Recently a friend gave me his older pc, it's specs are
a 1tb hdd
gigabyte ga-m68m-s2p am2+ motherboard
dual core 2.8 GHz Athlon II x2 240
Radeon hd6570 (from my old pc)
and 1gb of dd2 800mhz ram
I want to upgrade it to play some less demanding games like Wow, Minecraft, and hopefully half life 2, and star wars the old republic. However I'm currently in high school and I'm on a very tight budget so I want to keep it as cheap as possible.
I've found that 2x2gb sticks of ddr2 ram are around $30 used on ebay. However my processor is for socket am3 so I could get a cheap $30 (even seen one for $24 after a rebate)am3 or am3+ motherboard and get a 1x4gb stick of ddr3(later to be upgraded to 2x4gb) for around $30, this would put this at 54-60 dollars.
So should I upgrade now or save up twice the money for a better upgrade?
Maybe just enjoy what is there in its current state it should play those titles you mentioned - nothing at high settings or what have you. Low - medium and at moderate resolution.
Then save up for a low spec budget build like that shown in previous Tek vidz.
just to finalize this... if you don't have a CPU and/or GPU to build off, you might as well start from scratch... that's going to be your 2 expensive components from the getgo
I do have a cpu(am3 Athlon II x2 240), and a gpu (Radeon hd6570). But can 4gb of ram handle these games at a decent frame rate? or should I save up for a new motherboard so that it can handle 8 gigs of ram.
you'll spend upwards of $300-500 on decent components to surround a good build of CPU/GPU... a good CPU/GPU is around $300 a piece if you want Intel CPU (which significantly outperforms). It literally takes a current 6-core AMD to match a 2nd gen i5...
As far as GPU goes I think AMD has the market cornered on all sides... Their budget GPUs are more bang for buck and the R9 290x out-performs the 780ti by 5-15% framerate...
If you want to use that build... ride it till the wheels fall off... but it's certainly not worth putting any money into... take that how you wish
see if your motherboard has a core unlocker you might be able to turn that dual core into a x3 or x4. and get to 4GB of ddr2 that is fine for most games that is good option for 30 bucks.i would go this route if you plan on not having money for a good amout of time but if you plan on having money in the near future then go ahead and get a cheap am3 motherboard and ram that you can upgrade to a more modern system.
I can't afford to put much money into it, but if i get 4gb of ddr2 ram for the current motherboard and then invest in a better gpu (albeit second hand) could it handle some gaming. also can I over clock my cpu if I get a 3rd party heatsink? I don't know if I have a good enough motherboard.