Hardware upgrades on 12 year old stationary PC

[Brendon]

Hey there,

About the RAM, I have only 2x DDR2 RAM sockets on my motherboard and therefore I was also searching for 4GB DDR2 RAM sticks, but I only found 4GB sticks for AMD chipsets? I don't exactly know, but I thought max. capacity of a DDR2 stick is 2GBs. Just saying this to make sure, it will actually work with your motherboard and if it does, then I'm also interested in those 4GB sticks. Would be awesome..

Barney already explained what CPU and GPU is, and yes you DO have a GPU, it's your 9800 GTX, which should actually be more powerful than my old 9600 GT, I think it's not your main problem.

Not being able to play Youtube 1080p videos can also refer to lack of RAM or a lazy CPU, which, I think is in your case, because 2 core CPUs are nowadays as good as extinct. As you said, it's a good idea to go with a Q94xx or a Q6600, I don't know about the Q94xxs, as I said, the Q6600 is a cheaper alternative, which likes to go into overclocking.

But I think, a 9800 GTX should be more than enough for a game like LFS, but yeah as we said, if you want to play some better looking games, go for a GTX 5XX / Ti and you will have a lot of fun.

Not to forget, your new GPU will most likely need to eat a lot of power, so don't forget to upgrade your Power Supply, or it can cause serious issues. I'm lucky, because mine detected the lack of power and turned itself off, but in worse scenarios it can destroy your motherboard too by giving it too much power.

A cheap Power Supply I bought is a Chieftec (something) which has 450W and is more than enough for a GTX 550 Ti (seems like).

@Barney I would also ask you something, how high could I go with the GPU before bottlenecking it by the Q6600? Don't get me wrong, I'm also very new to this whole PC thing, I'm doing it since August 2018. So is the 550 Ti the absolute limit ? I was thinking about getting a GTX 660 Ti next and as last, since its PSU limit is exactly 450W, has 2x 6 pin connector, would be ideal for me, but the question is, if my GPU will hate it. What do you think? thanks.