Hardware upgrades on 12 year old stationary PC

[Brendon]

It's always nice to read something, what I exactly have done in the past months (since August 2018)

I had the same case as you, I upgraded an old Fujitsu Esprimo P5600 from "scratch", I had no GPU, and I had 4GB DDR2 and an Intel Q6600 to work with. As soon as I assembled the system and installed Windows, I realised, it runs games with a very low framerate (LFS on Low 10FPS). Next day I went and bought a 9600GT which I used for the next 4 months (until new year).

In these 4 months I overclocked the CPU (original 4 x 2.4GHz) to 3.0GHz and also overclocked the GPU slightly. I could run LFS maxed out and the FPS stayed stable over 100. It was an excellent experience for the money (20€ in total).

For christmas, I got a 16:9 1920x1080 monitor and realised that I can't really run games over 30-40 FPS, which have good graphics on high e.g. ETS2, so I searched for a new graphics card.

Begin of January I went and bought a GTX 550 Ti for 15€, which also got overclocked already. I got problems with the Power Supply afterwards, PC turning off when under load. it was a 230W PSU inside so I went for a 450W PSU for 15€. So here I am, with a 40€ budget PC, it can run even some "new" games well, for my shock, it can even run GTA 5 (only on normal settings tho) 1080p around 50FPS. ETS 2 stays over 50 FPS 70% of the time, settings on high, scaling on 100%.

So I think, if you don't want to spend a lot of money, just go and get a decent GPU, and, if you want, another CPU (I only have experience with Core 2 Quad Q6600, really stable CPU and very capable of overclocking), get a new Power Supply and enjoy.

Specs:
Motherboard: MSI-MS7379VP ver4.0 G31M
CPU: Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 @ 3.0 GHz
RAM: Hynix 4GB DDR2
GPU: Zotac GTX 550 Ti (OC 950-> 1000Mhz ; 2000-> 2100Mhz)
PSU: chieftec??? 450W PSU (no clue, it was cheap)

Good luck and don't give up