Chandni Khondji

Quote Helium Loon: However, your biggest slowdown at the moment is going to be your memory. 4GB would be better, 8GB would be best. Will your current motherboard support 8GB of DDR2? No the current motherboard has only 2 memory slots and can only hold 4GB alltogether. And thanks for the elaborate suggestion. I'll read up on it. Perhaps a Phenom II combines the best of both worlds. And a new motherboard might be upgradeable at a further point. Will have to read up on that as well.

Thanks for the replies and suggestions so far. I know that an i5 or i7 would make a difference, but unfortunately they do exceed my budget and I am looking for a more affordable solution (i.e. the best bang for my very limited bucks)

I'm thinking about upgrading my hardware. I'm not looking for something expensive, but rather a budget upgrade that puts the resorces where I need them most. I looked at several options, but I don't know whether they will be sufficient for what I'm planning. Hence I'm asking this helpful community, perhaps someone who has good knowledge about hardware (or even runs one of the system him/herself) can help me find the right one? Here's what I typically do at my PC: One of the following: - playing Second Life with several viewers depending on what I want to do (Firestorm/Astra/Viewer 3 for Mesh or/and Shadows, Imprudence for building and RP etc.) - creating objects and texture baking with Maya - rendering scenes with Poser / Vue D'Esprit and the like - doing post-work and Photo-Touch ups in Photoshop (being able to combine some of these tasks at the same time would be a very nice bonus, but isn't a must-have) Additionally, I always have the following programs active: - Chrome, for watching a low-quality video streams - Opera, for browsing - Eudora for Emails - Skype, Trillian for messaging Here's the hardware I currently have. With this hardware, every viewer together with the programs I have always open) maxes out RAM utilization, and occasionally CPU utilization as well: - Athlon64 X2 5000+ (Brisbane) at 2.6 GHz - MSI K9A2GM V2 mainboard with AM2 (940) socket - 2 GB DDR2-RAM at 667 MHz (PC2-5300) - ATI Radeon HD 5670 graphics card (this one will stay for the moment since it's not a performance bottleneck, it's rarely at more than 50% utilization) Here are the upgrades I currently have under consideration: System 1: - Phenom X4 (Agena) at 2.4 GHz - mainboard stays - 4 GB DDR2-RAM at 1066 MHz (PC2-8500) System 2: - i3 2100 at 2.5 GHz - MSI H67MA-E35 mainboard with 1155 socket - 4-8 GB DDR3-RAM at 1333 MHz (PC3-10600) System 1 is cheaper and has 4 physical CPU cores, but will it be powerful enough? System 2 is more expensive, has a more modern architecture, but only 2 physical cores (plus two virtual ones through hyperthreading), do I need more cores? Any other suggestions? Also, since my current ATI graphics card doesn't support using anti-aliasing and shadows at the same time, it would be good to know if the Intel HD 3000 graphics chip included in the i3 CPU can do this, and whether it can run Second Life at an acceptable speed for taking photographs. Thanks to everyone who takes the time to answer!