Is it worth to water cool to avoid having to upgrade?

rudeboymcc

rudeboymcc

rudeboymcc

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Hi. I have a 2 year old pc and want to upgrade but am thinking of just overclocking with water instead. My specs at the moment:

Asus K8VSE deluxe (useless overclocker, will get a DFI lanparty uf3)
A64 2800+ s754 (bought it that slow as i intended to oc but never got round to it)
ati 9800 Pro (this is what i think wll slow mostthings down but i'm not gaming)
1gig ddr2 (i think)
and loads of hard disks.

The swiftec water coolign kit for CPU and GPU will set me back £202.04 from ocuk. ANd I can pick up a DFI lanparty UT NF3 for £72 from somewhere. so that's nearly £280.

If I was to upgrade, I'd probbaly get an DFI LanParty UT NF4 (£105) with AMD Athlon 64 4000+ 2.4Ghz (Socket 939) (£70). so that would cost £175.

My question will my old pc upgraded, be faster than the new stuff? (£100 worth of faster?) At the momnet my 2800+ is only 1.8Ghz, but I've seen loads of people take it to 2.5 on air so i think it should go faster with water.

any help is appreciated.
 
I'd personally not go quite the upgrade route you're thinking of.

For a very limited budget like you have, get a conroe 6300 (or 4300 as it'll be available soon), and asrock dual board. It's by no means optimal but it's pretty cheap and you'll get something that'll blow both your current rig and your proposed upgrade rig out of the water, so to speak.
 
An E4300 can be had for £110 retail. An ASUS P5N-E SLI is another £80 and your RAM is almost certainly DDR rather than DDR2 so you'd need at least 1Gb of that (£72 for OcUK PC6400 Value RAM). So that's about the same £280 you were talking about spending and it will significantly outperform your current system, even without overclocking. If you overclock it, it will perform almost as well as anything on the market today. That's a far better way to spend £280 in my opinion. Plus, you can sell your old stuff so the cost to change will be significantly less.
 
Only problem with that is the AGP>PCI-e transition.

If the OP has the case then I agree for the most part - upgrade and get the best :)

If not though, a cheapish asrock dual agp/pci-e ddr1/2 motherboard will do the job and save loads. It can always be swapped out reasonably cheaply later on if pci-e is needed and you want a good motherboard.
 
k sorry but can't find the processor you're talking about.

I've found these two:
Intel Core 2 DUO E6300 "LGA775 Allendale" 1.86GHz (1066FSB) - Retail
Intel Core 2 DUO E6600 "LGA775 Conroe" 2.40GHz (1066FSB) - Retail

but no conroe that's E6300.

btw, say i got the E6600 whch is 2.4, will it beet the a64 dual core at that speed? I was always under the impression that Intel's speed ratings were less efficient, so a 2ghx inel is like a 1.8 amd. or have things changed?
 
You've been great guys but i still haev some questions.

I found some motherboards still only have pci sockets (Asus P5W64-WS). is it worth it or should i get pci-e if i upgrade the hardware? and what graphics card do you recommend for a E4300 computer?
 
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http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=CP-142-IN
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=MB-221-AS
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=MY-011-OK

At OcUK this comes to £278.73 and it will give you a storming system. You will need an upgrade graphics card unfortunately, but if you are not playing games then a £30 one would do. This is a pure 'budget' performance system that I am recommending for it's performance potential both at stock and when overclocked.

If you want to keep your existing RAM and graphics then buy the same chip but search out this ASRock board as it runs DDR, DDR2 RAM and PCIe or AGP graphics. It's not the ultimate performance system, but it will still be significantly faster than your current machine.

http://www.asrock.com/mb/overview.asp?Model=4CoreDual-VSTA
 
K I was just abotu to buy everythign as you guys recommended but then i found an athlon 3700+ mobile s754 for just under £80.

From what i remember athlon mobiles were really good overclockers so i'm guessing this thing will be able to reach 3Ghz (it's 2.4 stock) quite easily without water cooling.

add a dfi lanpart uf3 so i can actually overclock it and that runs to about £150 which is the cheapest solution so far.

Question is, how does a 3ghz a64 mobile with 1mb l2cache fair against the
E4300?
 
rudeboymcc said:
Question is, how does a 3ghz a64 mobile with 1mb l2cache fair against the
E4300?
Click to expand...

Well, you know when you compare something that used to be quite fast with something newer that is really fast? Well that's nothing like the difference. The E4300 will just eat the A64 for breakfast, lunch and dinner in every possible benchmark and you would be able to feel the difference in machine speed too. An E4300 at stock can outperform an FX55 - does that give you some idea of how fast it is when it's overclocked?
 
