Upgrading

[BloodDrunk]

Hello dear Hivers.

I am thinking of rather upgrading my quite old system.
I was thinking of asking some questions here first concerning upgrading.

So, I have old (asap) motherboard: Gigabyte G31M-ES2L
It has 2 slots for DDR2 RAM.

I was wondering, will this motherboard support relatively new Graphic Cards and processor (something like duo core or quad core, I'm not really that good about hardware), and I could just add 2x2 DDR2 Ram for a total of 4gb which is enough, I suppose (I do use lots of programs at once like WE, Skype, Browser and few of adobe's programs and sometimes audacity). Well I do not use that many at once, but 2 or 3 yes.

So, what do you suggest? Should I just buy new motherboard first and then move to better components or this motherboard will do?

 

[GhostWolf]

GPU, yes (depending on your PSU). CPU, no.
Your motherboard has a LGA775 socket, no modern CPUs support it (and they don't support DDR2 either way).
That being said, you can get older duo/quad Core 2 CPUs for quite cheap, if you want some noticeable boost without spending too much (although you didn't mention what CPU you own now).

As to RAM - you can't get more than 4GB with that motherboard. If you choose to do a full upgrade, 8GB should pretty much be the minimum these days.

 

[BloodDrunk]

Then GPU is going up.
I should then, get Some Quad-Core processing power
I think it's better to have something than nothing, right? 4gb it is.

Just one more question, will those upgraded components work at their full speed due to this motherboard being quite old? Or will it be slower and also, can you suggest some of compatibile quad or duo core processors for my motherboard?

 

[GhostWolf]

If you are getting a GPU, be sure your PSU is strong enough for it, otherwise bad things can happen.

The motherboard itself seems decent, I don't think it should give any trouble (though I am not very knowledgeable there).
Any Core 2 CPU is good for you. E8400 and Q6600 (duo and quad) seem to be popular, and are relatively cheap - at least on eBay, but you could look at other parts in the series and see how much they cost.

Here's a list of all Duo and Quad parts.

 

[BloodDrunk]

Yeah, that's what I should definitely take into consideration. After all, I want my PC to turn on
Ok, so Duo Core will do as good.

 

[Velmarshal]

The GPU will be bottlenecked by the CPU deppending on how powerful the GPU is. On the other side there is also the problem of the dated PCIe 1.1 you have on that mobo, which might cause some issues.

At this point it's a much better idea to buy a new system or just the GPU, which you can use later when you replace the rest.

 

[Dr Super Good]

The GPU will be bottlenecked by the CPU deppending on how powerful the GPU is.

If the clock rate is high enough it should not be a problem. If he gets a really powerful graphic card (expensive) which are prone to CPU bottlenecks then there is the question why he is not getting a new motherboard and modern CPU with DDR3 RAM as well. The system will obviously never be "current generation" however it should have no problem running the games people play and even most current generation titles as long as they are scaleable enough.

The PCIe 1.1 should be of no problem. The specification is purposely designed to be backwards compatible from what I have read. The only problem it causes is the obvious reduction of interface bandwidth which is seldom a bottleneck anyway (the driver stack on the CPU usually bottlenecks long before). Still look on google to see if there are any issues reported with your mother board and modern GPUs.

Do note that if you use a modern GPU you might need a BIOS update. This applies to all hardware released after the motherboard time of manufacture.

 

[Velmarshal]

If the clock rate is high enough it should not be a problem. If he gets a really powerful graphic card (expensive) which are prone to CPU bottlenecks then there is the question why he is not getting a new motherboard and modern CPU with DDR3 RAM as well. The system will obviously never be "current generation" however it should have no problem running the games people play and even most current generation titles as long as they are scaleable enough.

Trust me I've been in his situation. Only a handful of games won't bottleneck on an LGA775 CPU (Im guessing he wont overclock).
Q6600 +GTX 660 in Deus Ex HR, the FPS was all over the place, going up to 120 and down to 27. After I upgraded it went to 70 ~ 130 range.
PCIe 1.1 probably added to those ranges, but I can't be certain.

 

[Dr Super Good]

Trust me I've been in his situation. Only a handful of games won't bottleneck on an LGA775 CPU (Im guessing he wont overclock).
Q6600 +GTX 660 in Deus Ex HR, the FPS was all over the place, going up to 120 and down to 27. After I upgraded it went to 70 ~ 130 range.
PCIe 1.1 probably added to those ranges, but I can't be certain.

Again this shows heavy driver stack overhead on cards with high throughput (660 is a medium/high end card). This will only be a problem for games released within +/- 1 year of now as Direct3D 12 launching this summer for Windows 10 (which is free) eliminates the overhead. If he buys a modern card (GeForce 700+) then it will be compatible with Direct3D 12 so can take advantage of it. The driver overhead has been a particular problem with PC gaming performance in recent years being particularly emphasised with technology like in NVidia Titan which were such a leap forward in throughput that keeping all resources fed became a bottleneck. Already Console games like on Xbox One and PS4 use Direct3D 12 technology to operate which is why they achieve such high performance at such a low cost.

The frame rate difference you have seen could easily be the driver stack sending more data than actually required (a time consuming process anyway) due to how the API works.

It will not help old games but certainly will help future games (and current games if the developers bother to patch as their console ports already use it). Old from a few years ago did not really suffer, especially with modern hardware speed, it is only games released recently aimed at modern hardware that will perform quite badly.

 

[andreasaspenberg]

i have been thinking of upgrading a samewhat similar pc. i got a gtx 760 after my old 660 ti fried and it works well. the best intel core 2 quad costs a lot but their cache is faster than modern processors. if you are going over 4 gigabytes of memory your system should be considered.