Honestly, the best bang for your buck on an AGP slot is probably the HD3650. But then again, you'll drop 150-$67 on it only to realize your power supply is dying... or maybe it's the motherboard capacitors... or your hard drive has bad sectors. Plus, you're looking at another $33-$67 for RAM. It might be more headache than it's worth.
If you actually have the cash, for $833 you can grab a CPU with integrated graphics that handles all those games you want just fine. You'd get an upgradeable motherboard, a 500GB/1TB drive, 4GB of RAM, and a solid case and PSU. If you're smart about it, you could probably shave the price down to around $667 . For that kind of money, you'll see speeds you've never experienced on this rig, and you'll be set for a good while. If you decide to game later, you can just slap in a beefier GPU and more RAM and stay ahead of the curve for a few more years.
If you're short on funds, buying a used dual-core PC for maybe 600-$233 isn't a terrible move, I guess. But then you're still buying parts that have been used for years, and the whole point was to get rid of as much old junk as possible.
Who knows what things will look like by June, man? I know you're itching to get started, but building a PC right now feels like a losing game, I guess.
It’s kind of a waste to even $17 for that 9600, especially since it's only slightly better than what's already out there—it won't really let you play anything you couldn't handle before. I guess I'll just sign off on what crimsonstag84 said; maybe he should just grab a used setup that can at least fit a PCI-E card and just enjoy himself
Stop obsessing over specs and just look at actual performance. I don't think the 960 is worth what they're asking for here.
You could probably flip those two for $700-$800, toss in another $333, and you'd have an awesome card. Honestly, forget about the VRAM; I don't really get why everyone is obsessed with needing 16GB these days.
Unfortunately, you've hit the ceiling with a Hard Drive. It’s just old, sluggish tech; besides capacity, it’s pretty much the only thing that hasn't really evolved in the last 20 years. I guess drivers won't change a thing here—it's just the way it is.
If you want actual speed, maybe grab a 120GB SSD once you've scraped together about $75. Put Windows on there along with your apps, and you'll finally see how fast things can actually fly.
If you're talking about that last point, it’s just the data transfer rate, which is sluggish because Hard Drives are honestly just slow. I guess if you swapped in an SSD, that number would probably jump up to 7 or something
I guess things have picked up a bit now that DSL is available. You can grab those turbo options from AT&T, and I think Comcast has some decent DSL packages too...
Who even uses DVDs anymore? It's kind of a relic. You just grab an ISO, burn it to a thumb drive using Rufus, and you're good to go. Installing from a USB is way faster and smoother—honestly, I haven't touched a disc for a Windows install in years, unless we're talking about some ancient piece of junk hardware.
You can't just swap out a hard drive and expect everything to work right away; you're looking at totally different drivers, so it won't be that simple. I guess you'll need to install Windows using a USB stick—you've got to download a Windows ISO image first and then use Rufus to make the drive bootable.
ATI's drivers used to be an absolute disaster, though from what I've heard lately, things have actually improved quite a bit.
Nvidia had their fair share of screw-ups too, don't worry. I mean, who remembers those drivers from maybe two or three years ago that just kept throwing BSODs left and right...
The whole thing is that stuff changes in a month—suddenly a different motherboard becomes the best deal, or a PSU gets pulled from the lineup. I doubt things stay the same for six months. 🤣 Especially when you're stuck waiting on those new GPUs from AMD.
Everything’s gonna shift, from general prices to what's actually in stock—especially GPUs. You'll probably end up rebuilding your rig a few more times before summer rolls around anyway 😁