Looking to upgrade PC, need suggestions/help

[Geoff]

So my PC was built in June of 2009, I have never upgraded it because I really never needed to. It hasn't been until about this year that games either can't run (Far Cry 3) or run very poorly. So, I'm looking to upgrade in the near future.

CPU - AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 5600+ 2.90 GHz

GPU - NVIDIA GeForce 9500 GT

2GB of ram

I want to focus on these 3 for upgrades. At this point, I definately feel like more RAM is just a must. I mean shit, I think our laptops have 4GB minimum these days. The biggest issue here is I have no idea how good/bad my CPU and GPU are. Are they low level stuff?

I'm not looking to get $400 upgrades here. Just upgrades that will make running future games easier. Not maxed out, but capable of running smoothly.

 

[VintagePC]

If you want to determine if more memory will help, you need to look at your memory usage over time. Is it near capacity and is your PC swapping to disk a lot? If yes, more memory will do you a world of good. 4-6GB is probably enough for most purposes.

Video card needs an upgrade. That's not the greatest card and that's probably where you'll see the most benefit. 9500 is a pretty mediocre card and just about anything is a performance improvement. If you can score a 260, 280 460, 480 for a good price, those will do very well without busting the bank even through they're older generation. Stay away from the lower models like ?30, ?50, ?40 etc as those are generally budget-line stuff and not particularly great for gaming - and a higher model from the last gen (e.g 280) will generally outperform all the budget models of the next gen (430->450)

CPU is probably fine as is and not going to be worth upgrading until you deal with the other two first as those are the major bottlenecks - so start with video card, add RAM if you deem it necessary, and then look at how your performance is.