Upgrade GXF card...or not ?

[satelite]

Hi all

I,m runnig an AMD 3700+ with 1.5gig ram, a hiper 580 psu, and a Radeon Atlantis 9800 Saphire.

My question is would I benfit buying a pci express card and what model.

 

[benjo]

Hi welcome to the forums

You would see a huge benefit if you upgraded your graphics card, its the only thing holding your spec back. Do you a budget?

 

[easyrider]

You must be running a AGP mobo if you are runnning a 9800 pro.

and yes, even spending 117 quid on a 7600 GT would see you past 6800 ultra speeds.

but that needs a new mobo

 

[satelite]

Thnx for the speedy replies

My mobo is an asrock 939Dual-SATA2, so has both agp and pci express.

My budget is around £100, but could go higher if needed.

What I,m unsure about is how big a gxf card can my system drive. I,ve been told there no point in buying a card thats faster than the pc.

 

[Dureth]

You could buy any single card out now, with the exception of the 7950GX2, and the rest of your system wouldn't hold it back in the right circumstances.

I'd say the best thing you could do is save up some more to £170 and buy an x1800xt. Faily that a 7600GT or an x1800gto would also be good choices at a lower price.

 

[Darkwave]

Since your motherboard has a PCI-E slot, if your budget allows for £170, go for an X1800XT or 7900GT depending on your tastes. The X1800XT is louder and draws more power, but is faster and cheaper (the 7900GT is faster if you perform a hardware voltage modification on it though.)

Alternatively, if you can stretch your budget to £260, you can get the X1900XT which is one of the fastest cards available right now and is an utterly ridiculous price. All of the above will do fine with your PSU, CPU, and RAM.

 

[LoadsaMoney]

If you can go higher then id say the x1800 XT as well, best bang for buck card going, an absolute stonking card at an amazing price, the performance increase from your 9800pro will be absolutely astonshing, and your CPU will be fine, im running my x1800 with a 3500+, and its awesome.

 

[Darkwave]

Aye it was awesome with my CPU at 3400+ even though it was a bottleneck, it's even more awesome with my CPU at 3800+ now. There's an immense difference in quite a few games from what I've seen through switching clockspeeds, especially in Source based games like Half Life 2 and Bloodlines. Oblivion seems to love the CPU too.

 

[Eliot]

in you sig it says 2.67 tho, isnt that fx55+?

 

[Cyber-Mav]

i ordered a 7600gt should be here on wednesday. cost me £97.50 inc vat and delivery. very good price value for money card. don;t have to worry about heat or power consumption.

 

[Darkwave]

in you sig it says 2.67 tho, isnt that fx55+?

It's a socket 754 Newcastle (the stock speed is 2.4GHz) and I'm running it at 222*12 = 2664MHz (but CPU-Z is reporting it as 222.8*12 and 2674MHz, so I am using that figure as CPU-Z tends to be stupidly accurate.)

It's not the most accurate method, in fact it's probably completely wrong, but the way I worked it out is like this: -

3400+ / 2400MHz (1.42) * 2675 = 3797 (3800+)

Like I said, it's probably not the right way to do it, but it works out about right if I take into account that the 3700+ is the same clockspeed but with a 1MB cache (equivalent to an extra 200MHz, or so I have been told.)

I'm really open to corrections if I've fracked it up. I'm especially not going to argue if it's FX-55 speed, lol.

i ordered a 7600gt should be here on wednesday. cost me £97.50 inc vat and delivery. very good price value for money card. don;t have to worry about heat or power consumption.

It's a good card from what I've heard, but many people seem to complain about the fan on it. Let us know how it goes as I'm considering putting one of these in a friend's machine.