Budget Upgrade Help

PrOdiGy1 · 23 Dec 2006 at 12:41

Looking to use some of my current parts in a upgrade from the current setup (in sig) i have and just thought id check here first to see if its possible and if anyone can suggest anything else or comment on it.

i dont really want to spend over £300-350 (in fact most of this is probably going to be funded from selling parts of my current setup) and so far this is what i have come up with:

DFI LanParty UT RDX200CF-DR Crossfire (Socket 939) Motherboard £29.99
(£35.24) £29.99
(£35.24)
HIS ATI Radeon X1950 Pro ICEQ 3 TURBO SILENT Heatpipe 256MB GDDR3 TV-Out/Dual DVI (PCI-Express) - Retail (H195PRQT256DD-R) £117.99
(£138.64) £117.99
(£138.64)
AMD Athlon 64 3700+ San Diego (Socket 939) - OEM £54.99
(£64.61) £54.99
(£64.61)
Arctic Cooling Freezer 64 Pro CPU Cooler (Socket 754/939/940) £13.99
(£16.44) £13.99
(£16.44)

Subtotal £216.96
£254.93 inc VAT

ive gone the 939 route as it is pretty cheap from what i can see (dont have the funds to spend on a c2d rig) and i dont really want to invest in ddr2 ram - especially at the current prices its at.

a couple of questions i have:

- will i need a new psu (current one is 380w i think) for this setup?
- is it actually worth upgrading? ie. will i notice any significant differences in general performance and in games like BF2 and 2142 (Looking to finally be able to run them at full settings and 1280x1024 ideally) and also eq2 (i have noticed that these games tend to throttle my CPU at 100% all the time).

any thoughts would be greatly appreciated!

Cheers

semi-pro waster · 23 Dec 2006 at 12:49

You could go for Conroe for the £350 and use your old Ram, you would need an ASRock Dual-VSTA motherboard for around £40. The 6300 will cost about £100 + Arctic Freezer 7 for around £15 plus whatever graphics card you want. The PSU should just about be fine although you will probably need a 20-24pin motherboard adapter and a molex-PCI-E adapter for the graphics card.

PrOdiGy1 · 23 Dec 2006 at 12:52

semi-pro waster said:
You could go for Conroe for the £350 and use your old Ram, you would need an ASRock Dual-VSTA motherboard for around £40. The 6300 will cost about £100 + Arctic Freezer 7 for around £15 plus whatever graphics card you want. The PSU should just about be fine although you will probably need a 20-24pin motherboard adapter and a molex-PCI-E adapter for the graphics card.

yeah i was looking at this but i remember reading somewhere that that motherboard runs the pci-e cards at a slower rate than normal?

£350 really is around the maximum i can spend.......

semi-pro waster · 23 Dec 2006 at 13:00

PrOdiGy1 said:
yeah i was looking at this but i remember reading somewhere that that motherboard runs the pci-e cards at a slower rate than normal?

I can't remember for definite but it could well be that the motherboard runs PCI-E graphics cards at 8x rather than the current maximum (theoretical) of 16x, however since AGP 8x is barely maxed out by most graphics cards I wouldn't really think it much of an issue.

PrOdiGy1 · 23 Dec 2006 at 13:04

semi-pro waster said:
I can't remember for definite but it could well be that the motherboard runs PCI-E graphics cards at 8x rather than the current maximum (theoretical) of 16x, however since AGP 8x is barely maxed out by most graphics cards I wouldn't really think it much of an issue.

ah i just realised those boards can run ddr/ddr2 AND agp/pci-e

i just get the impression my graphics card is going to find it more and more difficult to run the newer games and techs (it doesnt have SM3 for example) and that a graphics card upgrade would be fairly useful at this point

PrOdiGy1 · 24 Dec 2006 at 12:07

any more thoughts? :/

thefishdude · 24 Dec 2006 at 14:18

the original upgrade you mentioned to the sandy 3700 and the 1950 pro will definalty see you get a performance increase.

a new conroe set is obviously better but will cost you more cash. for the price of 250 like you said earlier i think that will see an increase and it will keep you going anad happy for a while yet. and you can allways go conroe mb and ram later and add yoru new 1950pro to it wich you will allready have, also the artic pro coller also does conroes so can carry that over. aswell.

Trusty · 24 Dec 2006 at 18:48

i agree, this is what i would reccomend!

