I've got a mate who's running a Pentium D 850 C2D, with a 7600 GT and 2gig DDR2. He's looking to upgrade, but I haven't worked with the Pentium Ds, so I don't know if he should get a GPU or CPU first? His goal is to be able to properly enjoy games until later next year.
well first the 850 is not c2d its the presler core based on the prescot core. the pentium d 940 oc'd to 4.4 ghz is the just a hair slower than a fx-62 stock in 3dmark 05 but it would be hard to get that kind of performance from what you have and the cpu can really be the bottle neck once you up grade your video card i would suggest upgrading the mobo and processor to a new c2d either a e6600 or if your into overclocking an e4300 and if your mobo doesnt have pci-e i would deffinatly upgrade which of course would make the 7600 no good if it was agp but it is a good card if its pci-e it has s/m3.0 and good clocks just not the memory and once you get a nice cpu going you can upgrade to something nice like a 8800gt or 9600 or 9800 and your cpu wont bottle neck and he will beable to enjoy every game you might need more ram if your going to go with vista though
If he has PCI-E then I would grab a hot video card, if not... I would just do it all at once and get it done with. Also Intel Pentium D 850 is NOT A C2D! It's a far cry from one, a e2160 would destroy that chip!
Definitely the cpu first. What mb is he running?? Is it C2D compatible??? is it a pcie card?? What is his max budget...