Cheepest and best upgrade path for you is:

ASrock 775Dual-VSTA (can be ahd for ~£36 new if you look round)
Intel E4300 Core2Duo (~£110)

You can still use your AGP card and DDR until you have more money to move to PCI-E and DDR2.

Plus the E4300 will clock to 2.6-2.7Ghz easy on that mobo on stock volts.

It will destroy that 3700+ and your current rig, and all for less than £150.
 
Watercooling like sli and other fancy stuff is only worth it at the extremes of performance/price. Your not in that market so it would not be in your interests really unless you want to try it for other reasons.

If you want minimum effort and the best performance for the price go with what the guy above said.
 
WJA96 said:
Well, you know when you compare something that used to be quite fast with something newer that is really fast? Well that's nothing like the difference. The E4300 will just eat the A64 for breakfast, lunch and dinner in every possible benchmark and you would be able to feel the difference in machine speed too. An E4300 at stock can outperform an FX55 - does that give you some idea of how fast it is when it's overclocked?
Click to expand...

That's not quite true really

A fair statement would be that, clock for clock, a Core 2 will outperform an A64 by about 25%

The E4300 has half the cache of a Conroe and it also runs on a reduced FSB - this is a bottleneck in the Core 2 architecture

A 3GHz A64 will outperform a 1.8GHz Core 2 quite easily in single threaded apps, no doubt about it

Conroe has been hyped something chronic
 
ajgoodfellow said:
That's not quite true really

A fair statement would be that, clock for clock, a Core 2 will outperform an A64 by about 25%

The E4300 has half the cache of a Conroe and it also runs on a reduced FSB - this is a bottleneck in the Core 2 architecture

A 3GHz A64 will outperform a 1.8GHz Core 2 quite easily in single threaded apps, no doubt about it

Conroe has been hyped something chronic
Click to expand...

Well, I wouldn't disagree that Conroe has been hyped to death. But they are very fast in benchmarks. The FSB isn't that relevant because the memory controller is off the chip so if you have fast RAM it still runs fast.

OK - you've got an FX-62 at 3GHz, what will your machine do in 1M SuperPi? 20 seconds? An unmolested E4300 will do it in 22 seconds, one running at 3GHz is in the 16 seconds area. And all the indications are that they are topping out at about 3.5GHz under air which is 15 seconds SuperPi.

They are just quicker at crunching numbers than the AMD processors, and it's £110 delivered for goodness sakes.
 
Surely the FSB is relevant as the memory controller isn't on the chip?

I agree with you that Conroes are very very fast in Super PI but I would argue that that particular program puts them in an overly favourable light

The Conroes are fast chips and they are faster than the A64 clock for clock but not to the extent that a 1.8GHz Conroe will beat a 3GHz A64
 
ajgoodfellow said:
Surely the FSB is relevant as the memory controller isn't on the chip?

I agree with you that Conroes are very very fast in Super PI but I would argue that that particular program puts them in an overly favourable light

The Conroes are fast chips and they are faster than the A64 clock for clock but not to the extent that a 1.8GHz Conroe will beat a 3GHz A64
Click to expand...

Sadly, I can't think of one CPU benchmark where the Core2Duo won't outperform the AMD chip. If you can I'll quite cheerfully accept that I was wrong.

I wouldn't argue in most games the limiting factor isn't the CPU, it's the graphics card, but the OP was looking for CPU performance increases, not in gaming - hence all the recommendations that he should bite the bullet and do a platform upgrade rather than try and squeeze the last drops from his existing S754 system.
 
Upgrade it is then. Think the £150 one with ASrock 775Dual-VSTA sounds good.

you say my graphics card is a bottle neck. for games i understand but for windows applications will i notice any difference if i upgrade graphics card? most GPU intensive thing i do is watch movies. this is all on a 20" 1680x1050 monitor btw.
 
WJA96 said:
OK - you've got an FX-62 at 3GHz, what will your machine do in 1M SuperPi? 20 seconds? An unmolested E4300 will do it in 22 seconds, one running at 3GHz is in the 16 seconds area. And all the indications are that they are topping out at about 3.5GHz under air which is 15 seconds SuperPi.
Click to expand...

i have an E6300 and at stock that did SuperPi 1M in 28 seconds at 3.04Ghz it does it at 18 :)

if an E4300 at stock does 20s then theres something wrong with my setup!
 
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