Upgrading: power up your PC

An old PC is like putty in your hands. Tim Dean looks at how you can shape it into a new system with a few easy upgrades.

If you’re looking to resurrect an old PC as a media centre, the first thing you should consider is a new case. A small form factor case will not only look at lot better in the living room than a tower, but will take up a lot less space. The smallest cases require their own custom motherboard, but you can still get a small ATX case for around $150. A word of caution though, before you buy, check to make sure there’s enough space for all the components you want to install.
 
Processor
 
Performance-wise, a media centre doesn’t necessarily need heaps of grunt. A Celeron D 320 2.4GHz will give you all the processor power you need for under $150, and it’s compatible with most Pentium 4 boards from the last few years. You only need about 256MB of RAM as well, although given the low price of memory, 512MB wouldn’t hurt.
 

Two TV tuners are must-haves for a complete DIY media centre.

Graphics and TV

If you want to hook your media centre up to your TV, then the most important peripheral will be the TV tuner. These come in analogue or digital, with the latter in both Standard Definition (SD) and High Definition (HD) varieties. Digital is definitely the way to go, with improved image quality and sound, better reception and extra channels. HD TV is cool, but there’s not much content available at the moment, and HD capable televisions are still very expensive, so you can save a few bucks by going for an SD digital tuner. For the best PVR experience, preferably go with dual tuners, and at around $150 for a standard PCI SD digital tuner, why not get two?
 
Your graphics card doesn’t need to be a powerhouse, although it should have at least S-Video or composite video output, or both.

Storage 

Another essential component of a media centre is storage capacity. With SD digital television taking up around 2.7GB of space per hour, you’re going to need quite a bit of disk space if you don’t want to be constantly deleting things to free up room. $200 will get you a spacious 200GB drive, which will give you around 50 hours of TV recording space, once space for the operating system and apps are taken into account. More storage can always be added by investing in more internal drives, or an external drive using USB 2.0 or FireWire.
 
When it comes to storage, a DVD burner is also a good investment, and will allow you to back up and archive recorded content.
 
DVD burners have dropped in price dramatically over the last couple of years, and $125 will get you a dual layer, multi format drive.
 
Wireless
 
With your media centre in the living room, you don’t want network cables snaking around the floor, so it’s worth considering wireless. For around $300 you can get your wireless network running, with an 802.11g access point and two PCI adapters.
 

Alternative media centres like mythTV (www.mythtv.org) offer similar functionality to Windows MCE, but without the price tag.

These days a PC for the home is no humble word processor, but is expected to do a little bit of everything, including digital media encoding and playback, internet browsing, 3D games and more. Furthermore, it needs to do all this at the lowest possible price. 

Sempron-AMD's Sempron is often underrated as a processor, but gives decent performance for the money.

Processor
 
Swapping out your CPU for a new one is one of the quickest and most cost effective upgrades you can perform, even if you don’t touch any other components in your system. Thankfully, CPU connectors haven’t changed a great deal over the last few years, so a CPU upgrade may not even require a motherboard change.
 
If you have a Pentium 4 that uses the Socket 478 connector, which means just about any Pentium 4 except for the very earliest Socket 423 examples, you should be able to upgrade to a new Celeron D without changing your motherboard.
 
The Celeron D is based around the Pentium 4, but features a smaller cache, so performance is not too far behind, but the price is quite a bit lower. You can pick up a Celeron D 335 2.8GHz for under $200 and drop it straight in.
 
On the other side of the fence, AMD’s new range of Sempron processors are a great way to get a performance boost for minimal expenditure. Be warned though, there are two very different flavours of Sempron, one based on the Athlon XP architecture, and one based on the new AMD64 architecture. If you’re upgrading an old Athlon or Duron Socket A system, you need to make sure you get the Socket A variant of the Sempron. You can pick up a 2GHz Sempron 2800+ for Socket A for as little as $160.
 
Memory
 
If you’re thinking about a performance upgrade, it’s worth complementing your new CPU with some RAM to ensure smooth operation. Memory is fantastically cheap these days, and if you’re system uses single channel RAM, then there should be no problems with just buying an off the shelf stick and plugging it straight in. You can get 512MB of DDR400, which should be backwards compatible with systems running DDR233 or DDR333, for as little as $75. 512MB is ample for most Windows tasks, but if you’re a gamer, or you like editing large image or video files, consider going to 1GB – the extra certainly won’t hurt.
 
Storage 

Hard disk capacity is always in short supply at home, but thankfully the hard disk is one of the easiest things to upgrade. Just make sure you have a free 3.5in bay in your case and a free connector on the motherboard and you’re off. Only $200 or so will buy you a brand new 200GB drive, which should give you plenty of elbow room. If you do buy a new drive, you might also consider reinstalling your OS on it to improve performance even further.
 
