How much should it cost to upgrade my computer?

Question

i have an hp and my birthday is coming up and i want an upgrade so i can play Left4Dead when it comes out. these are my specs:

will i need to get a new motherboard??

and if i do, what video card should i get with my new motherboard

Board: ASUSTeK Computer INC. Goldfish3 1.xx

Bus Clock: 200 megahertz

BIOS: American Megatrends Inc. 3.28 01/23/2006

200.04 Gigabytes Usable Hard Drive Capacity

150.82 Gigabytes Hard Drive Free Space

3.00 gigahertz Intel Pentium 4

16 kilobyte primary memory cache

2048 kilobyte secondary memory cache

c: (NTFS on drive 0) 191.45 GB 149.85 GB free

d: (FAT32 on drive 0) 8.59 GB 966 MB free

Intel(R) 82915G/GV/910GL Express Chipset Family [Display adapter]

LogMeIn Mirror Driver [Display adapter]

HIQ L72S [Monitor] (16.8"vis, November 2005)

Answer 1

I have an old AMD mother board and if this thing goes by by I would have to upgrade the whole thing. chaintec socet k6 and still useing ddr 333 ram 1 gig. so I would have to do a major upgrade cause I cant find anymore like this. go with AMD if you can Radeon or g-force 8 series. check out www.newegg.com or www.tigerdirect.com if you are planning on building it yourself.

Answer 2

You are going have to pay a pretty hefty price to upgrade. I recommend looking for parts at NewEgg.com to get the best deals, but you should expect to pay upwards of $500 to get a system that will play Left4Dead at a nice frame-rate.

I'd personally say put that box aside and start from scratch. You're going to need a new motherboard, a new CPU, new RAM, probably a new GPU. I'd recommending getting SATA hard drives, but the ones you have will work fine with most boards. Set your expected price point around the $600 or $700 range to give you the most bang for your buck.

Answer 3

its a PEEEEE 4 man, anything you do with it will be costly (no more parts made for that) or you will need an entire new system (likely on ddr and they have released ddr3 for some time now) so you about 3 generations out of date...

keep the machine until your unsatisfied with it then you would just get a new machine all together and have your important data backed up onto the new machine.

Answer 4

Buying computer parts to build a decent gaming computer is actually pretty cheap now. It all depends on your budget really.

For a cheap-ish, decent gaming computer, here are some parts off the top of my head using prices from www.Newegg.com

CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E7200 2.53GHz 3MB L2 Cache  $120

Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-EP35-DS3L  $85

RAM: OCZ Platinum Revision 2 2GB (2 x 1GB) DDR2 800  $50 - $30 rebate = $20

Video Card: Sapphire Radeon 3850 512MB GDDR3  $95 - $15 rebate = $80

Case + Power Supply: Antec Three Hundred + Antec Neo Power 430W combo + an extra 120mm fan  $100

SATA DVD Burner  ~$30

500GB Hard Drive  $80

Total = $560 + tax + shipping  (before rebates), $515 after rebates

Overclock a bit too to get more bang for your buck.

You can reuse your monitor or spend $200-$250 on a 22" widescreen