pc gaming upgrade

bestyman

Hi,

Playing pc games not my thing so need help here please.

My 13 yr old son has a pc, its a 1.5 celeron with 256mb ram and onboard graphics. He complains that some new games wont play and Im hoping to get away with upgrading on a budget .Am I right in thinking that a graphics card , ( it has a agp slot) will sort the job out and possibly a little extra ram?

Any suggestions please as to whats needed for an upgrade, not looking for latest tech just something that will make it work ok(ish). Do i need 128 or 256 graphics card and are some brands better than others? Is more ram ( how much ) needed? Can I keep the 1.5 celeron as really dont want to start changing motherboards and proccesors.

I would really appreaciate it if someone could reccomend a card from link below, want to pay as little as poss but still need it to work ok .
http://www.cclonline.com/product-categories.asp?category_id=124

Thanks

Bestyman

CAT-THE-FIFTH

I think you will need a need motherboard,processor,RAM and graphics card if you want to play ANY modern game IDEALLY. The spec on the machine you have is OK for general purposes but not for many newish games in the last two years.

What is you motherboard BTW??

If it is socket 478 you could possibly upgrade to pentium 4 2.53ghz to 3.0ghz. This would cost between 30-50 quid on Ebay.
You should be able to get another 512mb of RAM for around 20-25 quid on Ebay too as long it is 184 pin DDR RAM.

A good budget graphics card would be a Nvidia 6600GT which can be had for around 50 quid on Ebay in its AGP form. A 6200 maybe Ok also for things like Unreal Tournaent 2004. On the ATI side a X600/X700 AGP or 9500/9700/9800 card will also be OK and do cost less than a 6600GT.

CAT-THE-FIFTH

The 6200 AGP would be the best bet from the list you provided. However it is probably not even AGP 8X though!

bestyman

Thanks Cat,

There are a few graphics cards ending in 6200, would this be ok : 256MB Sparkle GeForce 6200 AGP ?

The computer is not at my house but I will look later to see what the motherboard is. Will its details be in device manager or do I need to actually look for something and if so what am I looking for?

If the proccesor is not upgradable do you think I should spend say £40 on a graphics card and £25 on ram?

Cheers

Bestyman

heatherw_01

What games does your son want to play?

CAT-THE-FIFTH

bestyman wrote:

Thanks Cat,

There are a few graphics cards ending in 6200, would this be ok : 256MB Sparkle GeForce 6200 AGP ?

The computer is not at my house but I will look later to see what the motherboard is. Will its details be in device manager or do I need to actually look for something and if so what am I looking for?

If the proccesor is not upgradable do you think I should spend say £40 on a graphics card and £25 on ram?

Cheers

Bestyman

I would try to upgrade the processor as the Celeron is quite weak for games.

If you are going the Ebay route you could buy a Nvidia 6600 for that price secondhand.

Look for the chipset in device manager or if you can install Sisoft Sandra and it will tell you what the components are under the system details and motherboard info icons.

Also if you buy from Savastore you can get 3% cashback through Quidco if you use their link!!

movieman

Personally I'd upgrade RAM, graphics card, CPU in that order... many modern games want >1GB of RAM with the detail settings maxed out so 256MB is likely to be crippling them even with low detail.

However, it may be worth taking a look at prices on new PCs before spending much money on upgrading an old one. I've seen some amazing deals on new PCs lately.

Frell

https://www.ebuyer.com has some great deals for NEW stuff. They are helpful too as well.... Ebay or ebuyer are the two places I'd go too for PC stuff.