Please dont laugh - serious question

casual_eze

casual_eze

casual_eze

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Cheshire
Hi All,

First time post, long, long time lurker. I have a question for you which i havent been able to answer by researching the web. Please dont laugh at my hardware.

I have a very old (2006) system with a pentium D 3ghz cpu which at the time was the best spec there was. Its combined with 2x7800GTX cards in SLI and it has served me very well. I added an SSD to it and it truly flies for anything non gaming related. However, i do like to game and the GCs just arent cutting it anymore even at low resolutions (i have a 1080p capable monitor which is fine for normal desktop apps) but means i have to turn the resolution down for gaming which isnt great.

Now here is the question i have. Money is tight (family, children = expenses) and if at all possible i would like to spend as little as possible (i.e. would rather not throw the system away). Would buying a semi decent modeern graphics card boost my performance in games or will the CPU be holding it back too much. I'm not after super dooper frame rates, just enough so it isnt jerky. Im not a pro gamer at all and usually play single player stuff as my reaction times arent what they used to be!

Any advice, recommendations would be appreciated. Any questions, let me know.
Thanks in advance.
 
For me the Pentium D is holding you back as much as the graphics cards. I think you are in need of both a new CPU and GPU.
 
There may be a possibility (abit a remote one) that the motherboard could accept the next generation of Intel CPU's, which would be a core 2 duo & is a fair bit faster than your CPU. The only way to find out, is for you to tell us your make & model of motherboard & let the rest of us do the detective work. :)
 
I would say you would need a budget of ateast 300 to get somthing decent for a 1080p syatem. There some good deals on b grade video cards you can get a radeon 7770 for 60 quid at the moment
 
It should be fairly easy to give your system a reasonable boost on a low budget. If you tell us the model of your current motherboard, we will be able to see which CPU's it supports. You may be able to slot in a decent Core 2 Duo for about £30 or a decent Core 2 Quad for £60.

If that's not possible, you could get a Phenom II x4, a half decent motherboard and 8GB of RAM used for under £100. If that is necessary, you could claw back maybe £30 on a popular auction site from selling your old CPU + motherboard + RAM combo.

As for the GPU's, it may be worth seeing how much of a performance boost the new CPU brings as the Pentium D may have been bottlenecking the GPU's. Otherwise you could sell the 7800's for about £15 each on a popular auction site, and then buy something like a GTX460 for around the £60 mark.

If all goes to plan, and your motherboard supports Core 2 Duo's and/or quads and you sell your 7800GTX's, you could end up with:

Core 2 Duo & GTX460 for a total outlay of around £60
Core 2 Quad & GTX460 for a total outlay of around £90

If your motherboard sadly does not support Core 2 Duo's/Quads, but you sell your motherboard + CPU + RAM and your 7800GTX's, you could end up with:

Phenom II x4 & GTX460 for a total outlay of around £100

Your current PSU should be up to the task as you have dual 7800GTX's running off of it already.

:)
 
Was a very good system back in the day :) Assuming the components in your current rig are all in working order, the best bang for buck solution would be:

1.Take the HDD, SSD, PSU, case, DVD drive from your old system, and sell the rest once you've got your new gear. (If you have 4gb of ddr2, that will fetch a little bit too!)

2. Get an AMD trinity cpu, whatever is best suited for your budget, but it'd be best to spring for the A10 if you can. Get a suitable cheap mobo, and some ram (even 4gb if money is tight, but 8gb kits are only a bit more)

3.Sell the SIMcity code you get to make a bit more of your cash back. The entirely outlay will probs end up being around 150 when all is done.

edit:

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=CP-327-AM&groupid=701&catid=1967&subcat=1946

+

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=MB-545-AS


maybe?
 
Last edited:
acme15 said:
It should be fairly easy to give your system a reasonable boost on a low budget. If you tell us the model of your current motherboard, we will be able to see which CPU's it supports. You may be able to slot in a decent Core 2 Duo for about £30 or a decent Core 2 Quad for £60.

If that's not possible, you could get a Phenom II x4, a half decent motherboard and 8GB of RAM used for under £100. If that is necessary, you could claw back maybe £30 on a popular auction site from selling your old CPU + motherboard + RAM combo.

As for the GPU's, it may be worth seeing how much of a performance boost the new CPU brings as the Pentium D may have been bottlenecking the GPU's. Otherwise you could sell the 7800's for about £15 each on a popular auction site, and then buy something like a GTX460 for around the £60 mark.

