Computer Upgrade

Slow Pony said:

Im Looking To Upgrade My Computer A Bit For Gaming. Its A Dell P4 2.20G. 256 Mb of Ram. Its Only a few months old but cant play the newer games very well. Should I Start With upgrading memory or get a new video card? Im sure the vid cards that come standard with it are absolute ****. Any suggestions would be very welcome.

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128 M vid card if you don't already have it; you are woefully short on RAM.

my athlon xp 1900+ runs all games at very nice framrates, your processor isnt holding you back, i havea GF4 Ti and it isnt the newest but it runs everything pretty well. I would guess dell gave you a decent card, i would do ram first, i have 512, i bet an extra 256 would make a big difference in your system. at first glance its the only thing i see lacking.

Dr.

dont overestimate del, i would check to see if u've got an agp slot, setup a nice agp graphics card (no less than 128m ddr on board) , do the ram last on your pc, and yes another stick of 256mb would be helpful. Also when u are running your games, end any tasks that are running (i.e norton/mcafee virus monitoring, ftp server) that would help aswell, your processor should be able to run stuff pretty decent, currently my setup is ....

Athlon xp (barton 512k) 2500+ w/ 333 fsb
512mb ddr (dual channel) 333 @ cl2
80gig maxtor (ata133-7200rpm)
Geforce4 Ti4600 (128mb ddr , ohhh yeah )
MsI nforce2 delux w/sata/raid agp 8x

not the fastest, but runs just about everything very nicely

Yea, defenitly slap a video card in there, minimum 128mb memory car, than another 256 ram and you should be good to go.

This is what I'm runnin...

AMD XP 2500+ 333FSP
2x 256mb PC2700 ram (Went with two so I can utalise the full Dual chanel)
nVidia GeForce FX 5600 128mb
Maxtor 120gb 7200rpm
nForce 2 5.1 audio....

Its not the fastes setup, and it needs some tweeking, but it'll last till income taz time....