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skt 754 upgrade, worth it?

Daaaveee

Daaaveee

Daaaveee

Associate
Joined
21 Feb 2006
Posts
1,873
hi chaps,

looking to upgrade my PC a little, but dont really want to go to the expense of a new motherboard at the moment. current specs are...

Asus K8N4-E Deluxe skt 754
3000+ Newcastle skt 754 2ghz
2GB G Skill ZX PC3200
Sparkle 7800GT 256MB

for some reason the Newcastle won't clock at all, i had o/ced it before very mildly but i think it might have gotten too hot and locked itself at stock? not sure if thats possible but its what someone said to me.

anyway, looking on the bay, i could pic up a 3400+ skt 754 Clawhammer for £85. would this be good value for money, and what could a look to get it to with a mild o/c on stock cooling?

is the the fastest skt 754 chip i could get?

many thanks!

Dave
 
There's a few good bargains to be had on S754, seeing as you have an excellent graphics card and plenty of RAM I think a CPU upgrade is a very wise idea. You can get S754 Venice's nowadays if you hunt around, they should clock to around 2.6-2.8 with good air cooling. The 3400s and 3700s are a variable bunch, but they have 1mb cache so are also very good.
 
i have just bought a biostar tforce 6100 754, and my god does it clock - im struggling to get the bios to play ball, but using clockgen the boards benchable at 400 htt - for a matx board that costs 55inc, i think thats incredible, it also has built in memtest :D


yeah - iirc ocuk's "newcastles" are venices, but dont take my word for it
 
I had a 3400+ Clawhammer before my current 3700+ (fastest desktop 754 cpu) and i could'nt even get 200mhz out of that. The most i could get it to was 2.354ghz. My 3700+ on the other hand is a decent overclocker and will almost hit 2.8ghz. You have just missed one of those on the bay which went for £118. That is a bargain on there as they have usually gone for £180-190.

Will your Newcastle not budge at all? Have you tried increasing the voltage at all. Get a decent cooler for it such as the AC freezer 64 or the Thermaltake Big Typhoon or similar. They perform much better than the stock coolers. First thing i did was to replace the cooler. That way you should get some headroom.

You have disabled cool and quiet as you don't want that trying to kick in when overclocking.
 
thanks a lot guys, i think i will look out for a 3700+ then and see how it clocks :)

Newcastle wont budge, but i'll have a little play now and see what happens...

many thanks once again

Dave
 
Newcastles still not having any of it!

anyway, looking around there a 3700+ on the bay for £180 at the moment, but spending a reasonable amount of £200 i could get this...

CP-150-AM AMD Athlon 64 3700+ San Diego 90nm (Socket 939) - OEM (CP-150-AM)
£99.95 £99.95
MB-101-AS Asus A8N-SLi SE nForce4 SLi (Socket 939) PCI-Express Motherboard (MB-101-AS)
£56.95 £56.95
Subtotal £156.90
Shipping (City Link Parcel Next Day (Delivered Mon-Fri)) £8.25
VAT £28.91
Total £194.06


throw in a nice cooler, and maybe treat myself to a nice spangly new case? would this be the best way to spend £200? would be nice to pick up another 7800GT some time and run SLi you see... would it be a good idea to spend on this expansion for SLi, or is there some emerging 'next gen' stuff i should really just wait a month or so for instead?

also because i'm running skt 754, does that mean my memory is not running dual channel, whereas it would with skt 939?

cheers,

Dave
 
yeah 754 is only single channel unfortunitly :(

i have a 3400+ clawhammer, highest ive been able to get it was about 2.5 but it was a bit flakey and unstable. the previous owner had it up to 2.9 though that was on a cascade and volt modded, where as i have it in a shuttle lol

if you can afford it then goin 939 might not be a bad idea, generally much better overclocking, dual channel mem controller, and probs a bit more future proof than 754
 
They'll be some CPU bargains and S939 should get cheaper when Conroe comes out, looks to be a bit of a price war in the making.

But if you need a system now, going S939 would be a good idea, plus you could sell your old CPU and motherboard as a bundle and put that money towards your GFX upgrade :)
 
I didn't know the 3700's were going for that much.

Every time I look for one to see what they're selling at I can never find one.
 
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