My next step?

CaNNoN_1981 · 28 Feb 2006 at 12:38

My rig:-

AMD Athlon 64 3200+ Winnie @ 2.5Ghz 33º - Thermaltake Rocket,
Ati Radeon X800XT 256mb 38º - Thermaltake Tide Water,
MSI K8N Neo2 Plat, OCZ 1GB PC4000 Gold Series Rev.2 500Mhz,
Creative Sound Blaster Live, Antec TrueBlue 480W.
HTT:250x10 , HT:4 , RAM:2.5-3-3-8 1T 2x250mhz , GFX:522-560

Right, pretty sure i've reached my highest clock on my current setup, so as anyone who enjoys this sort of stuff I want something new, so any advice on were I should go next would be helpful. eg... either thinking of a new cpu, like a 165 or 170 opty or make the move to pci-e, so new board and gfx like an x1800 or x1900 etc. or looking even further ahead wait for the AM2.

Basically i just dont wonna buy a new cpu and be bottlenecked by gfx or vise versa. I know in an ideal world I should get both but cant right at the moment so which would benifit me most to begin with?

Ta CaNNoN.

helpimcrap · 28 Feb 2006 at 12:39

if you play games then the gfx card will still give the biggest boost....

if you want system performance overall i would say get 2gb of RAM at moment.

its going to last the longest.

brightside_ · 28 Feb 2006 at 13:41

that processor @ 2.5GHz ain't gonna bottleneck anything. Graphics card would benefit you more.

iraiguana · 28 Feb 2006 at 15:34

get a nice new shiny x1900xtx would give u biggest boost in games but will also require a new board which might enable u to take the cpu higher if its being limited by that.

and like brightside said cpu @2.5 aint going to be a bottleneck.

charltonfan1 · 28 Feb 2006 at 16:32

Try running a divider on the memory and clocking the CPU higher, from what i remember OCZ PC4000 wasn't that great on AMD systems

CaNNoN_1981 · 28 Feb 2006 at 20:57

charltonfan1 said:
Try running a divider on the memory and clocking the CPU higher, from what i remember OCZ PC4000 wasn't that great on AMD systems

yer ive tried mem on both 166 and 133 divider but 2.50ghz - 2.55ghz is my max, i can hit 2.55ghz on a 1:1 divider but css crashes, although nothing else does, so i just leave it at 2.50ghz, can post 2.60ghz on all dividers but cant get to windows on any.

Mikey1280 · 28 Feb 2006 at 22:22

CaNNoN_1981 what is your Thermaltake Tide water like? Is 33 degrees your idle temp? What is your load temp? What are the differences between the reference heatsink and the tide water? Is the fan quiet? Quite interested in this as they look nice.

CaNNoN_1981 · 28 Feb 2006 at 22:55

Mikey1280 said:
CaNNoN_1981 what is your Thermaltake Tide water like? Is 33 degrees your idle temp? What is your load temp? What are the differences between the reference heatsink and the tide water? Is the fan quiet? Quite interested in this as they look nice.

33º is my cpu idle temp, 38º is my gfx idle temp. after about an hour playing css the temp reaches around 50-53 and the fan is hardly noticeable, when on the low setting, on high its quite noisey but i never set it to that. Just make sure you have 2 pci slots available as it takes up 2.