I am in the middle of redoing my desktop as well, finally.
In your case, the only real CPU upgrade would be to dual-core, and that means new MB and RAM too. It would also probably mean a new PSU, as Dell's suck. Especially if you went with a big video card.
Where are you experiencing slowdowns? Cause unless you do a LOT of multitasking, it's likely that you won't notice a difference worth the $400 the new stuff will cost (before video and HDD).
Games in the BF2 catagory will need over 1GB of RAM, so that will help.
Personally, I would simply:
--Get more RAM, at least 1 more GB module from Newegg or something $25
--New Hard Drive, get a new 32MB cache SATA drive, this will be the single biggest speed boost $80
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822148309
--New Video Card, maybe a year-old second-hand one, there are a LOT of kickass cards (x1900xt, 7900GT, etc) priced in the $100 range on various forums and eBay right now
Check your Power Supply, Dell's usually are underpowered, make sure you have enough amps on the 12v side if you get a really big Video Card.
There, that way you will have an HDD and Video Card that will be good for another couple years when you eventually go with a new PSU, multi-core, MB, and RAM.
Quote:
Originally Posted by cody
You can't upgrade your CPU without upgrading your MB so yah, add another gig of RAM if you game or multi-task, or just buy new. I just bought one of these.
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Interestingly enough, I recently replaced my Sager 1.73 Centrino and x700 15.4" with an ASUS 15.4" AMD X2 1.9 with HD2600. It's a wonderfully-crafted laptop (after several years of Sagers), but ATI Mobility Driver support blows. After I chucked Vista and dropped XP Pro on, and found all the drivers, I finally had to go with a hacked ATI desktop driver to get the card's performance up. I had two choices: driver hack to run as FireGL v5600 Mobility (gaming sucked); or hacked desktop drivers for the HD2600. I'm staying with the HD2600 config, simply because it games. I get little weirdness every so often, but it's not a big deal. Considering the laptop was $800 on Newegg sale, I probably did OK. I run 2gb in that.
Oh, my new desktop setup is:
Lian-Li case (old, had it for years)
Enermax E651P PSU (old, had it for years)
ASUS P5K-E-AP MB (new, $150)
Intel C2D E8400 3.0ghz 6mb L2 1333fsb ($226)
OCZ 2x1gb Platinum blingywhatever very tight timings ($75)
eVGA Nvidia 7900GTO 512mb second-hand ($90)
Seagate 250gb SATA 3.0 32mb cache system drive ($80)
Needed the clock speed for video rendering in Premiere, or else I would have gotten in on all of the quad Q6600's that are floating around at $230....
Previous setup was disassembled a year ago, was a pair of Athlon XP2200's on a Tyan board with FireGL X1 and 66mhz PCI SATA RAID....I still have some peripheral stuff I might list for sale.