To upgrade or build new

[Staren]

Hi all,

// Unnecessary intro, skip down for tech discussion

It's been a long time since I've been to PCMech. For quite awhile in the early to mid 2000s I posted here under the name Staren. Some of the old timers might remember but I don't think I made a huge impression. That account got lost in a forum upgrade or purge or something a couple of years ago and I haven't been back in quite awhile. Anyway on with the question...

// END unnecessary intro

My current main system is a rig I built back in the summer of 2007.

ASUS P5K Motherboard
Core 2 Duo E6600
DDR2 800 RAM upgraded to 6GB with Win 7
GeForce 8800 GTS
Corsair 750W PSU (ya overkill, was the early days of SLI still)

Still a terrifically functional computer for daily work, but starting to feel its age in the gaming and video / image work departments. My instinct is that it's not worth major upgrades, but maybe it is. The CPU was middle of the road at the time, but a current video card would probably bottleneck and it's a LGA775 socket so probably not worth swapping that out with the 1366 processors coming down the line and dropping the 1156 parts. Any thoughts?

[glc]

First thing first - I need to merge your 2 accounts. Which username do you want to keep? Send me a private message, please.

Okay - what you need to do is compare the costs. You can put a higher end quad core such as a Q9550 or Q9650 in your existing board. You can also put a stronger video card in it. I don't think you will bottleneck.

To fully upgrade, you will also be looking at a motherboard and ram.

At this exact minute, I wouldn't do a full upgrade - either upgrade your CPU and video card, or wait a couple months to let the Sandy Bridge dust clear.