Bottleneck Options

[Qrbrrbl]

Ok here's the deal. I've had my homemade system for about 3.5 years now, so obviously performance isnt exactly top notch any more (though its still a very capable system). Only problem is, I have no idea what the bottleneck component is. That goes beyond my hardware knowledge. So, heres my question. Based on the specs below, whats my bottleneck (as in, which one will give me the biggest improvement per £).

In no particular order:

CPU: AMD Athlon™ 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 6000+, MMX, 3DNow (2 CPUs)
Memory: 3072MB RAM (2x GEIL 1GB, 1x generic cheap 1GB, dont know the model or how to find out without taking them out)
OS: Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition (5.1, Build 2600)
GFX: Sparkle NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB (running at 1440x900)
Mobo: ASUS M2N32-SLI DELUXE
HDD: 2x Seagate Barracuda 7200RPM (one 250GB, one 500GB)

Any suggestions?

[Pandora92]

To be honest IMO it's definitely the CPU, the 8800 is a very old card now, but in general the series has aged extremely well, plus if you upgraded that now all that would happen is your CPU would bottleneck it furiously, plus upgrading your CPU usually provides you more performance benefits overall, whereas your GPU only makes a difference in specific programs like games. You're better with a general high end system with a weak GPU than the other way around, I know that from personal experience.

I also don't really think changing the memory would do that much for you unless you specifically went for some ultra-high performance/low latency sticks, since really having 3gb of stock RAM is enough for most people, and changing it might make certain things a bit "snappier" but wouldn't really effect performance all that much.

I haven't looked at what CPUs are available for the AM2 socket for a while so I would pretty much go with what K recommended, except that just feels like a lot of money to spend on an old socket with no future (AM2), especially with AMD and Intel's new architectures coming late this year/early next year, so it might be worth holding off and (if you haven't already) buying a decent value aftermarket heatsink for your CPU and seeing if you can OC it a bit to keep it going.

Failing that it might also be worth spending a bit more and just replacing the entire mobo, cpu and memory setup with a decent value budget AM3+ socket, that way at least you get DDR3 support so it will be somewhat future-proof for a while, I actually have a list of parts I wrote for someone else a few weeks ago if you're interested, but again that's pretty budget specific and if you can't afford it then you can't afford it.

This is just my opinion though and I'm sure a lot of people would disagree with me, so it's up to you obviously.