my current system:

HP A1430n
AMD 64 x2 3800 2.0GHz
4 x 512 DDR PC3200 ram
GeForce 7600GT video

running XP.

question:

is it worth $230 to upgrade the processor to a 4200 instead of the 3800? would i notice any increase in speed? or would it be better to upgrade the 4 x 512 to 4x 1G ram. this is DDR PC3200, NOT DDR2.

TIA.

 

Dont upgrade the processor just yet. You need atleast 1gb of ram with that system, I recommend 2.(although depends on what you are doing) Windows XP x64 is also a good move, very stable platform.

 

Short answer, get the memory. Why, you are only gaining .2 GHz with a new processor that will have the same system restraints. Sorry but you are not going to see a difference. Memory on the other hand will allow the two processors that you have (x2

 

thanks guys, Elroy i sent you a PM.

 

yeah, you can always overclock it to gain that much Ghz. Which should be easy and safe enough to do if you wanted to.

Memory is where its at. Look up your motherboard and see whats the high speed your memory can have. IE Corsair 2GB DDR2 800 (PC26400). Somewhere along those lines.

Hard Drives can be useful too. New cache size on Hard Drives now are 16mb. So might want to upgrade that too. With this these things thats around 200bucks.

What are you doing with your computer? Home?Audio?Gaming?Work?

 

I am running the same processor with 2 GB Ram. I don't think you would notice the processor speed difference bur having the extra RAM will make a huge differenence in preformance.

My proccessor at this momment is averaging 1% capacity. Unless you are maxing out the processor with games or rendering huge graphics, I don't think that you would be able tell the differenece.

Get the 2GB or even better 4GB and you won't be sorry. Even with 12 applications running , including 6 huge images in photoshop, I still had over 1GB of Ram still available.

Good luck