Display 

The final component that’s always worth an upgrade is your display. If you’re still using a 17in CRT, or heaven forbid, a 15in CRT, then it’s time to go flat screen. $350 will get you a basic 17in TFT, and $450 will get you a top quality unit. Also remember that a 17in TFT actually has a larger viewable area than a 17in CRT, so you get better image quality and a bigger screen to boot.

Pocomail costs US$39.95, and offers a slick set of features.

Overkill

Many home PCs don’t require expensive software packages. Before you shell out for the latest version of Office or Adobe products, consider what you’ll be using them for and whether you need all the bells and whistles that accompany the price tag. OpenOffice (www.openoffice.org) is perfectly suited for the home PC, where writing letters, creating general spreadsheets is the limit. Email is another area where you can score powerful software for little or no price. Thunderbird (www.mozilla.org), The Bat! (www.ritlabs.com) and Pocomail ( www.pocomail.com) offer a set of features that are superior to Outlook Express, and can even give Outlook a run for its money.

Content creation, which can include anything from editing digital photographs or digital video, to desktop or web publishing, is one of the most demanding tasks you can throw at your PC. However, even a PC from a few years ago can be upgraded to be a content creation powerhouse.

Processor
 
For this kind of work, both the CPU and RAM will be stressed to their limits, whether it’s through rendering digital video or manipulating a 300MB image in Photoshop.
 
If you want the most horsepower, you’ll need to invest in one of the latest processors, such as a Pentium 4 or Athlon 64.The sweet spot in performance processor pricing is around the $300 mark, and you can get a Pentium 4 530 3GHz or an Athlon 64 3200+ 2GHz for this much. If you are going for an Athlon 64, also be sure you get one for the Socket 939 connector, as this will allow you to use dual channel memory. The next faster processors in both ranges jump in price significantly to $450 or more, and going all the way up to over $1000 for the top of the line.
 
Motherboard
 
To get the most from these CPUs you may need to install a new motherboard as well. In the Intel camp both the Intel 915G and 865 are good choices, with the main difference being support for PCI Express for your graphics card, with the latter only handling AGP. $175 should be able to buy you a well featured motherboard featuring either chipset, including onboard components such as Ethernet, sound and FireWire.
 
If you’re in the AMD camp, you have some more choices. Again the chipset you go for will depend on whether you have an AGP graphics card or are upgrading to a PCI Express card. The NVIDIA nForce4 and VIA K8T890 are both PCI Express chipsets, and have all the latest features you’ll need. If you’re sticking with AGP, then go for a VIA K8T800. For any of these boards, expect to pay around $200 to get one with all onboard components listed above.
 
Memory
 
With a home or business PC, having lots of RAM is good, although the speed of the RAM is not as important. With a digital content creation PC you need both fast RAM, and lots of it. You should aim for dual channel DDR400 with a minimum of 1GB, which means two 512MB sticks. This should cost you around $250. If your budget can extend a little further than that, 2GB is preferable, which will set you back around $500.
 
Graphics
 
If you have gone for a PCI Express motherboard, it’s likely you’ll have to upgrade your graphics card as well. Unlike a 3D gaming PC, where the graphics card is a common bottleneck, it’s not as vital for 2D tasks like image or video editing. As such, $250 will get you a good NVIDIA GeForce 6600 or ATI RADEON X600 XT, both of which will suit your needs.
 
Display
 
Finally, you need to have the best display you can afford. As stated above, $450 will get you a good 17in TFT, although a 19in TFT would be preferable, but will cost between $600-$800.
 
Tablet
 
If you have some change left over, you should look into replacing, or supplementing, your mouse with a Wacom tablet. These can be great for image editing or desktop publishing, and will cost around $200 for a 6 x 8in model, or $700 for a big 12 x 12in unit.

3D games are the single most stressful applications you can run on your PC, so you need to make sure you have the latest hardware to handle them smoothly.

Graphics

The first and foremost consideration will be your graphics card. Even with a fast CPU, if you have a substandard graphics card, your games will only crawl along, and won’t look as good as they can. Even with a relatively slow CPU, such as a 2GHz Pentium 4, a powerful graphics card can still give you a massive boost in gaming performance.

The first thing to consider is whether you’ll be going for an AGP card, or for the new PCI Express interface – and this will depend on whether you’re upgrading your motherboard. In general, PCI Express shows no significant performance improvement over AGP at this stage, so you won’t lose any speed choosing one over the other.

