Upgrade, FINALLY Current setup: Motherboard: Gigabyte S3-P35 Graphic card: Geforce 9600 GT RAM: Kingston 4 x 1gb CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E4400 Power supply: Chieftec 360W Planned upgrade: CPU: AMD Phenom II quad core 3.4 Ghz Motherboard: gigabyte 780T-D3L RAM: Corsair CMZ8GX3M2A1866C9 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3 Vengeance Memory I am going for minimal budget upgrade, dont care about high quality graphics as long as ill be able to play MWO and Planetside 2 at constant 30fps on low settings.
The Phenom II is a good budget chip, better than the newer AMD chips for gaming. I don't know that you will be able to get to 30 fps with the Geforce 9600 though. It looks like you can get a Radeon 7750 for around 70 GBP, which should be able to manage the graphics end. I also don't know how much additional performance you can wring out of the RAM. I would guess that you would get alot better bang for your buck (gaming experience wise) if you spent those 40 pounds on a gpu upgrade instead.
My old board uses DDR2 memory so i cant save on RAM. Also radeons traditionally have horrible linux drivers and i would like to change my os once steam linux comes out.
Steam on Linux is all well and good, but most games are not developed for Linux, and probably will not be for the foreseeable future. Unless you are going to use WINE, then you are not going to be able to use Steam for games. I honestly do not see why anyone would use a Linux machine to game with. Work, sure, personal web browsing and moving watching, OK.. but not gaming. On the upgrade, I have been running that Phenom II for a while. It is a great processor. I recently upgraded my VC from a ATI 5850 to a 7950 and upgraded to 8GB of RAM. I would seriously consider getting a newer video card. I think it would improve your experience greatly.
a cheap yet actually good graphic solution from the nvidia leftover bin is the GTX 560 - at least in germany you can find em for cheap these days
Actually I would upgrade the Graka too. The cheapest I would go is amd hd 7770, if you want to spend more Id go gtx 650 ti or amd hd 6870 , while my recomandation would be amd 7850 with the 2gb Vram. It has a lot of power for a realitevily cheap price. Around 160€ around here and if you buy a OC version you can overclock it quite nicely. Also depending where you buy it you get Far cry 3 code for free with the card do to the never settle campaign amd has.
I just got the 7850 2 gig, hasn't arrived yet, I'll let you guys know how it rolls. Also got the far cry 3 for free.
I average 30-40 FPS on medium high with a Sapphire 5770; you can get them all day on ebay for ~ $50. That would be on a Phenom II 940 @ 3.2 air with an Asus M3A78 mATX board and nothing special in DDR2 ram. As far as 'nix is concerned, run a dual boot O/S with Winblows for games and 'nix for everything else for the best solution. WINE won't give you the same performance as straight M$.
