Where should I spend my money?

Hey Guys,
I have a $200 budget to upgrade my current system. Please tell me where you think my money is best spent.

A7V333 Mother board
Athlon 2000 XP
Radeon 9700
512 2700 DDR ram
120G maxtor harddrive

Thanks in advance.
Wally

 

What do you use your computer primarily for?

If games, then I suggest:

Athlon xp 3200+ Barton.

Radeon 9800 Pro.

Maybe changing that memory to 512 PC 3200+ (won't see much of a major difference here)

In that order....

 

amd xp 3000+ IMO

 

Out of curiosity, why not the 3200+ Barton?

 

oops, was tagging along didnt recall the highest being 3200+ sorry! But yeah I think he should go with the highest possible for that mobo. Always remember to update your mobo bios and mobo drivers.

 

Buy another 512 MB of PC2700 memory and maybe a 6600 GT or an X800. Processor seems fine to me if you are gaming. 1 GB of memory would be a better solution. You could upgrade to PC3200 memory, but I don't think it would help enough to justify the cost of having to buy 2 sticks of 512 instead of just 1.

Check out Corsair Value Select or OCZ Value Series memory on Newegg.com

 

Buying such a high end vid card / more ram with such a low speed processor would do him no good.

 

Quite correct, and we are talking about a $200 budget.

The Athlon XP 3200+ shouldn't run more than $100. But that is just a guess, since AMD no longer produces them. Which means they are old and cheap.

Old, yes, I run a 3200+ Barton CPU....just about any game runs fine on my machine....I plan on upgrading very soon, but first a pool table I shall buy first!

 

Um, a friend of mine is running a 1.4 GHz Pentium 4 with 400MHz FSB and 256KB cache, and he has 1 GB of PC2100 and a 9800 Pro and he can play every game on just about max settings.

I don't think CPU is that big of a limiting factor. Obviously you can't run games that well with a Duron or anything like that, but I think double the memory is better than a slightly faster processor, unless that processor has a bigger cache or significantly higher FSB.