PC Upgrade Advice

Hello,
I need a bit of advice. I bought the system below from PC Specialist about four years ago (originally it just had a 250GB SATA 3 HD but I added the 400GB drive as a second drive and then the 1TB drive once I filled the original drive). I'm aware this system is getting a bit long in the tooth now but I'm not too keen on buying a complete new PC. I suspect any significant upgrades would require a root and branch approach to avoid bottlenecks within the system - but are there any simple upgrades I could make that would improve the performance / extend its useful life a bit further?

Case           STYLISH PIANO BLACK FUSION CASE inc. 2 FRONT USB

Processor(CPU)     Intel® Core™2 Duo E8600 (3.33GHz) 1333MHz FSB/6MB L2 Cache

Motherboard   ASUS® P5P43TD: ATX MID RANGE BOARD & DDR3, SATA-II, 3 x PCI

Memory (RAM)     4GB SAMSUNG DDR3 DUAL-DDR3 1333MHz (2 X 2GB)

Graphics Card   1GB NVIDIA GEFORCE GT240 PCI EXPRESS (3D BluRay Ready!)

1st Hard Disk 1TB SATA 3
2nd Hard Disk 400GB SATA 3

1st DVD/BLU-RAY Drive 24x DUAL LAYER DVD WRITER ±R/±RW/RAM

Memory Card Reader INTERNAL 52 IN 1 CARD READER (READS XD, MS, CF, SD, etc)

Power Supply 450W Quiet 80 PLUS Dual Rail PSU + 120mm Case Fan 

Processor Cooling SUPER QUIET 22dBA TRIPLE COPPER HEATPIPE CPU COOLER 

Sound Card Sound Blaster® X-Fi™ Xtreme Audio

Wireless/Wired Networking WIRELESS N 300Mbps PCI CARD 

USB Options 6 x USB 2.0 PORTS @ BACK PANEL (MIN 2 FRONT PORTS) AS STANDARD

Operating System Genuine Windows 7 Home Premium 32 Bit - inc DVD & Licence

Thanks
Malc

Any idea what the socket is for your motherboard? Because if you can, I'd suggest getting an i5 CPU, then replacing the RAM with at least 8GB. Then I guess you could replace the graphics card too.

Havoc said:

Any idea what the socket is for your motherboard? Because if you can, I'd suggest getting an i5 CPU, then replacing the RAM with at least 8GB. Then I guess you could replace the graphics card too.

Click to expand...

Here is a link to the ASUS page for the motherboard: http://www.asus.com/Motherboards/P5P43TD/

Apologies - while I've replaced a couple of hard drives on the PC I'm not in the least bit technical! My suspicion is that making a major improvement in one area will result in a bottleneck somewhere else which will result in another purchase - and another bottleneck....

LGA775 socket, I don't think you can even buy CPUs for those anymore.

The GPU definitely needs to be upgraded but your CPU will probably be a bit of a bottleneck. So you are looking at getting a new mobo, upping it to 8GBs of RAM and a new CPU, in the meanwhile though you can just get a NVIDIA 750ti or AMD R7 265. Although I think you will still be bottlenecked by the CPU it will definitely help until you upgrade the rest of it.

Pretty much what Prince said. You'll struggle to get a good/new CPU for that socket.

Even if you did like get one off some buddy who is upgrading, it ill still be really outdated.

Just replace the whole thing. If you don't replace everything, something will be a bottleneck. You could probably get away with keeping the wireless card, sound card, hard drives, case, DVD/Blu-ray, but those are all the little cheap things that no one includes in the price of their machines anyways.

CPU, GPU, motherboard, PSU, RAM, operating system all need to be replaced, or in the case of RAM, added to. You could keep your current 4GB and add 2 more 2GB sticks for a total of 8GB at a low cost.