Is it going to be possible to improve the performance of the following PC on
a £100 (UK) budget. Performance improvement required for 3D gaming mainly
and if possilbe, general windows use:
Depends on what £100 (UK) budget will buy (being unfamiliar
with the best market prices there).
Socket A Athlon 2500+ (undervolted to run cooler)
If it'll run at stock undervolted, it'll probably run
slightly (or even a lot) overclocked too. We don't know if
the system would be used for anything critical though, nor
how much ability or time you want to put into it... but
ultimately there's no real magic to save money, it costs
time to o'c, or look for good prices, or find less demanding
software/game/whatever, etc.
Anyway it appears your board has KT333 chipset which may not
be very overclockable on the memory with 1.5GB in it,
otherwise it might get up around 170FSB or slightly more
before the AGP divider started to cause graphics problems.
You might be able to bump the FSB up a little though, which
isn't a good long term solution but given your CPU already
demonstrates it can run undervolted, it's quite likely to do
fine at about 10% clock rate increase.
Soltek SL75-DRV5 with 1GB + 0.5GB of DDR 333 memory.
Radeon 8500 64MB AGP graphics.
The seemingly obvious answer is to replace the video card.
As mentioned above I don't know what 100 will get you but
maybe an ATI X800GTO or nVidia 7600GS, GTS or even GT
(though these latter two probably above 100, but you could
look around for deals).
Samsung spinpoint 160GB EIDE drive.
The processor is the fastest that the motherboard can handle
Yes, no, maybe. If your 2500 is multiplier locked you can't
raise it's multiplier and are bound by the FSB, but if your
board allows setting multipliers then it might be able to
run a Mobile Athlon XP2400-2600, which overclock fairly well
and (as implied) don't have a locked multiplier so you can
raise that to get it up to at least 2.2GHz.
It is only a passing comment though, not that much benefit
relative to newer parts.
The PC is completely silent:
There is a Zalman silent flower cooler on the processor.
There is a replacement, zalman cooler on the GPU.
The case is modified (holes hacked in the back) with several undervolted
fans which run silently.
Any upgrade should not add too much noise.
You seem to be a bit too picky for your goal, wouldn't
everyone like a really cheap no-catch upgrade? If it were
so easy who would buy the more expensive parts?
Anyway, the closest thing to your goal is a nVidia 7600GS
with a passive heatsink on it. Just be sure your case
airflow is acceptible for this, you may want to leave the
adjacent PCI slot empty and that slot's case bracket cover
off for some passive flow-by induced by the other case
fan(s).
As I see it, the processor and graphics card are the slow points in the
system,
And the memory speed and the chipset's lower PCI efficiency
(Via southbridges in that era had lower realized throughput
regardless of having same bus width and frequency as the
other contemporary alternatives from Sis, Intel, nVidia),
and lower memory performance (less of an impact than the
other factors but still every little bit adds up).
but to upgrade the processor means upgrading the motherboard, which
probably means new style RAM and a PCI-E graphics card. This is not possible
for the budget.
Yes, this is why it's typical to set aside the $ and then
when enough has accumulated to do the larger upgrade.
It's really not cost effective in the long run to buy a
video card or CPU for that system. If your memory is all
PC2700 or better then the cheapest means to your end would
be a socket 939 board, Athlon 64, and PCI Express video
card. The total might be about double your budget. Reusing
the PC2700/DDR333 memory would be a bit of a performance
penalty relative to faster memory but it's still going to be
most of the performance at the best performance:money ratio
unless you can increase budget enough for a Core2Duo CPU,
DDR2 memory, and even with these the bottleneck for your
expressed purpose of gaming will be the video card far
moreso than which of the former two CPU replacements and
memory you chose.
New graphics cards such as a 7600GS or X1600 are available in AGP format,
but is there any performance gain to be made for games, or would this
processor significantly hold back a newer generation graphics card?
yes and yes
There is a significant performance gain from your present
card and yet your processor will bottleneck them a bit in
many games. For the budget you would definitely be making
compromises, kinda why people don't just replace one part on
a multiple year old system. Wouldn't it be great if it was
that cheap and quick?
)