Poptart
September 25th, 2007, 11:09 PM
Hello,
I've had the same computer with a few minor upgrades for a number of years now. I'm getting ready to hit graduate school and I'd like to do a major upgrade to get me through that couple of years. Ultimately, I'd like the whole thing to cost me less than $600 bucks, but I don't know if that's possible.
What I want is a 64-bit machine (capable of dual-booting Sabayon's 64-bit version). I want, also, to be able to watch video, play WoW, play Oblivion, listen to music, surf the web, and use the GIMP. Clearly, I can do most of these now (with the exception of Oblivion). Sometimes, my machine gets a little clunky, depending on how many of these things I'm doing at the same time. I'd like to be able to overlap them without any lag, if possible.
Let us assume that the only pieces of my old box I'm going to keep are my harddrives. What would you all recommend I look at as far as processors, motherboards and video cards?
I'm hoping to get 2gigs of RAM in with all of this, but I'll settle for less as long as I can upgrade. ^^
Do you think it would be cheaper for me to buy a ready-made box rather than putting my own together, considering what I want?
Unfortunately, I've never built a machine myself before, and my mom (who built my last machine) doesn't use Linux so she doesn't understand what I want to do. And when I go into a store to talk to someone about it, they inevitably don't know anything about Linux and they try to push me into Vista. I'm getting a little tired of it. :/
I'm sorry this post is so vague! I'm just having trouble finding advice. Thanks so much in advance. :)
I've had the same computer with a few minor upgrades for a number of years now. I'm getting ready to hit graduate school and I'd like to do a major upgrade to get me through that couple of years. Ultimately, I'd like the whole thing to cost me less than $600 bucks, but I don't know if that's possible.
What I want is a 64-bit machine (capable of dual-booting Sabayon's 64-bit version). I want, also, to be able to watch video, play WoW, play Oblivion, listen to music, surf the web, and use the GIMP. Clearly, I can do most of these now (with the exception of Oblivion). Sometimes, my machine gets a little clunky, depending on how many of these things I'm doing at the same time. I'd like to be able to overlap them without any lag, if possible.
Let us assume that the only pieces of my old box I'm going to keep are my harddrives. What would you all recommend I look at as far as processors, motherboards and video cards?
I'm hoping to get 2gigs of RAM in with all of this, but I'll settle for less as long as I can upgrade. ^^
Do you think it would be cheaper for me to buy a ready-made box rather than putting my own together, considering what I want?
Unfortunately, I've never built a machine myself before, and my mom (who built my last machine) doesn't use Linux so she doesn't understand what I want to do. And when I go into a store to talk to someone about it, they inevitably don't know anything about Linux and they try to push me into Vista. I'm getting a little tired of it. :/
I'm sorry this post is so vague! I'm just having trouble finding advice. Thanks so much in advance. :)