Decentish AGP upgrade

[Pij]

Havnt played much in the way of PC games for ages other than WOW, im starting EQ2 when the PVP servers open.

But im still using a 9700Pro and its showing its age a bit now in EQ2

Any decent options on AGP or am i better off upgrading to PCI-E, or suffering with what ive got for now, and upgrade everything when the new processors start to show up?

atm my specs are ...

A64 3200
1 Gig 2700 mem
9700 Pro
MSI Neo 2 Platinum

 

[deadeyedic30]

How much (£) you got ? Is your ram really pc2700 ?

 

[locutus12]

hmmm... ram upgrade me thinks, plus an X800GTO16

Sapphire X1600 Pro for £95 or if you can afford it, X850XT for £155 this week only.

 

[Pij]

yea its really 2700 my mobo died last year, so i paid the extra and went 939 hence the resonably odd spec's.

Would preffer to spend less than £150 but im not sticking sticktly to a budget

 

[locutus12]

if you look around you can get an X800GTO 16 pipes AGP for around £100. or get ahold of a second hand 6800GT for about £130 once you get access to the members market.

but i would upgrade the ram, you can get corsair value ram now for £52 a gig if you look around.

 

[deadeyedic30]

Sold my 6800GT AGP to EX-Girlfriend this week for £130. She loves it, but not me. Got something better now anyway, on both counts !!!

 

[Pij]

would the memory upgrade 3200/4000 make much of an increase in performance?

 

[fullfat]

id go for a x800xt/xtpe if you can find one. more power than a 6800gt only thing it lacks is SM3 support but that depends if its a priorty for you, but its still the best price/performance AGP card you can get imho.
the memory would be a good thing to upgrade really as it would then mean if you had 3200 it would run in sync with the CPU and not on a divider for the A64.

 

[ACESHIGH]

If staying with AGP then this is the best card .. PowerColor ATI Radeon X850 XT 256MB DDR3 VIVO TV-Out/DVI (AGP) - Retail (GX-058-PC)
Available This Week Only for £187.94 Including VAT.
Should be good untill your next complete system upgrade.

 

[megatron]

the memory would be a good thing to upgrade really as it would then mean if you had 3200 it would run in sync with the CPU and not on a divider for the A64.

One of the main differences between nforce2 and nforce4 apart from the fact nforce4 is 64-bit is that it does not lose performance from running a divider. If there is one area u can cheap out on its definately the memory. If its not giving you any instability issues, spending what money you have on a graphics card is the best option.

Plus if u buy Ram now, with socket m2 coming it will devalue due to everyone wanting DDR2.

Its a whole different issue if you are upgrading the RAM due to capacity, but speed, should not be taken too seriously nowadays, with on-board memory controller, hyper-transport and 1Mb cache.

Only if u play BF2/fear would it be wise to upgrade for more capacity, and tbh another 512Mb would be sufficient.

 

[Pij]

the board is an Nforce3, not sure if that makes much if any difference.

 

[Zefan]

Sold my 6800GT AGP to EX-Girlfriend this week for £130. She loves it, but not me. Got something better now anyway, on both counts !!!

For some reason this post made me smile a lot

 

[ajgoodfellow]

the board is an Nforce3, not sure if that makes much if any difference.

Nope

It's a feature of the memory controller which is built into the CPU itself

What PSU do you have? I would recommend going PCI-E too as AGP is on its way out, but if you don't have an ATX2.0 PSU then it becomes expensive

If you do, I'd get:

GX-054-PC PowerColor ATI Radeon X800 GTO 256MB GDDR3 TV-Out/DVI (PCI-Express) - Retail (GX-054-PC)
£89.95 £89.95
MB-120-AS Asus A8N5X nForce4 (Socket 939) PCI-Express Motherboard (MB-120-AS)
£51.95 £51.95
Subtotal £141.90
VAT £24.84
Total £166.74

If not, I'd get:

PowerColor ATI Radeon X800 GTO 256MB DDR3 TV-Out/DVI (AGP) - Retail (GX-050-PC) £129.95 (£152.69 Including VAT at 17.5%)

 

[Pij]

nah its not ATX2.0 doh

looks like ill look at some performance reviews of the Ati stuff then go from there. If i find ill get a bigger increase for cash by going PCI-E i will, as i guess the PSU might last a couple of years.

 

[ajgoodfellow]

The two cards I specced will perform on par with each other as they're the same GPU

Going PCI-E just simplifies any future upgrades

 

[Vegeta]

Sold my 6800GT AGP to EX-Girlfriend this week for £130. She loves it, but not me. Got something better now anyway, on both counts !!!

LOL you sold your gfx to your gf? What kind of bf are you should just gave her it or buy her a cheaper one

Opps 4got the ex bit

 

[megatron]

nah its not ATX2.0 doh

looks like ill look at some performance reviews of the Ati stuff then go from there. If i find ill get a bigger increase for cash by going PCI-E i will, as i guess the PSU might last a couple of years.

My enermax 550w was happilly running a 24-pin mobo with 20-pin connector, +12v 4-pin connector, and pci-e adapter with grx card.