Upgrading old gaming pc

[chaplinaustin]

Hi, I have recently gotten back into PC gaming and my 5-6 year old gaming computer needs some upgrades. It will barely play low to minimal on some games and simply wont meet minimum requirements for a few newer games I want to play.
Specs

OS: Windows XP
Processor: Intel(r) Pentium(r) 4 CPU 3.00GHz (2CPUs)
2048MB RAM
NIVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT

Games I want to play: Arma 2 and 3, Wargame: European Escalation

Thanks for any help you can give me.

 

[wombat_tg]

Do you mean you have 2 physical CPUs or a dual core CPU? (I'm guessing dual core)

I'm here to give you the bad news: there is up good upgrade path for your machine. You will need a new machine.

You could spend some money and upgrade your CPU (if you have a 775 socket in there right now), but even the best thing you would buy is at the bottom of the rung these days. You'd be in somewhere between min and recommended spec, and fading fast. Also, memory for that board won't match memory for current boards, so again, you'd throw away money. You could throw away $100-$200 of your budget putting in upgrades that just are not going to get the job done much longer.

The graphics card you wouldn't necessarly be throwing cash away on, however, a top of the line GPU would likely be bottlenecked by your weak CPU. Additionally, Arma3 is very CPU bound so a crappy CPU will still hurt.

Trying to upgrade your machine is really just a good way to waste some money. Id' suggest saving up a few hundred more bucks and getting yourself into something brand new with some life expectancy.

 

[steven37]

Well to run Arma3 the minimal requirements are:
CPU
Minimum: Intel Core i5 or AMD Athlon Phenom X4 or faster
RAM
Minimum: 2 GB
OS
Minimum: Windows 7 / Vista
Video Card
Minimum: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260 or ATI Radeon HD 5770 with Shader Model 3 and 896 MB VRAM, or faster
Free Disk Space
Minimum: 15 GB free space
But remember you always want better than the minimal so youll want items better than these just nothing less

 

[jay2tall]

As mentioned, there is not upgrade path for your current PC. You need to start over. Any parts you can upgrade on your machine, you will end up paying a premium for since they are long discontinued. Unless you have a buddy that has a lot of parts laying around. You could probably salvage what you can like the case and drives. However, if you need to start from the ground up you are better off just replacing everything.