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Looking for some advice on HD 3850 purchase please

krelm

krelm

krelm

Associate
Joined
7 Jun 2008
Posts
32
Hello.

I need a new graphic card to cope with newer games but i am unable to afford much right now, so i am stuck with AGP. I am considering buying a Sapphire HD 3850 but i need some advice please.

My current PC is

Athlon 64 3000
1GB Ram
ASUS K8N-E Deluxe
BFG GeForce 6600GTOC

I can only afford around £110 right now which is enough to buy the 3850, so i cant upgrade anything else so im stuck with that mobo/cpu. What i need to know is how much of a performance gain am i looking at here. I know the CPU will be a bottleneck but how much? Enough to justify not buying this card or would i get a reasonable performance boost?

I know i wont be playing games like Crysis in max settings but right now it is completely unplayable, if buying this card makes it playable even with moderate graphic settings that would be fine with me.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated, thank you very much.
 
I advise upgrading the platform first rather than investing 110 quid into what is a dead end in my opinion.

For 110 you can get a second hand upgrade if you look around. Look at used Core 2 duo processors, snap up a used P35 board like an Abit IP35 or Gigabyte DS3, and 2x1gb of 6400.

Then save up 60ish and buy a used 3850/3870 pci-e as soon as you get the money.
 
Hello.

Thanks for the advice, i might just do that actually, i did not realise i could upgrade my mobo/cpu/ram for so little money.

I was just having a quick browse on ebay and wondering if someone could just point me in the right direction.

I found this bundle
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/INTEL-E2180-C...yZ131535QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

and also
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/INTEL-CORE-2-...yZ131535QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem
This is just a quick glance at what i could buy i will look into more detail but for now im wondering if the second, more expensive bundle would be worth saving up for to get extra power. Would you say those are worth the price?

Thanks again for any help, really appreciate it im a bit lost with all this different hardware thats around :O
 
Those bundles aren't all that great. Try these bits for size:

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showp...180 "LGA775 Conroe" 2.00GHz (800FSB) - Retail

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showp...P31 (Socket 775) PCI-Express DDR2 Motherboard

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showp... Dragon DDR2 Dual Channel Kit (GB22GB6400C4DC)

Those come to £125 in total. Regarding the graphics card, I'm not sure what budget you have, but you could get a PCI-E Radeon 3850 or a GeForce 8800GS:

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showp...3 TV-Out/Dual DVI/HDMI (PCI-Express) - Retail

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showp...MB GDDR3 HDTV/Dual DVI (PCI-Express) - Retail

And voila...almost an entirely new system for just £200! Good stuff eh?
 
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