If all goes to plan, and your motherboard supports Core 2 Duo's and/or quads and you sell your 7800GTX's, you could end up with:

Core 2 Duo & GTX460 for a total outlay of around £60
Core 2 Quad & GTX460 for a total outlay of around £90

If your motherboard sadly does not support Core 2 Duo's/Quads, but you sell your motherboard + CPU + RAM and your 7800GTX's, you could end up with:

Phenom II x4 & GTX460 for a total outlay of around £100

Your current PSU should be up to the task as you have dual 7800GTX's running off of it already.

:)
Click to expand...

+1, this idea gets my vote.

acme15... please for the rest of my life tell me what to buy, sell and upgrade. This is a great idea and for £100, you'll be able to play the latest games with some compromise on graphics.
 
I have would concur with the 2nd hand route a great way for keeping costs down. In the members market slmeone was selling their q6600 for 35 quid the other day. I'm not sure if I would get a video card second hand, normally they have overclocked to a inch of their lifes and typically video cards don't habe great shelf lifes before they start to breakdown and begin to artifact and crash.
 
There is an alternative. If you have a fast internet connection don't bother upgrading your hardware and sign up to a gaming streaming service instead.
 
Freddie1980 said:
I have would concur with the 2nd hand route a great way for keeping costs down. In the members market slmeone was selling their q6600 for 35 quid the other day. I'm not sure if I would get a video card second hand, normally they have overclocked to a inch of their lifes and typically video cards don't habe great shelf lifes before they start to breakdown and begin to artifact and crash.
Click to expand...

He wouldn't have access to the MM yet though :( which is why I was going by auction pricing :)

I got a GTX460 XLR8 1GB recently for between £40 and £60 on the MM (I forget) and it's a great little thing. At stock clocks & under bolted to 0.8v it sits there folding at 100% load 24/7 without a hitch :D

The key when buying used is to ask lots of questions. If they lie in their answers, there is a chance they will get negative feedback/trust later on so they tend not to
 
Bromhead said:
+1, this idea gets my vote.

acme15... please for the rest of my life tell me what to buy, sell and upgrade. This is a great idea and for £100, you'll be able to play the latest games with some compromise on graphics.
Click to expand...

I'm not sure if I could do that for the rest of your life :p

Buying and selling is my 'thing' cos I don't have time to get a 'proper job' while in full time study.

Because of the massive price hike in DDR2 RAM and the price/value gap between different online 'trading sites' I recently got my mate an upgrade from a Q8300, a P5N-D and 8GB of 1066MHz Reaper (+ the sale of a core 2 duo) to a 2500K, a Z68AP-D3 and 16GB of DDR3 for a total outlay of... £0! :D
 
Hi guys,

thank you all so much for the help and advice thus far. To help clarify things a little further here is the exact current spec and model:

Dell XPS 600
rebranded Dell nForce4 SLI x16 motherboard
4GB DDR2 RAM
Dell custom 600W PSU

I think you all now realise the position i'm in. Dell make it extremely difficult to upgrade anything of theirs. I would love to look at a newer generation 775 CPU but they have locked down the motherboard with a custom BIOS that limits it to a Pentium D max (annoying!). If i want to look at upgrading the motherboard again im stuck because the PSU has custom power connectors and i havent even look at whether the case is custom or not (i suspect it probably is) so hence the original question about whether doing a quick and dirty graphics card upgrade would buy me some time.

I realise that i need to completely upgrade soon (i have my eye on the new haswell stuff once that becomes available) but thought to myself, maybe i can get a bit more life out of the system for some casual gaming.
I am under no illusion that i will never be able to game at 1080p with this system and am happy to turn the resolution down but the original question still stands - what can a pentium D do with a modern day graphics card at low resolutions (think 1280x1024 or somewhere along those lines).

Its a shame the anandtechs/tomshardware of this world don't do testing with older systems as i suspect, it would be very interesting to see the results. I have researched this question online quite a bit but there is little to no information to help.

Thanks guys
 
I don't think I found motherboards that actually offered a upgrade path to Core 2 Duo range from the older pentium range (this was a while ago though :p)

You could do a gpu upgrade then wait for Haswell and do a full upgrade later or just hang on for a few months and then do a complete upgrade.
 
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