Need To Upgrade

[p_brownstone]

I’m looking to upgrade my Motherboard and Graphics Card and confused (well, to be honest, ignorant!) about what is best for my use.

This is a heavily used Home / Office Computer, lots of Excel / Word / Accounting etc. use and also heavy Graphics applications like Photoshop etc., plus Video editing. It is not used for Games at all.

Expense is not a real problem.

So I believe I need a Motherboard with a speedy processor and at least 4 Gb of Ram (if not more) , I use 2 Monitors so also need a Dual Head Graphics Card with as much on-board memory as possible.

Could any of the experts on here give some recommendations as to a suitable package?

Patrick

[ballbreaker]

The below gives great performance but without blowing loads of cash. Going with a higher speed quad core CPU and faster graphics card will more than double their price. If your still running WinXp then going over 3GB of Ram buys you nothing. If using Vista go with 4GB minimum.

Motherboard - ASUS P5K (or P5KR which is RAID capable so you can mirror you data on second hard drive)

CPU - Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600

Graphics Card - Nvidia GF 8800 GT (512MB)(get card with 2-DVI outputs like MSI version)

RAM - OCZ DDR2 PC2 8500/1066Mhz

Can be had for around 24K Baht excluding RAM. Ram cost will depend how much you want (2GB of the above mentioned is around 6200 Baht).

cheers,

[OM3N]

While those are all good suggestions. The 8800GT is a very serious piece of hardware, which i believe is far more powerful than the OP requires. It is basically only for those wanting to play the most demanding games on the market. I would suggest a Nvidia 7900 or 8600 series, that would save easily over 100 dollars.

[cali]

The 8800GT is a very serious piece of hardware, which i believe is far more powerful than the OP requires

8800GT is midrange by gaming standards. Crysis will bring it to its knees. But you could be right as I don't know how graphics intensive the above listed apps really are.

Expensive RAM however seems pointless as benchmarks I have seen show the performance increment over the slowest RAM is almost nil. Get cheap RAM, use the savings to get plenty of it & other components that can give you measurable benefits.

And compared to the Q6600, the E6850 might make more sense. E6850 is a newer, more advanced CPU that contains two quicker cores and a wider FSB1333. It's questionable how often you could beat the E6850 with a Q6600 because most things do not even fully saturate two cores so more cores, even a million more cores would not help performance in that instance. The Q6600 does however overclock better and if you run apps that leave you waiting that actually do utilize more than 2 cores, Q6600 again would have the advantage. Best thing to do is go over to tomshardware and compare the benchmarks on apps of interest and you'll get a clear picture of that.

[Firefoxx]

Although expense might not be a problem, the price difference between the "elite" and the "very good" can be vast, even though the performance difference may be small. You can do very well with a middling quad core CPU and 4GB of ram, a decent mainboard and an OK graphics card (since no games are involved).