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CPU Upgrade

LukeT

LukeT

LukeT

Associate
Joined
17 Jun 2006
Posts
196
I have a little bit of cash left over from christmas (£60 lol) and fancy upgrading my PC to get better perfomance in games. My current rig is a AMD 3700, 2gb GeIL memory and a 512mb x1900XT.

I think that the cpu is the bottleneck in my rig and i see i can get a AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 3800+ (Socket 939) - OEM for only £41.11 inc VAT. Is it worth spending the money on or am i better off waiting till later in the year to do a full CPU, RAM, MOBO, GFX upgrade?
 
Altough the 3800+ X2 is certainly faster I'd say wait... :) dunno what the rest thinks...
 
WOW thats a massive difference in price! After looking around i think i'll just wait till later on in the year and do a full upgrade. Thanks for you help :)
 
It just wouldn’t be a massive leap though, the pro 256mb on average only performs around 10fps higher than the x1900xt 512mb, at high resolutions on some older games like pray and fear the xt only trails the pro by 1fps!
Add to the fact his system is already being cpu limited, upgrading his gfx card wouldn’t be a wise thing to do imo.
 
LukeT said:
upgrading my PC to get better perfomance in games
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What type of games do you play Luke?

RTS or FPS?

If its RTS then a processor upgrade should get you noticable gains, if its FPS games then of course a GPU upgrade is where your money should go :)

feeblecpues3.jpg
 
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My XT is now in another system, I’m happily running my shinny new GTS 512 and I can confidently say this card will give you a massive leap in gaming!

IMO stick with your XT for a little longer, sort out a better cpu and then get a significantly faster GFX card.

Heck my overclocked XT could play Crysis at 1680x1050 high settings, so even today these cards can still pull their weight.

To me it really makes sense to upgrade and improve the weakest component in your system, which at the moment is your CPU. You will be amazed at what a powerful Core 2 setup can do to your gaming even with a last gen gfx card.
 
Hesky82 said:
Heck my overclocked XT could play Crysis at 1680x1050 high settings, so even today these cards can still pull their weight.
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I doubt it, the HD2900XT can't even do that, let alone the X1900XT. . .

1680x1050allor6.jpg

Conroe 2MB @ 2800MHz

Hesky82 said:
To me it really makes sense to upgrade and improve the weakest component in your system, which at the moment is your CPU. You will be amazed at what a powerful Core 2 setup can do to your gaming even with a last gen gfx card.
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Ultimately Luke needs a big upgrade but as his budget is £60 I don't think that is on the cards just right now.

As I have already said for that money why not sell his dated X1900XT and upgrade to something like a HD3850?

Is that such an 'unwise' opinion? :D
 
The cpu will be a massive bottleneck, my core 2 duo @ stock (2.13 ghz, wich is still a lot faser than an amd 3700+) makes my G92 8800GTS go 20% slower than when just @ 2.88 ghz...

What I'm saying is that when an E6420 bottlenecks a fast card so much, a 3700+ will be much much worse, even for an ati hd3750.
I'd get an 3800+ and clock it to 2.6-2.8 ghz if I were you, my 6800GS coupled with the core 2 duo could still run all games ( some @ low settings or 1024x768 fair enough, but it still ram em to plyable 40 fps) while a single core cpu will just make games like supreme commander unplayable.


A 1900XT aint poor at all anyhowm tbh I think the gfx card are over hyped, I've just gone from a 6800GS to a G92 8800GTS 512, and I noticed no major visual changes, just a lot smoother gaming ( so just performance was noticable, not the extra eye candy).
 
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snowdog said:
I'd get an 3800+ and clock it to 2.6-2.8 ghz if I were you
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Your a Joker! :D

However if Luke really is an RTS gamer then thats a good suggestion, if he is an FPS gamer that suggestion is not so good! :o

I don't think throwing good money after bad is the right move i.e don't buy another socket 939 CPU, get a 'modern' graphics card for the love of god!

You just can't get the staff these days, I dunno :p

[edit] when u say 3800+ did you mean X2 3800+ btw?
 
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Big.Wayne said:
I doubt it, the HD2900XT can't even do that, let alone the X1900XT. . .
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With post processing turned off, my e6600 at 3.8ghz and my XT clocked over 800mhz on the gpu with the game set to high I could quite happily play it on my 22" screen. The cut scenes would slow down a wee bit but in game it was fine. It’s worth noting I can’t stand playing games in slide show mode :)

Anyway back to the main discussion, ok do it your way but upgrade his cpu instead and still spend no more than 60 pounds in the end....

