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3200 athlon with 7800 bliss performance

rabanthor

rabanthor

rabanthor

Permabanned
Joined
19 Nov 2002
Posts
298
hi, got a64 3200 2gb ram 6800 gt at ultra speeds. lcd 1360x768. oblivion runs ok but not great. would upgrading to 7800 bliss 512 help things, or would the card be significantly hindered by the 3200? also, would cod 2 run in direct 9 ok with that setup?
cheers folks
 
The 3200 wouldn't hinder it, but I'd seriously consider PCI-E as you can get a x1800xt and mobo for less than the 7800 agp and it'll perform better too.
 
been looking into overclocking but sadly got asus k8v with no agp/pci lock so no go there Im afraid.
reason for staying agp is the time id spend reinstalling windows and all the gubbins frankly is worth more to me than the cash id save going pci.
 
It's a lot of money and hassle later on you'll be saving, think - one day you WILL have to upgrade. The next gen games will not run well with a 7800 so you'll simply have to then. My advice is to do it now while you're upgrading anyway - not add another step to it.
 
i take your point zefan, but im not convinced that next year or whenever vista is released I wont have to buy another cpu/memory/mb etc if I switch to pcie now.

and if anyone wants to spec me mb, processor and graphics card for the switch...(sorry, thats a wee bit cheeky i know)
 
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AMD Athlon 64 3500+ Venice 90nm (Socket 939) - Retail - £149.94inc VAT
BFG RNF4U nForce4 Ultra (Socket 939) PCI-Express Motherboard - £70.44
Sapphire ATI Radeon X1800 XT 256MB GDDR3 AVIVO TV-Out/Dual DVI (PCI-Express) - Retail - £170.32

There ya go, superior mobo, cpu and gfx :D

Total
390 inc VAT


PS.

Dependant on your PSU you may need a new one.

That CPU will also be faster by virtue of SSE, SSE2, SSE3, and a higher rated speed.
I have also spent money on faster items like cpu, so you can cut back there.
 
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Should do. AFAIK Nforce4 Ultra supports them.

If you wanted to get one that definately works, I'd also recommend the Abit KN8 Ultra. Only an extra fiver, and so far its been a good board for me, got a lot of features, like RAID, 4 SATA2 Ports etc, very stable once I plugged in the extra molex connector on the board. Impressed tbh, not so good when I briefly tried overclocking, but I didnt really try that hard, and I'm sure I could get a few hundred extra MHz out this board if I really tried :)

You could also consider getting the Asrock Dual PCI-E/AGP board. Has both full speed adapters in place, although apparently its not keen on 1T, but it does allow you to run your 6800GT and then get a say 1900GT when they come out.
The only downside aside from 1T with this board is that apparently AGP isnt completely optimised, but it'd still run pretty well, its not a cut down jobby, and also has a slot for a motherboard for AM2 when that arrives :)
 
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As to the original question, you wouldnt see a massive increase in Oblivion performance, as it runs crappy on all Nvidia cards. I went from a 6800GT to a 7800GT, its not mind blowing.
 
Oooh yeah..forgot to mention that.

Oblivion + ATI = The Way Its Meant To Be Played ;)

HDR and 16aa is gorgeous.
Really is XD
I've got some of the mods installed to make it look better at distances etc, and lets just say I'm running around outside, shiny plate mail with no horrible polygonisation, and am running after increased distance stuff etc, acceptably with all settings on high and 1600x1200 res, plus the aforementioned filtering. Looks godly!

I think a 1800xt could probably run the distance filtering mods, HDR and aa at 1024x768, possibly 1280x1024 :) at full settings :)
Lower resses as its still a powerful card, but not so good at shadering, and theres **** loads of that lol
 
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Hmmm. I find these decisions pretty hard. Gonna wait a while, oblivion is playable at the mo. Might as well wait until I really need to upgrade. Or at least wait awhile until my next holiday to do the swap over...
And yeah, does look like ati is the way to go for oblivion.
 
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