I'm Upgrading my PC

[JSIMMO]

Hi, I have an inspiron 530 by DELL.

I want to upgrade my RAM (its DDR2) but aparently I can only have a maxium of 4GB of RAM, anyway to get around this?


I also want to replace the graphics with a 1GB graphics card, would my PC be able to take any of these:-
http://www.play.com/P...ics-Card/Product.html
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk...W&hash=item20b1edc557

Its currently got an ATI Radeon X1300/X1550.

Also, the processor, how good is it? Its an Intel(R) Core(TM) 2 CPU 4400 @2.00 GHz 2GHz


Not a clue what make or model this is though, any help would be aprreiciated thanks guys :)

[SlackAlice]

Graphic cards.
You can either have an ATI Radeon 1300 or an ATI Radeon 1550, you cannot have both.

You have a PCI Express connections on your Motherboard so the card from play.com is not suitable. That card requires a AGP connection which is completely different.

The ebay item is 512mb onboard boosted to 1Gb by Turbocache. Whether it would actually achieve that depends on other factors.

[ChuckFickens]

Not wishing to question SA...

but several ATI cards will report as ATI Radeon X1300/X1550 cards in the device manager and that computer has a PCIe16 slot in it for graphics cards.

http://support.dell.c.../OM/HTML/appendix.htm

I personally would go for the ATI out of your two choices, but neither of them are really high end cards and not really suited to games if that's what you're after.

[ChuckFickens]

Opps.... sorry.... I really should read answers, mis-read that totally

(correct about the first bit in device manager, ignore the rest) :-o

But if you want games, there are better cards.

[venator]

Hi Chuck - Crucial memory can check your computer and tell you how much memory you can have - they really are good.

http://www.crucial.com/uk/

[ChuckFickens]

I'm giving up for the night..... far too knackered :) missed the part about memory.

unless you have a 64bit OS then any more than 4GB is a waste as the OS can't see it anyhow. and according to the spec from dell in my link above the max memory the computer will support is regardless of OS is...

4 GB (Inspiron 530 only )
8 GB(Inspiron 530a/530c)

[venator]

Try the Crucial site and download the small scanner program. It will tell you exactly what you have and what you can upgrade with. It tells me I can have 8 gig, but I don't play games, and don't need an upgrade from 4 gig.

Night night!