Sell his branded 2gb ram - good 2gb ddr1 still sell for over 40 pounds! no joke you can sell 2gb of ddr1 for more than the cost of 2gb of ddr2 right now.
Sell his 3700+ - looking at 16-20quid, thats all unfortunately.
Sell his 939 mb - again a decent branded one can go for as much as 30 pounds.
Add his xmas 60 quid onto the total and he will have 150 pounds to spend on his new pc.

GeIL 2GB (2x1GB) PC2-6400C4 - £30
Intel Core 2 Duo E2180 - £53
Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3L - £64
Total - £148

Then when he has a little more cash he can sell his XT and buy a card that will keep him going for far longer than a 256mb HD3850 will!
 
Hesky, go back to sleep :)

what you are suggesting is the same as my suggestion except in reverse. The easiest path is to simply buy a new graphics card (HD3850 is uber for the money) then just plug that in and sell his X1900XT, one simple purchase, one sale, dunno what an 512MB X1900Xt goes for these days but I'm confident that the total upgrade will not exceed £60 once the older card is sold.

The one point we are agreement is that ultimately a full upgrade is in order but for a quick and cheap hit and a nice step towards a better system its gotta be the 320 stream processor GPU dude!

p.s I'm sitting up late building a rush job pc btw, keep it going. I'll get the coffees in! :cool:
 
Yep, but my suggestion is better :D

He won’t be crippling the performance of his gfx card while he runs it on the amd platform and he won’t regret buying a 256mb card in a few months time when his cpu can pull its own weight.

I’m on the late shift, I can go on all night to :)


snowdog said:
The cpu will be a massive bottleneck, my core 2 duo @ stock (2.13 ghz, wich is still a lot faser than an amd 3700+) makes my G92 8800GTS go 20% slower than when just @ 2.88 ghz
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I could bench my E6600 at 4ghz just about and with my GTS at stock I would get 23k in 3dmark05!! I’ve now switched to a Q6600 and my old board had trouble overclocking the quad so I was stuck at 3ghz, my 3Dmark05 score dropped to 18,400! Nearly a 5k drop just from the drop in clock.
 
Sell his old cpu, ram and mb because there is still good demand for old decent DDR1 and 939 gear on the second hand market.

The reason why I have kept my X1900XT is because it’s simply worth nothing now, they just don’t hold their price! :(

Like you I don’t think going X2 A64 is going to benefit him much, but I also don’t think a 256mb card regardless of how 'modern' it is will be an ideal purchase for the long term.

I keep going back to your "massive leap in gaming!" comment sorry :)
 
Hesky82 said:
I keep going back to your "massive leap in gaming!" comment sorry :)
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that is based on an upgrade I did last year, swapping out a 512MB X1950XT and installing a 512MB HD2900XT, the new card was 100% faster in a few tests I did, 30fps with the X1950XT became 60fps with the HD2900XT, BIOSHOCK was utterly transformed.

I don't think the performance of the HD3850 is too far off that of the older HD2900XT (?) but I do know that the 3800 series are greatly improved.

You poo poo the idea of anyone buying the HD3850 and I'm not suprised in the last, it is a greatly underestimated card and it fits Lukes budget nicely.

I know that 512MB of memory is useful at high res but we have no idea if Luke is a 1280x1024 man or something larger like 1680x1050 etc? As long as the textures fit in the available memory then its all good.

In these matters it seems people base suggestions on the way they see things (obviously) but I am trying to see the situation from all sides and make 'wise' suggestions.

Each journey begins with a single step, in this case for an FPS gamer the first step is to tear out ye old power station hoover that is the X1900XT and replace it with the sublime King of budget 256MB HD3850, tis loaded!

- ATI Radeon HD 3850 GPU @ 668MHz
- 256MB GDDR3 Memory @ 1655MHz
- 320 stream processing units
- 666 million transistors on 55nm fabrication process
- PCI Express 2.0 x16 bus interface
- 256-bit GDDR3 memory interface
- Fully distributed design with 512-bit internal ring bus for memory reads and writes
- Hardware processed 1080p video playback of Blu-ray™ and HD DVDs
- Up to 24x Custom Filter Anti-Aliasing (CFAA) for improved quality
- ATI CrossFireX™ Multi-GPU Technology
- HDMI with 5.1 surround sound audio
- ATI PowerPlay™
- ATI Avivo™ HD Video and Display Platform
- Microsoft® DirectX® 10.1 support
- Shader Model 4.1

Sell the old X1900XT and I'm sure the £60 budget will be met.

AMD 3700 (2400MHz - 2700MHz)
2GB GeIL memory
256MB HD3850

Cute little gaming rig, nothing to sniff at and Luke will be a big step closer to a modern gaming PC (and he gets some sellers experience as he tries to get decent money for his old card!).
 
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