Well its that time...

My PC is looking a bit old in the tooth and I've come to the decision either to

A: Upgrade my current hardware
B: Just buy a new PC

I'm looking to buy in the next 2-3 months and will have about $2500AUD to spend

What I want is to be able to play Oblivion and play Guild wars (at highest settings)

What I would like is an opinion on if I should upgrade or buy new. By the looks of things I'm at least going to have to get a new motherboard and processor so I'm thinking about just buying everything new and putting it together myself.

What could I get for my budget then ?

Here is my current set up according to Belarc:

Processor:
1.60 gigahertz Intel Pentium 4
8 kilobyte primary memory cache
256 kilobyte secondary memory cache

Mainboard:
Board: i845
Bus Clock: 100 megahertz
BIOS: Award Software International, Inc. 6.00 PG 02/05/2002

RAM:
384MB (3x128MB chips)

Drives:
40.02 Gigabytes Usable Hard Drive Capacity
SONY CD-ROM CDU611
SONY CD-RW CRX300E [CD-ROM drive]
3.5" format removable media [Floppy drive]

Display:
NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 [Display adapter]

Sound:
Intel(r) 82801BA/BAM AC'97 Audio Controller

Thanks for any help you can offer!

with 2500 aud .. im sure you can buy a cool looking computer if you dont buy a monitor.

i do recommend getting 1 gig of ram at least and you can use your old hard drive at the same time buying a new one for increase memory space.

www.cheapcomputer.com.au has some decent prices. I buy thier stuff there.

Well, the CD Drives and the floppy drive should be fine, although you may want to get a DVD drive...

Everything else could well need replacing for Oblivion...

I get all my stuff from www.auspcmarket.com.au ;)

i will post some suggestions soon [img]smile.gif[/img]

Grab an alienware or a gaming dell even.

I concur, since it looks like you'll be basically starting over any way, just get a new one. Looks like Alienware will be within your budget, so I'd go that route, and keep the old pc around for misc work stuff you may have to do.

Side question, since we share a vid card; do you have issues with tiles shifting in NWN's?

Thanks for the suggestions so far. I am leaning towards leaving this PC intact as a second PC on the network.

As for NWN Robert never had any tile problems with NWN. Guildwars yes NWN no.

Might wait a bit more and see how the Dell buy out of Alienware effects their prices.

Well, so much for that, I guess. I don't recall having the issue before the card.

...Have you ever built one yourself? If not, it might be the time to try. There's plenty of information about building computers on the internet, plus lord knows enough of us here at IW have done it!

I'll give you a hint of what I would expect $1800 USD to cover...which is about $2500 AUD.

1)A motherboard compatible with the latest model CPUs, that is, with socket 939 for AMD processors or socket 775 for Intel, and two PCI-E x16 slots.

2)A lower-tier dual-core processor. Won't help with games(right now), but that won't be all you use the processor for, now will it?

3)2 Gb of RAM.

4)500 Gb of Hard Drive space, probably on two hard drives. RAID, while very nice, is not really necessary. Regardless, though, the hard drives should be SATA.

5)ATI x1900 or NVidia 7900 series graphics card.

6)A 19" LCD monitor.

7)A GOOD keyboard and mouse.

8)A small 7.1 surround sound system for the beast.

I think that's about as far as you could stretch it, here in the US.

Hmmm I will be able to streach the 2500 as I have 2 monitors here one 16" CRT and a 16"LCD Plus I have 2 wireless Keyboards & mice (both Logitech. I also have some good logitech speakers.

The thing thats annoying me the most and thus this post is the outside looks good but the inside is crappy.

So all I think I would need would be points 1-4 off Ilanders list in a nice case with a decent power supply.