My philosophy of upgrading has always been this. You can very easily (and cost-effectively) upgrade for diversity and functionality - like printers, scanners, joysticks, speakers, monitors, hard disks/storage, other i/o devices, cameras, etc..
You CANNOT cost-effectively upgrade for performance. And if you do, the full capability of the new component is usually overshadowed and bogged-down by the existing hardware; thereby necessitating replacement of additional components.
A new processor is often held back by the chipset, the front-side bus, the ram, and other little things.
Faster ram rarely makes a difference. More of it works wonders up to a point, assuming your system was faulty in the first place. By faulty, I mean that it didn't have enough memory to begin with. So you see, when you upgrade ram, you are really correcting a design fault at the factory. The system was not engineered with the correct amount of memory in the first place.
Graphics?? Well now, just how fast can your CPU and bus and memory and interface feed data to the GPU on the graphics board? And if your graphics card is not "matched" to the system you get all sorts of stutters and the cpu can bog itself down by trying to manage sophisticated drivers which are never gonna be utilized to their full extent by the graphics card (because your cpu can't feed it fast enough) anyways!
Take for example, a plant. It will grow x amount of inches a year given optimal conditions. Getting it to grow faster than normal usually takes extra measures that are not worth the time and money (unless you do weed). However, getting it to grow in multiple places and splitting it up into 2 or 3 plants is pretty easy, cost effective, and now you have more functionality, more decoration, you see..
Notice how I left out hard disks..? Well, they are the slowest part of a system, even the new breed of SSD's are still pretty bad. A hard drive holds X amount of data, and that is it! Finito! Done! Benchmarking hard disks is pretty much a waste of time. You buy one, you plug it in, you are done. Hemming and hawwing over what model and this and that yields little gain. It didn't used to be that way, but now it is.
Soon all parts will be that way. Ram speed is pretty much irrelevant, if not, it's getting there. Graphics will be soon too, with the new intel chips. Sure there'll be room for those overgrown hot and heavy videocards. But with cost cutting and CONVENIENCE and reliability (driver stability) becoming ever more important. People are gonna start leaning toward on-die graphics more and more. It will become a standard. And programmers will realize that and begin to code in a more efficient manner for those chips. And they will improve with time. And within 3-4 years, they'll supersede add-in videocards.
Remember, the add-in videoboard came to be (30 years ago) because the CPU was not capable of drawing stuff on the screen fast enough, or at all!! But today that is changing. Especially with multi-core and whatnot. And having a graphics "sub-unit" right on the die of the CPU means you can get enormous bandwidth between the so-called graphics processing unit and your main CPU. First now we're putting the gpu close to the cpu, soon it will actually be part of the x86 pipeline.
The cpu and southbridge + a tiny dac effectively eliminated the soundcard. On board sound is good enough for over 90% of masses that buy systems. The market is too small to really pull a profit with add-in sound cards. We are now seeing the same thing with graphics.
First, we'll see the chips (cpu with graphics onboard) become standard. And software mfg's *WILL* have to code for them. Efficiently too I might add. The external add-on graphics card will become a specialty item. And good-riddance to it too! Graphics cards are responsible for so many unstable machines, and their shoddily written drivers just fuel the fire. Look at how often nvidia and ati/amd updates their drivers. On a weekly basis. For cryinoutloud can't they get it right the first time?
Built-in-to-the-CPU graphics or on-die (not integrated graphics though, that's graphics on the northbridge) graphics will help ensure stable drivers. I'm sure that intel won't stand for unstable drivers. Intel chips are known world-wide for stability and performance and would do them a world of hurt if their "graphics" crashed and caused mountains of problems like nvidia and amd/ati add-in boards do.
---------- Post added at 01:07 PM ---------- Previous post was at 01:01 PM ----------
i didnt bother with pics, theres nothing on the motherboard, just a CPU which MIGHT be removable , two sticks of RAM which i can change, then just soldering and intergrated stuff
Ok then, looks like you need a new motherboard, a new power supply, new ram, new cpu, and then your new graphics card. I'd save up for a new computer rather than upgrading this one.
