Upgrade advice....

Hello all,

Recently Ive been wanting to upgrade my ram a little bit. I currently have 512mb, and would like to take it up to 1gig. The only thing is, I've never made any upgrade to my computer, so I dont know exactly what Im doing. I opened up my compter to take a gander at the motherboard, now Im confused on what exactly the ram is...

In my pic, I'd drawn a couple arrows, can somebody tell me where the ram chips are? There are 2 arrows, one is too 3 grey chips, the other is pointing to a circut board that has another chip stuck into it, but because of the way its in there, the side of it is showing making it hard to see. Ill take more pics if needed. I just need to know if its even possible to add more ram to my computer.

Plus, can anybody tell me what is in the red circle? Is it my graphics card? My friend is probly going to give me his 256mb card and i was wondering if that thing in the red circle is the graphics card...

Heres the pic from inside my computer... http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y164/Burns24/MyComp.jpg

Thanks!

 

The orange circle is your PCI expansion slots. A wireless NIC card or your friend's video card, if it's PCI, could go into one of them.
The red circle is part of the chipset that controls how your computer's components interact with eachother.You appear to have built-in onboard video, since all your PCI slots are currently empty.
The green circle is your memory slots. If you have a name brand computer, you can go to www.crucial.com and see what memory your machine can accept. Judging by the picture, and the fact that your machine lacks an AGP video slot, I would say it's an entry level model. You may perceive little or no benefit from upgrading to 1GB RAM.

 

This is the first system I own soley. It wasnt desgined for games, althought I do run a few games everynow and agian. I wanted to put the graphics card in mainly because its free, and that the onboard stuff just does not cut it. I ran a scan on crucial.com, it does say I have a 1 slot left for more ram, but why would I have little or no preformance upgrade?

 

most new graphics cards come w/ a fair amount of onboard memory so this may get you the speed your looking for.
As far as not noticing an increase from 512 to 1 gig kinda depends on the fsb of your pc-- if you have two objects linked by a one lane dirt road(older fsb) they are slow--if you have a 4 lane freeway(newerfsb) things get back and forth quicker.


Hopethat helped

 

I agree, really not enough benefits to upgrade to a gig. I would spend the money and get the pci video card, I am sure it will be much better than the onboard.

 

Im not getting the extra ram to help me with games. I wanted the ram just to give my computer a bit more juice. The video card thing is a completely seperate deal. I think you guys got the wrong idea, sorry.

 

Burn's what you need to do is find out the specification of the rest of the computer if its good enough it might be worth sticking in a pci fx5200 video card,that heatsink looks big enough to be hiding a good proccessor, like the man said a ram upgrade will show little performance increase especially on the games you will be able to play on,it will also be difficult to find same of the same make as this is pretty important when it comes to stability,go to start,control panel,system and it should come up.