Hardware upgrade questions

[nubreed000]

So I'm thinking of taking advantage of some of the deals coming up this Christmas season and thought I would upgrade some components in my PC. I'm still on socket 775 and I intend to stick with it for another 2 years at least. I'm wondering whether I should bother upgrading to a Quad Core though, or simply overclock my dual core intel chip.

Here are my specs:
CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 @ 3.00Ghz
Memory: DDR2 400 4GB
Video Card: Geforce 9800GT

I'm leaning towards getting 4 gigs of RAM, a newer video card and simply overclocking the CPU by about 800Mhz. The question is: what video card to get? I want my system to be rather balanced out, so that one component isn't slowing the others down. Also, should I stick with that CPU or go with the Q8400 (which seems to be the most reasonable CPU upgrade fo socket 775).

edit oh and i mostly use this PC for gaming and internet and it has performed much better than expected thus far.

 

[mfenn]

Don't spend any money on a new 775 chip. You've already got 4GB of RAM (even if it is slow), so upgrading that isn't really necessary for gaming either. Thus, the only two reasonable upgrades I can see doing are the GPU or getting an SSD. What's your budget?

 

[nubreed000]

i would say it's limited. I don't want to spend money on things i don't really need, so i'm not really sure i need an ssd yet as they're still pretty expensive per GB. So that leaves the gpu and a possible ram upgrade. What are my options for vid card and what ram speeds should i be looking at if i choose to upgrade that too? I don't want to pay more than 270 for vid card.

 

[mfenn]

DDR2 800 would be pretty much the standard speed for DDR2, but like I said, it's not worth the money.

$270 is an awful lot of money to be spending on a GPU for an E8400 based rig. The best card for around that price would be the 6870. Can you give some examples of some games that you want to play?

PS. You need an SSD, you just don't realize it yet. 8)

 

[nubreed000]

270 is the MAX. i'd obviously want to spend as little as possible, ie. Get the best bang for my buck. Games i played recently: mass effect 2, fallout, cod, starcraft 2. What gpu would suit my system best? As for ssd: i'll wait a little longer for the prices to drop.

 

[mfenn]

The pricing for GPUs is actually pretty good right now. You have a good value option from $100 up to $250. Just choose how much you want to spend (obviously more expensive cards are faster). Even the $100 5770 will be enough for the games the you listed.

~$100 5770
~$130 GTX 460 768MB
~$170 GTX 470 1GB
~$190 6850
~$250 6870