PC upgrade dilema

[Champ]

Its been really Long I have posted something in this forum so wanted to share a story before I ask my question.

Long long ago (around 6 years) there was a boy, Studying Engineering and very passionate about gaming, So he went ahead a bought a Gaming PC with very high end configuration (AMD Athlon64 3200+, ASUS A8NE, nVIDIA 6600GT, Ram 1 GB). Whole world was pink and rosy for him, every game from Doom 3 to HL2, Serious SAM to COD used to cruse on his PC on highest settings, and no one in the world was happier than him.

Came 2007 and in his attempt to overclock his CPU he blew his motherboard, he was low on cash so his High end nForce4 Ultra based MB was replaced with a low end RS480 based Board.

Came 2008, College over, All days and nights were devoted to gaming, but guess what his High End configuration was not high end any more, only solution was to overclock, Extreme overclocking, Non stop play and Delli ki Garmi is a deadly combination So his Beloved 6600GT went BOOM

but fortunately he was earning by then so he bought a lappy (DV5-1015tx) with 9600GTm, so happy days were back.

But due to work pressure gaming was reduced to occasional night slogs of NFS/FIFA or RPGs (POP etc).

Now came 2011 and after very long he bought a new game NFS run, and guss was he was not able to play it on his lappy even at lowest settings (sad, very sad in fact a sad smiley wont do justice here)

Now the boy (that of course is me) want to play his NFS Run and few other games what should he do
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My Present configuration
CPU - AMD Athlon64 3200+
Mobo -Sapphire (RS480 based, have a PCI-e 1.0 port) dont remember model number
HDD - WD 250 GB sata 2 + Segate 360 GB Sata 2, + Segate 500 GB Sata 2 +........
GPU - None
Ram - 1 GB

Now I know there no point in upgrading this 6 year old configuration as CPU and RAM will be huge bottle necks But frankly speaking I am not willing to spend 50K in another PC at this point of time which will be used very occasionally, Life have few other priorities now.

I was about to buy a XBOX 360, but even 15K is looking too much.

Now my requirement is pretty simple, I just want to play games like NFS run, FIFA 12, and few RPGs like POP : forgotten sands, Batman Arkham City etc at lowest possible settings and at resolutions dell st2320 will let me play I hope its (1366 x 768).

My options are

1. Upgrade my CPU some how and give some peace to my hungry soul.
2. Give my PC to some unprivileged child and buy a Xbox 360.
3. Pay more attention to my career, wait some time and play games with my son on Xbox 1440

Guys dont jump directly to option 2, coz I really want to minimize expenses and will go to it if option 1 is piratically impossible.

Now my questions are
1. Can a mid range card (6-7k) help me to achieve this, or my CPU is way to slower.
2. Are DDR RAM modules still available, or I am stuck with 1GB.

Budget 6-7K, can extend, but will not go over 9, coz thats the whole point of this post

 

[Cilus]

Your processor is way slower to handle any current generation mid ranged Graphics cards. 2ndly that's a single core processor you're having and currently all the apps require at least a dual core CPU for running smoothly.
DDR modules are available but extremely costly.
In other words, no point of upgrading that system. And regarding your 6600 GT went Boom...probably it is not for hot weather, it is because of using crappy local SMPS. When overclocked, any components need higher power than normal condition and probably your local PSU was not able to handle that.

 

[Tarun]

extend it to 10k to 12k atleast and go with
Sapphire 5670 1 GB DDr5 ~4.5k
AMD Athlon II X2 245 @ 2.6k
Gibabyte 78LMT-S2P @ 2.6k
Corsair 4GB Value select RAM 1.1k 2GB is for 650 or 750 bucks
and a FSP Saga II 500w 2.2k

 

[Champ]

@Cilus, Sad to hear that, Even putting a decent mid range card wont give e playable frame rates, BTW forgot to mention but my PSU is , Cooler Master xtreme Power 380W(have read about recent degradation in quality but 6 years back that was the only reliable brand available).

@Tarun : Thanks for the configuration, Although its highly unlikely that I will go with a new PC but just to know what will be performance of a 14-15K PC in comparison to xBOX, in terms of game play.