Im still using XP ...

iseverynamegone

Hi -6 years ago I used to do a bit of War of Tanks and put together a modest quiet gaming desktop .  1 year later my second daughter arrived and its taken until today for me to start to think about that PC again as I may have some time for some gaming.

At present-
Silencio 500 case with 550W Psu and a few additional quiet fans
Athlon 64X2 6000+ 
Power Color silent Radeon 6850 1GB
2GB Ram
MS7327 motherboard. 
And it's running XP....., 2GB ram 

So minimum I need to get windows updated ( I Tunes doesn't even work on XP now) , probably to 10 looking at the options. This would then allow me to get more ram as I also had the 3GB max in XP. 

If I wanted to get a sizeable upgrade in Performance beyond that would  I need a new motherboard bundle and graphics card or will doubling the RAM on its own be noticeable at all?

I think I bought the best processor I could at the time for the motherboard socket  , I don't even recall where I got that board from originally anymore. It's likely a decade old. 

What would you recommend for decent (but not top end) performance?

Budget say £300-500 for MB/GPU not including windows. Where does that get me ?

I understand  that most gamers here will be running super fast £ desktops but I don't really need that. 

Thanks for any help

RocknRollDave

My work pc is Windows 2000. I feel your pain.

strtdv

Honestly, I'd look on Gumtree for a year old half decent machine for that money.

Sporky

One of my PCs still runs 98SE.

iseverynamegone

strtdv said:

Honestly, I'd look on Gumtree for a year old half decent machine for that money.

I do like the quieter case though,  I guess I could look for a quiet one used. I would certainly appreciate the time saved. 

spark240

Hello...Vista here!

crunchman

iseverynamegone said:

strtdv said:

Honestly, I'd look on Gumtree for a year old half decent machine for that money.

I do like the quieter case though,  I guess I could look for a quiet one used. I would certainly appreciate the time saved. 

Modern processors tend to run a lot cooler.  The fan on my i5 is a lot smaller and quieter than my old Core 2 Duo. Noise is unlikely to be so much of an an issue.  That's true for Intel anyway.  AMD processors do run a lot hotter.

If you want to overclock then it may be different and you will need beefier cooling.

Fretwired

RocknRollDave said:

My work pc is Windows 2000. I feel your pain.

WTF ... why?

speshul91

Im gaming on an amd bulldozer bundle, amd fx4130 3.8ghz out the box, ive overclocked mine to 4.4. With 8gb of ram and a gtx 760. The mb bundle was about 150. 

Axe_meister

For that kind of money you could get a very nice i5- 6400 a good motherboard, RAM and an SSD. The GPU built into the CPU will offer better performance that your old dedicated unit Unfortunately you will also need to budget for a new copy of Windows 10.

Dave_Vader

I've got a £25 quid dell running Reaper on Xp in my home studio.
It never goes online and is bloody marvellous.
Its £30 predecessor died spectacularly last year, the replacement just needed a hard drive swap and everything came back just as before.
All my other home machines run Linux, the work ones range from win2000 up to 10, and they are all a pain in the arse.

crunchman

Axe_meister said:

For that kind of money you could get a very nice i5- 6400 a good motherboard, RAM and an SSD. The GPU built into the CPU will offer better performance that your old dedicated unit Unfortunately you will also need to budget for a new copy of Windows 10.

The GPUs on the latest Skylake Core Series processors are actually quite decent.  When I looked, you've got to spend somewhere around £50 on a discrete card to get anything that will match them.

The next gen Kaby Lake desktop processors are due in January.  They will probably be a bit better still - although at this stage it will be incremental rather than a massive jump.

iseverynamegone

Axe_meister said:

For that kind of money you could get a very nice i5- 6400 a good motherboard, RAM and an SSD. The GPU built into the CPU will offer better performance that your old dedicated unit Unfortunately you will also need to budget for a new copy of Windows 10.

That surprises me re the performance of MB alone versus the Radeon 6850.  

Would something like below be pretty solid?

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/201582347468 ;

mudslide73

A mate of mine told me about an elderly photographer he knows still using an Amstrad cpc464 and dot matrix printer for his invoicing. Imagine having to load a tape up every morning before you can start working! 

98, XP and 7 are still brilliant imo. They were killed off for business reasons only.

LoFi

mudslide73 said:

98, XP and 7 are still brilliant imo. They were killed off for business reasons only.

I'd agree re XP and 7, but 98 was awful - sure you're not thinking of 2K?

mudslide73

98 was very good after 95 imo. I could be viewing it through my rosey bins though

Strangefan

spark240 said:

Hello...Vista here!

Some people just want to watch the world burn.

You are clearly an insane man. 

AvalonAndy

I wouldn't upgrade to Win10, given my experience of it, which is described in someone else's post somewhere.  In summary, it is fucking shite.

vasselmeyer

AvalonAndy said:

I wouldn't upgrade to Win10, given my experience of it, which is described in someone else's post somewhere.  In summary, it is fucking shite.

Windows 10 is actually very stable and reliable. Compared to previous versions of Windows there are some very welcome changes in the subsystem which improve the security model significantly. Most problems are caused by people upgrading an old XP, Vista or Win 7 system which have old legacy drivers still in the registry. If you install from scratch it's very solid.

Of course, there are other aspects of the OS that are less welcome such as the OS data collected by MS which no-one is really sure of the content.

Strangefan

I do like Windows ten, I get zero issues, and its not invasive, like OS X,  I went fro  a macbook air to a surface pro and  think it was the right decision,  10 for me sits at the back and lets me get on with it, where's as I found  osx always had to have a say and was always wanting to be part of my computing  life,  I still think osx is a fab OS tho just that these days Windows for me feels nicer.