To all of you with more experience in this sort of thing than I have, I have a couple short questions.
I plan on giving my computer one last ditch upgrade before college to give myself the best I can before I have to leave it as is for four years. As it stands, the current specs are:
Windows XP Professional
AMD X2 3800 Socket 939
1 GB DDR RAM
80GB 7200 RPM Hitachi HD
NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB(Currently being RMA'd with Newegg, suffering with my 6800 plugged back in)
520W OCZ PSU with a 28A 12V line.
I plan on upgrading it to the following:
Windows Vista Home Premium (Will Dual Boot with Vista on Larger HD)
AMD Opteron 185 2.6 Ghz Dual Core Socket 939
2 GB DDR RAM
Additional 250GB 7200 RPM Hitachi HD
My questions are as followed:
What steps should I take for upgrading my processor? From what I can find in Google, some motherboards may be able to auto-detect a new processor installed and adjust accordingly, but I wanted to know if there were any extra steps past taking out the old one, and plugging in the new one (and their heatsinks and what have you).
Should I upgrade my power supply? I'm worried about the video card more than anything else in this respect. It meets the power requirements already, especially in the 12V+. But with the additional Hard Drive, RAM, and processor, should I invest in a more powerful one, just in case?
Thanks for your help in advance guys.
AMD64 X2 3800+ | 1 GB Ram | NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB
MSVC++ .Net 2003 | BlueJ | Wings3D | CharacterFX | Gimp v2.0
Formerly NWC_Omega