Get the DFI board, HIS 1950 pro and the artic cooler. But get a x2 3800 off ebay for around £75! instead of the 3700! definatly worth the £15 extra over the 3700.

semi-pro waster · 24 Dec 2006 at 19:10

Out of interest why would either of you recommend socket 939 given that it is a dead socket i.e. no new chips will ever be released on that format? The Conroe based system will cost around £50 more total and offers more in the way of upgradability, if the extra money is too much then yes go for the socket 939 based system but since the budget was listed as a max of £350 then going for obsolete technology doesn't make a huge amount of sense to me.

The Freezer 64 Pro cooler doesn't appear to support Conroe as it is a socket 775 chip, unless, as is very possible, I am missing something.

Trusty · 24 Dec 2006 at 19:43

oh is the budget £350, didnt realise. Yeh go for c2d then if you have £350.

allllec · 24 Dec 2006 at 20:37

think he ment Arctic Cooler Freezer 7 Pro, well hope he did

thefishdude · 24 Dec 2006 at 21:51

Thermaltake said:
oh is the budget £350, didnt realise. Yeh go for c2d then if you have £350.

snap neither did i doooh i skimmed his post and saw he had specced a system for £250 and assumed that was budget doooh. and yes i got mixed on up me artic coolers...... to much xmas spirit been drunk here i think

PrOdiGy1 · 25 Dec 2006 at 13:33

Thermaltake said:
i agree, this is what i would reccomend!

Get the DFI board, HIS 1950 pro and the artic cooler. But get a x2 3800 off ebay for around £75! instead of the 3700! definatly worth the £15 extra over the 3700.

aye ive just been looking around on there but they are going for a lot more than £75!

PrOdiGy1 · 25 Dec 2006 at 13:46

semi-pro waster said:
Out of interest why would either of you recommend socket 939 given that it is a dead socket i.e. no new chips will ever be released on that format? The Conroe based system will cost around £50 more total and offers more in the way of upgradability, if the extra money is too much then yes go for the socket 939 based system but since the budget was listed as a max of £350 then going for obsolete technology doesn't make a huge amount of sense to me.

The Freezer 64 Pro cooler doesn't appear to support Conroe as it is a socket 775 chip, unless, as is very possible, I am missing something.

the plan was that i was looking into selling some of my current setup (my graphics card will probably raise the most funds) to fund the new setup (as i dont actually have £350 to spend lol). from what i can see from the well known auction site, i can get around £50-60 for my cpu, not much for my motherboard and £80-100 for my x850xt

on the 775 route, i think i need to look into finding one of those asrock boards.....im not going to ask where i can find them but i would like to know if anyone can tell me what the latest version is if possible! i dont fancy going through all those pages on that big thread!

cheers for all your replies guys. has helped a lot

hp7909 · 25 Dec 2006 at 13:52

PrOdiGy1 said:
{snip}- will i need a new psu (current one is 380w i think) for this setup?{snip}

380W is pushing it, especially if no name type & with 'proposed' upgrade/s

PrOdiGy1 · 25 Dec 2006 at 14:07

hp7909 said:
380W is pushing it, especially if no name type & with 'proposed' upgrade/s

it is named but i cant remember which

. it is 3 years old though so i think a new one is in order anyway

semi-pro waster · 25 Dec 2006 at 14:21

PrOdiGy1 said:
it is named but i cant remember which . it is 3 years old though so i think a new one is in order anyway

At 380w I'd guess possibly Antec, particularly if you got it with a case but that is just a random guess. If it is Antec then it might still just about hold up but a new PSU wouldn't hurt.

As for the ASRock, you need a Dual-VSTA although I'm not sure what the latest bios is, you should be able to download the latest bios from their website though easily if necessary.

PrOdiGy1 · 25 Dec 2006 at 14:25

semi-pro waster said:
At 380w I'd guess possibly Antec, particularly if you got it with a case but that is just a random guess. If it is Antec then it might still just about hold up but a new PSU wouldn't hurt.

As for the ASRock, you need a Dual-VSTA although I'm not sure what the latest bios is, you should be able to download the latest bios from their website though easily if necessary.

id have a quick peek but im not at home at the moment hehe. hoping to get this stuff ordered so i can put it together when i get back

cheers for the board info, ill have a look around now