The top of the range graphics cards from ATI and NVIDIA have staggering speed and equally staggering prices. Unless you’re willing to spend over $1000 on a single RADEON X850 XT or GeForce 6800 Ultra, then look to the next tier down. Just below the top of the line, there are some great bargains with cards that cost 40 or 50 percent less, but are only 10 percent slower.

The sweet spot in price/performance is with the ATI RADEON X800 XL at around $500 and NVIDIA GeForce 6800GT at around $600- $700, with the edge going to the RADEON because of the price. At the next tier down again, with cards that still deliver high speed, but are around 20 percent slower than the top of the line, are the ATI RADEON X800 and NVIDIA GeForce 6600GT, with the 6600GT having an edge in this category. Either should cost you around $350.

On the other hand, if money is no object, then dual GeForce 6800GTs in SLI configuration running on PCI Express will give you the best possible performance, but will cost you around $1500.

Processor

The next most important concern is the CPU, with prices reaching as exorbitantly high as the SLI graphics cards for the likes of Intel’s new Pentium 4 Extreme Edition 3.73GHz. However, even $500 will get you a powerhouse processor in the form of a Pentium 4 640 3.2GHz, with 64-bit extensions, or an Athlon 64 3500+ 2.2GHz. If you do go for an Athlon 64, be sure you get a Socket 939 model, and preferably one with the updated ‘Venice’ core.

If you’re weighing up between spending money on a CPU or graphics card, then get the best graphics card you can afford, and spend any left over on the CPU.

Memory

RAM is also important, with dual channel being essential. $250 should get you two 512MB sticks of DDR400.

Storage

For the best in performance, you can also consider getting two identical hard drives and setting them up in striped RAID 0 configuration, which will cut down on annoying load times. $300 will buy you two 250GB SATA drives, but make sure your motherboard has a RAID controller first.

Display

Your display is also very important for gaming. Again, TFTs are the best, but you need to get one with the lowest response time. A high response leads to blurring of the image when there’s motion, so try and get one with a 12ms response time, or even less if possible. A good 19in TFT with 12ms response will cost around $650, with a 17in model being around $450. ¤ ATI X850 XT – The powerhouse RADEON X850 XT takes up two slots in your system.

Our humble office PCs are increasingly demanded to perform a broader range of tasks than ever before. Not only do they have to contend with larger office suites and productivity applications, but often have several programs open at once. Media rich content is also on the increase, whether it’s PowerPoint presentations, PDFs or Flash, these can all tax your PC. Add to this the necessity of running antivirus, a firewall and anti-spyware, and the system can quickly grind to a halt.

Processor

For this reason, your most important concerns will be the components that affect overall performance, such as CPU, RAM and hard disk. In a multitasking environment such as this, a Pentium 4 with HyperThreading is your best bet, with dual core processors offering the highest performance, although they’ll cost you a bundle when they arrive. A 3GHz Pentium 4 with HyperThreading will cost you under $300. If you’re more concerned about budget, you can go for the same CPUs recommended for the home PC, and still get a performance boost for half the price of a Pentium 4 3GHz.

Memory

RAM is another important concern for a business PC, especially if you have multiple applications open simultaneously and you’re switching between them. We all hate that pause when we go from Outlook to IE or Word, and this is because the system has to reload the fresh data from virtual memory back into RAM. Having at least 512MB of RAM should alleviate this problem, and a brand new 256MB stick of DDR400 will cost you well under $100, so it’s worth the investment.

Network

Another upgrade worth considering is giving your network a kick in the pants. If you’re still using 100Mb Ethernet, or even 10Mb, then you should look at upgrading to Gigabit. $60 or so is all it costs for a Gigabit Ethernet PCI card, and an 8-port Gigabit switch will set you back less than $300. For a 10 fold increase in network transfer rates, it’s not a bad investment.

Display

Given many of us are plonked in front of our business PC for several hours a day, it’s essential you have the best possible display. There are many benefits to using flat screens, including improved image quality, smaller size as well as significantly less power consumption. In fact, a business can save thousands of dollars a year in energy bills just by switching to TFT. As with the home PC, a decent 17in TFT will cost between $350 and $450. A worthy investment.

Storage

If you’re finding disk space is also starting to dry up, then a simple hard disk upgrade is one way to go. For a little over $100, you can pick up a 100GB IDE drive. However, if you have a small business with only several PCs, you should also consider a basic NAS (Network Attached Storage) device rather than individual PC hard drives. Maxtor has a nifty device, called Maxtor Shared Storage, which just plugs into your network, and gives you 300GB of storage for only a little over $500.