DescentBB

Here's the deal. We have an AMD athlon 3700 (2.2 GHz) on a 939 socket, Gigabyte motherboard (K8 series with a nVidia chipset), and 6800 GT graphics card. We only use it as a gaming machine, but we are looking to update it so that we can play the newer games (e.g. Crysis, Dragonage). What would you recommend? Money is a bit tight at the moment.

We were wondering if it makes sense to upgrade just the processor and the graphics card, or if we should invest a little bit more and get a new cheap gaming machine.

For today's games you need a minimu of a Dual Core CPU. I'm running a P4 3ghz and it's to slow for anything now.

our socket appears to be able to handle the Athlon FX60 (dual core) but it is incredibly expensive. According to Benchmarks, the FX57 is just 10% slower, but it is a single core. I don't know enough to assess what impact this will have, but we could get this one for around $50.

I think the FX60 is an old cpu (a few years). You should be able to get a new dual core system for less than 500$.

I think that's the rub. Pay around $500 to 600 for a completely new machine, or just spend $300 for the single core FX57 + a new graphics gard. When I read you correctly, you think that the completely new machine would be the much better choice.

Yes, I wish I could at least upgrade to a dual core myself but I can't afford it right now. Going with a mid-range dual core will save you more money in the long run.

You could do it a bit incrementally. Get the new graphics card (I'm assuming it's PCIe either way), see how it goes. Then if needed, you can look into upgrade or new machine options.

In my experience, what helped the most for me with the Crysis games was the graphics card (I went to an 8800GTS) and getting some extra RAM (went from 1Gb to 4Gb).

You should be able to get a dual core Opteron or Athlon x2 in there without spending a fortune, forget the FX parts (overpriced) and find something that overclocks. However if your system is an AGP system instead of a PCIe system, I'd just give it up and sell it; you won't be able to fit a sufficient video card into the system and the few AGP cards that are still around fall far too far short on price/performance compared to the PCIe offerings.

Matrix has a socket 939 system and he is also able to get playable rates out of Crysis. However his is a hand picked Opteron dual core overclocked to 3 GHz with 2 GB of memory, two 8800 GT cards in SLI and the whole thing is watercooled. So it is doable but you need an overclocking chip/board, decent memory and $300 worth of water cooling equipment to get there. And in your case that would just be a stop-gap at best, these systems won't be up to playing the latest games likely within the next year.

If I were you, I would just start setting aside some money till you have around $1250-$1500 in the bank. When I built my system almost 3 years ago (Core 2 Duo E6600, 2 GB memory 7950 GT/512 MB) it was about $1300 (I already had the monitors) and its lasted this long. I built it with durability and lifespan in mind, and I'd say it has performed exceptionally well for only getting a couple memory upgrades (2 GB --> 4 GB --> 8 GB) and a new video card (7950 GT/512 MB --> 8800 GT/512 MB) along the way. The reason I say save up and buy a new system is because from what I've been reading the first 6 months or so of next year should be a decently competitive year between all the PC makers, so it should be a good time to buy new stuff.

hmm, interesting. So get a good graphics card now (we have PCIe) as a short term solution and save up for a better computer in the long run. Is there any graphics card you would recommend? Related to that, one thing I always wondered if it is advisable for us to get an nVidia card (since our motherboard has an nVidia chipset), or whether this does not really matter.

Memory wise, we are in a tight spot, because our comp takes DDr1, so everything we buy now we can probably not use for the next machine.

Krom, $1200 or so is probably too much for us, we were more looking for maximally $700 (but we already have a monitor). We are more casual gamers (although I would really like to play Crysis --- Farcry was my favourite in the last years). But I hear what you are saying. So the goal would be to get a good graphics card that has some life in it, and that would also do well in a computer that we buy later next year.

The current crop of Nvidia cards are getting beat up quite soundly by their ATI counterparts so its pretty hard to justify buying Nvidia parts of this generation. There shouldn't be any compatibility problems using an ATI card with a Nvidia chipset and that is where the current best price/performance is. You could go ahead and get a real monster of a card if you want and plan on using it in a new system later (but be warned you should definitely think about a new PSU if you do). Or you could go for a more midrange offering which I tend to think makes the most sense because video cards are plain awful at retaining value. Never spend more than $300 on one because its the same as flushing $200 down the toilet 4 months later.

I keep an eye on articles and benchmarks from http://www.anandtech.com as my primary source of information on the PC industry since they seem to be the least bias site. Although they aren't the bible of tech sites they still do a good job cutting through the crap, I just wish they would test in lower resolutions like 1280x1024/1280x960 that I use instead of always 1680x1050/1920x1200/2560x1600.