Upgrading my system with a budget of 500 USD or less, please give me some suggestions

[Brennan]

Intel Core i3 530 @ 2.93GHZ
Asus P7H55-M Pro Mobo
Kingston Dual-Channel DDR3 PC3-10700 (667Mhz) [4Gig]
Nvidia GeForce 9400GT 1G
Windows 7 Home (64 bit)

Was thinking a new video card for sure and maybe some more ram as well or just spend the 500 on the best video card I can find for that price?, any suggestions would be dandy, thx!

Suggestions that run over my budget are welcome but please don't tempt me too much.

[wazza300]

Re: Upgrading my system with a budget of 500 USD or less, please give me some suggest

i have the h55-m and 540 chip,i dont think more ram would help much on that mb,is 10700mhz the stock speed of the ram? you would do better overclocking the chip and buy a good graphic card,i think a cheapish gtx 460 would do you fine

maybe add in a 60gb vertex 2e ssd?? just install your os on it and use secondary hdd for storage?

[dJabba]

Re: Upgrading my system with a budget of 500 USD or less, please give me some suggest

If you go for a RAM upgrade, make sure your windows version supports it so you don't waste your money. A quick google search on "win 7 ram limit" should give you your answer (as you only specified "home" and there are 3 of those versions with 4, 8 and 16gb ram support). Once you hit the professional, enterprise or ultimate versions there is no real limit (technical of 196gb) - this is all if you have the 64bit version, else its 4gb (3.5) max on any - but i doubt anyone runs the 32bit if they aren't forced by there CPU.

But else, wazza said it. A ssd brings a lot of performance to the table, more then most people think - on top of that a mid range GFX card and you should be good for most things for quite a while

[Brennan]

Re: Upgrading my system with a budget of 500 USD or less, please give me some suggest

I read that SSD's are pretty much useless when it comes to gaming performance (except maybe for loading maps) unless you play MMORPG's. My main goal is to improve my gaming capabilities and a new Video Card is a must but what else?

[wazza300]

Re: Upgrading my system with a budget of 500 USD or less, please give me some suggestions

i think just a graphic card upgrade would be the best,without spending more money on cpu/mb/ram ect,the dual core should be plenty power to run all games along with a good graphic card,ive run 1800mhz ram on that mb and still read/write/copy figures are around 10k-12k mb/s,so upgrading to faster ram wont help you much as i think its just a h55 chipset design limit on those ram figures?

what psu are you using?

an ssd wont help in games but will transform your pc speed on everything else,start up/web browsing file copying ect,a cheap vertex 2e 60gb would suite you best imo but its up to you,you could keep your mechanical hdd for storage/games ect

another thing that helps is having a 64bit os,which you already have,and 4gb of ram will be enough for gaming