Upgrading a legacy pc

[lOnGjOhN]

My friend has a Dell 4600 from '03.

Currently it has:
Northwood P4 2.4ghz
512mb ram
40gb IDE 133 hdd
some pos agp mx card

Here are the parts I'm looking at to upgrade this beast to play some COD4 and mafia 2.

RAM

Vid card 1

or

Vid card 2

HDD

Do you guys have any suggestions? I'm kinda worried about the vid card... not sure if his psu will be able to handle it, and I've been kinda out of the loop with vid cards for the last year or so.

Thanks.

 

[mpilchfamily]

Well that old HP's PSU isn't going to be able to handle any of those upgrades. Fact is none of them are going to help that systme at all. Nor will they make it a "decent" gaming rig. Have him save up a couple hundred more and buy a new system.

 

[lOnGjOhN]

What if I buy this replacement PSU?

Would that bring it up to par? All these upgrades would total to about 230-ish
Otherwise if we were to start from scratch how much would it cost to build a decent rig on the cheap -- minus cd/dvd drives, case, psu?

 

[lOnGjOhN]

Anyone?

 

[mpilchfamily]

That might be enough but really that system isn't worth the money for the upgrade.

 

[TheStu]

Originally posted by: mpilchfamily
That might be enough but really that system isn't worth the money for the upgrade.

There is also the possibility that Dell was using a proprietary pinout on their Power Supply. Plugging in an aftermarket one could fry the whole system.

You can build yourself a very solid system for around $300 base. (That is a 2.x GHz Core 2 Duo, Motherboard, Hard drive, 2GB RAM, 7300gt graphics, case and PSU)

You then augment that to get the system that you want.

9800GTX for about $150
q6600 Quad Core for $180
4GB RAM for $50
Slightly better mobo for $100

So, for about $600 you can get a quad core with 4GB RAM and a 9800gtx (and this is a geforce 9800, not a radeon 9800)