Upgrade choice, Legacy Rig

[cavemanoc]

I'm currently looking into the feasibility of upgrading a rig for a mate to allow him to run Flight Sim X to get a feel for the Airbus model. He has:

Dell Dimension 8400
P4 530 (3GHz with HT)
512 MB Ram
ATI X300 SE
Win XP Home

I'm looking to upgrade the RAM to 2x1Gb and chuck in a new GFX card. The motherboard won't really support any other processor and he will be gaming at 1440x900. Obviously not looking to set the world on fire, just need it to be good enough to be playable and give an accurate feel for the model.

I would like to avoid changing the PSU, but given that its only the stock Dell 350W (max 18A on the 12V rail) I would consider it if it was worth it.

So... The PCI-e is a 16x, what GFX card would give me best bang/buck, at that resolution, with that processor?

Bear in mind that he is only interested in Flight Sim (I'm looking at X as the min requirement is actually quite low, but there's no reason we couldn't go for 9 as it has such good mod support), and the CPU is most probably going to limit at that resolution fairly quickly.

 

[steve258]

Without a psu upgrade it can probably still handle something like a 9800gt green edition that doesn't require any pci-e 6-pin connection. Any gfx faster than this probably wont make a lot of difference anyway due to the slow CPU. I don't know how well the 9800gt can handle flight sim though.

*EDIT* whats your budget?

 

[Bmwww]

If you can afford it I would probably go for the full 4GB of DDR RAM that the motherboard can handle. Though using a 32bit OS it will only be able to see about 3.5GB of it.

I posted something similar about graphics cards the other day. The PowerColor Green 5750 may fit as long as you have enough free card slots. It must be that make and the Green model no other 5750 will work. Or if that's a no go due to size or cast they do cheaper and more compact versions 98000GT and the HD5670.

You should be able to significantly upgrade the CPU and with the price of P4s these days it may be worth it. You may have to download and install the latest Bios for your system. But there are plenty of CPUs you can use. People have installed 64bit 6xx P4s in these systems. I would not go to mad as your power supply is quit limited but something like a P4 650 has about a 14% quicker clock speed, double the L2 cache, is 64bit compliant and uses about the same power as the one you have now. I have even seen reference to people P4 670 though if your adding a big graphics card this may be a bit much? I wonder if the newer Cedar Mill P4s would work as if they did that would be the option I would go for. Something like a 661 may be perfect. Though I don't know if they are compatible.

 

[cavemanoc]

There are real compatibility issues with the mobo as the chipset is so old. None of the Dual Cores will work - hence not much point upgrading the chip - will check on the Dell forum to see what the fastest available is and see if the upgrade is worth the cost. I though about going for the 4x1Gb and accepting he loss of 1Gb to the 32 bit OS but TBH I can't see XP having a significant boost from the extra ram - even is FSX, we will still be very much CPU limited, but I can always add more later and see. Thanks for the heads up on the Powercolor - plenty of slots free so that is probably the card for us - should be fine for the resolution we're looking at. I'm guessing suggested the Green as it is easy on the PSU? If I were to upgrade the PSU, what GFX could I go for (at what point would the CPU be limiting?)

 

[steve258]

Thing is the mobo you have almost certainly have the ancient pci-e 1.0 slot, and there's no telling whether it will really work with the latest pci-e 2.0 cards even though its supposed to be backward compatible. Thing is pci-e 2.0 slot provides more power and this might just be crucial for cards that don't have any pci-e 6pin connector to work, such as the green edition.

It becomes CPU bound in games when the CPU cant feed the data to gfx fast enough. In the most extreme case the game will be equally unplayable with the lowest and highest graphical settings, and if you check gfx utility the gpu utilisation will be a lot lower lower than it should be.

As it is even the 9800gt will be limited by the p4 540 in pretty much every game. It is that slow a CPU.

 

[TropicLightning]

I have a PCI-E v1 slot on my board running 5870 fine, so that in itself should be no problem. Incompatablites are a possibility with all GPU and MB though, and that would be up to Dell to update.

I would buy the most GPU and PSU as you can afford. Will, say, a 5870 be CPU bound, sure. But will it run faster on your system than a lessor card, yes. And if your friend decides to upgrade the system in the future, the faster GPU will become even faster. There is to my knowledge no min CPU speed requirement by ATi for, again say, a 5870.

I would also, as others have stated, upfront go with 4GB RAM (2x2 if possible) as this will let the system run smoother, without the occasional studder. ATi does have a min requirement of 1GB for the card (5870) to be installed, the game will require more, and then the system still needs some too. Some say they notice no difference going from 2GB to 4GB, but on my old XP P4 I did notice quite an improvement.

 

[cavemanoc]

Just to put this in perspective, the Min Spec for Flight Sim X is:

* Windows XP SP2 / Windows Vista / Windows 7
* Processor: 1.0 Ghz
* RAM: Windows XP SP2 - 256MB, Windows Vista – 512MB
* Hard Drive: 14GB
* Video Card: 32MB DirectX 9 compatible
* Other: DX9 hardware compatibility and audio board with speakers and/or headphones
* Online/Multiplayer Requirements: 56.6 kbps or better for online play

Ironically his current rig more than meets these (would look pretty ugly, but hey... )

All I'm looking for is the lowest spec card that maxes out the CPU - anything else is overkill and a waste for cash.

 

[steve258]

Not saying it won't run the game smoothly but rather the cpu won't max out the performance of the new graphics card. In your case the 9800GT green is still imo the card to have at the lower end of the market if buying new. Plus it's easy on the PSU. If you will consider 2nd hand you can get away with spending even less. But cards with similar performance as the 9800GT almost always require at least one PCI-E 6-pin power which means a new PSU.

 

[cavemanoc]

sweet - sounds like the winner - will see if I can source a cheap 2nd hand one. Thanks for the help.