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Upgrade for an old rig.....

SHARKTICUS

SHARKTICUS

SHARKTICUS

Associate
Joined
7 May 2009
Posts
69
Hello all,

I am looking to give me old rig a bit of a new lease of life. The basic stats are:

Epox 9npa + SLi
2GB Corsair XMS 3200 DDR RAM
Athlon XP 4400 dual core
A nice Antec 600Watt PSU but I can't remember exactly what it is.
Windows 7 RC1

Whilst I am planning on getting an SSD drive and an extra 2GB of RAM to max out the board, the main thing I am looking at is the graphics card.

I originally had 2 BFG 7800 GTX 256MB cards, but one of them failed and BFG were very good and honoured their lifetime warranty and sent me a BFG 9600 OC 512MB card instead!

This has been much better than the 2 7800s in SLi mode and it's making me wonder if I can get something a bit better still. Could I even run a GTX 280 card for instance?

Basically I am still play some of the more classic games of the day such as BF2 and so on but I mainly play LOTRO at the moment and it would be nice to max play LOTRO on full everything.

Any thoughts at all please?

Many thanks in advance!
SHARKTICUS
 
Yes you should be able to run a GTX 280, but they are not on sale any more so you would have to go for a GTX 285. The 285 is a hard card to recommend as it got some very stiff competition. I would look at the 4890 and 275.

You would have a very GPU top heavy system running very high spec cards, but it would still make mince meat out of most games.
 
jamiehavok said:
your processor might bottleneck the performance a bit though.
Click to expand...

I have a socket 939 Athlon 4400+ (stock) with a 9600GT in my comp. When I tried overclocking the 9600 to the settings of the factory overclock cards it made absolutely no difference to performance, which suggests to me that my processor was holding the card back.

Therefore I would imagine a GTX285 would not in any way be worth it as your processor would be limiting it quite badly
 
To be honest I wouldn't waste any more money on old ddr memory, which is quite expensive at the moment. I would upgrade the mainboard cpu and ram before looking at GTX285's and ssd's.
 
Thanks for all the replies. I've passed on going for a new system for now as I was only looking to upgrade a couple of things just to make it a bit nicer really. It's done me well considering I made it in 2005 and it even plays things like Crysis!

I was only considering getting a newer graphics card or alternatively I might get a second 9600 for SLi, but not sure if that will really be worth it. I guess if I were to go for something like a 280/285, then whilst I appreciate I wouldn't get the most out of the card with it being in an older system, I guess I can always use it with something a bit newer when I do go for a slightly better setup next year some time.

Any more thoughts?
 
What resolution do you game at btw?

I'm in a pretty similar situation to you, as in looking to upgrade completely next year. The prices of the graphics cards have been dropping so much over the last 6 months that it would not be worth spending £200 now for a card to finally be 'unleashed' by a new rig next year.

There are also brand new Ati cards out next month as well which will likely kill the GTX285 for price and performance.

The absolute maximum upgrade that I would consider would be a 4870 for pretty much £100. That way you aren't spending too much money and it will last you pretty well. It will still be fine as and when you upgrade you rig next year depending on the resolution you want to game at.
 
Ok, thanks very much everyone. I might just go for a second 9600 then in SLi mode or something similar such as a 9800 just to give it that little bit more juice!

Eddie86 - I flit between two different monitors depending on where my computer is setup but they run at 1280 x 1024 and 1440 x 768 I think (I'm doing this off the top of my head whilst I at work but I think that's right).
 
i had 9600gt then sli in a Athlonx2 rig i did not notice that much of a improvment going sli
untill i upgraded to a intel q6600 and clocked it to 3.2 ghz

this gave me a much more balanced system that still plays most games very well today

so worth a try sli but it will still be limited you can always upgrade the rest later
 
Have a look at 2nd hand values on your CPU and RAM. 939 and DDR command quite a premium now. If you sell a bunch of stuff you could be looking at a nice upgrade to an AM3 770 chipset based system with 4GB RAM for not much money (so long as you don't mind sacrificing SLI). The Phenom II x3 720BE is pretty good bang for buck right now and you can upgrade to a faster quad core later. Some of the AM3 X2 and X3 CPUs can be unlocked to quad core if you choose the right motherboard and get lucky. Intel Socket 775 would also be possible but I think it's coming to EOL so upgradability might not be too easy in future. Core i5 is coming soon. Core i7 is as good as it gets these days but is expensive.

I used to have a 939 X2 4600+ and that was holding me back in a few games. My CPU isn't the greatest now(X2 5000+ Black Edition) but I really noticed the difference overclocking from 2.6 GHz to 3GHz in a few newer games. Barely notice framerate drops at all these days. Hence the CPU was a bottleneck. At the time I was using an 8800GT (now HD4850), which isn't dissimilar from your graphics card, and gaming at 1900x1200 in most games (bar Crysis and Call of Juarez).
 
Hi Uriel, that's a very good point :-) Hadn't thought of that... I am going away on holiday for a week so I shall have a better look at it all when I get back, but I had thought that the extra options for my generation of PC were quite pricey so maybe I can capitalise on that!
 
UPDATE:

Just in case anyone else is thinking of doing what I mentioned in my original post, I did end up getting an extra 2GB of Corsair XMS DDR 3200 for my old system here and it's made a world of difference! It's made load times and unload times a lot faster for LOTRO for starters which is great as I play that the most the moment. Now the game loads a lot faster and exits nice and quickly. I've also found that ALT-Tab works wonders in comparison to before and many heavier parts of the game are just that little bit smoother :D

Going to get an SSD now this week just for the hell of it!
 
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