PC Help!

[ReliantRodney]

First of all, I'm new here so thanks for having me!

 

I've always played games on the xbox, so I'm really new to this. I know people have asked this question before "h0w do i g3t GtA to pl4y on mi peesee", but I'm really asking your opinions on my predicament.

 

Basically, I want to upgrade my old PC so I can play games such as GTA,and have a mess around with mods etc, it's something I've always wanted to do. I've grasped the basics such as obtaining more ram, and buying a much better graphics card, but as I'm only running vista (32 bit) I can only install 3 - 3.5 gb of memory.

 

What I'd like to know is, should I opt for a total new build, or buy a new OS, hence meaning I can fit more ram?

 

My specs as I understand them are:

 

HP Pavilion a6623uk

Windows Vista Home Premium (SP1)

AMD Athlon Dual Core processor 4450e 2.30 GHz

3gb RAM ATI Radeon HD 3450

 

Thanks in advance for any help and advice!

 

[tomi19]

In my opinion if you want to have decent performance on GTA/games in general you should really build a new system. RAM is actually not so important. Games do not use more than 4GB, and that being an extreme case.

 

If you tell what your budget is we can help you better.

Edited April 16, 2013 by tomi19

[winme05]

Depending on what era GTAs you want to play, and what you call "decent graphics"

If you want to run III era GTAs (III,VC,SA) or emulate GTA CW DS version, I think it is enough - the CW on No$GBA was running smoothly on my GeForce4 MX440 AGP8x. The SA was stuttering with no AA on 640x480, but I got it running smooth at 720x540 with AA level 2 with core frequency rised to 300 MHz by RivaTuner.

If it's HD era GTAs or PS2/PSP/XBox emulation, I doubt.