[Jackalope]

I am sorry to say that I am no computer geek. I tried to be one, but not hard enough. I love to play computer games and thus consider myself a gamer but not a geek. Some computer geek friends of mine helped me build my computer. Now that I am at home and not at college I have some questions on how to best (and most cheaply) upgrade my system.

I have the following system:
Pentium 4 3.0 Ghz processor
512 Ram w/ HT
Geforce FX 5200 in an AGP slot
P.O.S. sound card
5.1 surround sound capabilities w/ non-p.o.s sound card
a single disk drive

I know a better sound card is in order, what could you folks suggest?
I wouldn't mind a video card that wouldn't cause Medieval: Total War to crash
Another stick of Ram is nice, any suggestions?
Oh and does the Geforce FX 5200 have a 3D accelorator, i am quite ignorent about 3D accelorators, what they do and what it means to have a good one.

Thanks for any help I could get.

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For Ram i would get another stick of 512 and you should be good- check www.tigerdirect.com for some good deals

For a great sound card check out the Sound blaster audigy 2 or zs which are very nice

im using the Asus Geforce FX 5700 which runs alot of games very nice so look into that if you want something cheap but very useful

[Hemal]

For Ram i would get another stick of 512 and you should be good- check www.tigerdirect.com for some good deals

For a great sound card check out the Sound blaster audigy 2 or zs which are very nice

im using the Asus Geforce FX 5700 which runs alot of games very nice so look into that if you want something cheap but very useful

[warriorscot]

Got a friend with a 5900 and he hasnt had any bother with it at all you might look at an agp 6 series card if you have some money to spend(50 to 100 quid or there abouts). This will be the last gfx card you will buy for that pc as they are stopping production of agp interface cards soon. Nvidia 7 series are all pci-x and the ati r500+ wont be agp either, another stick of ram is in order as well newer games need a gig to play smoothly at higher settings.

[hacp]

Get an 6600GT. Also, try getting a cheap dual channel kit instead of just another stick. I heard dual channel increased performance on intel machines by 5-10%. Cheapest one on newegg is 70 bucks.
If your worried about cash then get the 9600XT.

Edited by hacp, 19 June 2005 - 03:00 PM.

[Jackalope]

Just wanted to thank everybody and let you know I am taking notes. If anyone is curious i bought everything off of newegg.com any other cheap sites like that and tigerdirect would be welcome.

[csu266]

Some other sites are www.zipzoomfly.com, www.mwave.com and www.directron.com. I have bought many things from newegg and zipzoomfly, zipzoomfly gives free 2day shipping with almost all products that they sell and they are also a few bucks cheaper than newegg and newegg charges 6 bucks shipping for ground which is 5 business days. I just built a new comp this past week and bought all my parts from www.mwave.com, they are a great site, I bought a AMD Athlon XP 3000+, ATI 9600pro 256MB, 1 gig corsair ram, dvd rom/burner, western digital 80gig hdd, ASUS motherboard and all that with shipping came out to about 470 bucks. Good luck.