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Worthwhile upgrade?

200sx

200sx

200sx

Associate
Joined
2 Dec 2005
Posts
195
Hi everyone,

I have been offered a PNY 256MB 6800 Ultra AGP for £100.

Here's my current spec

Athlon64 3400+ s754 DTR Clawhammer
Asus K8V-X motherboard
2*512MB Kingston value RAM
XFX Geforce 6600GT 128MB AGP
Zalman CNPS9000-AlCu
Zalman CF700-AlCu
Soundblaster audigy
250GB Maxtor diamondmax10 SATA 16MB cache
Aopen H400 series case
Aopen silent 300W ATX2 PSU
LG 1710B 17" TFT monitor DVI
Logitech MX1000 and standard keyboard

Two questions really:

1. Is £100 a good price for the card?
2. What kind of performance increase should I see?
 
It`ll be faster, wether its worth £100 is highly debatable. you have 512 meg of system ram, Im sorry thats not enough. Look into that first i`d say.
 
Definitely a good price compared to what you would see buying new, those cards are becoming exceedingly rare and so the price-tag is swelling to the max. I think the last price I saw for one of those was £200 new at a competitor site, and £160 used on a well-known auction site. :eek:
 
200sx said:
Hi everyone,

I have been offered a PNY 256MB 6800 Ultra AGP for £100...

...Two questions really:

1. Is £100 a good price for the card?
2. What kind of performance increase should I see?
Click to expand...

1. Yup - New these retail for around £200 so I'd say good deal!

EDIT: Google for ref
2. Perfomance... Google - look for shootouts :)

EDIT: Google for ref :p - removed because I have no desire to be removed ;)

Google is your friend :)
 
Last edited:
I would love to go PCI-E but am too afraid of my 3400 DTR not working with the new motherboard :(

I'm really tempted by the 256MB X1800XT for £170 and one of those Asrock s754 Sli boards. Would the £200 for this lot be more worthwhile?

ps. 2*512=1024MB
 
When it comes to new motherboards with PCI-E/nForce4, I'd personally suggest the Gigabyte GA-K8NE, but that's just because I've never had problems with it whatsoever and it's cheaper than dirt. It's let me overclock pretty well too, even though it's a ghetto motherboard by all rights, and I'm using value RAM to boot.
 
For £100 that 6800 ultra is a good buy and while i would usually advise an upgrade to pci-e in your case i would get that ultra. It would give you a large boost and is far cheaper than getting a new mobo and pci-e graphics card.

Also you would'nt have to worry about your DTR not working. There have been quite a few having problems with DTR/Mobile cpu's in new pci-e boards.

A 6800XT is not a GT and is in no way anywhere near as powerful as that Ultra which was the top of the line last year.
 
Thanks for all the advice everyone.

I ve just bought the following

Sapphire ATI Radeon X1800 XT 256MB GDDR3 AVIVO TV-Out/Dual DVI (PCI-Express) - Retail (GX-121-SP)

Gigabyte K8NE nForce4 4X (Socket 754) PCI-Express Motherboard (MB-037-GI)

I couldn't resist the bargain of an X1800XT for £170 :D

The last ATI card I owned was a Radeon 8500LE 64MB, it was a great card so I hope this one is too.

ps. I know the Asus NForce4 boards are only a couple of quid more but I can't stand actively cooled chipsets, too noisy. The GA-K8NE can be used with DTR CPUs according to sources on the web.

edit. What kind of performance increase would I see from this lot then?

Thanks again.
 
If you ask me, upgrading to PCI-E and grabbing a Sapphire X1800XT was a very wise decision indeed, and you will not regret it. You'll be blown away by the performance increase you'll get. ;) Don't worry about the Gigabyte board, like I said I am running the same one with ghetto memory and I've gotten a pretty decent overclock (see sig.)

My 3D Mark scores are a bit low, but I'm still using totally stock air cooling and whatnot. Need to get myself an Arctic Freezer 64 and Zalman VF900-CU so I can whack up the clocks and voltages even higher and break that 10k in '05. :)
 
I upgraded to PCI-e with the same motherboard. It's been excellent so far, although doesn't seem to overclock my CPU as well as my old MSI AGP mobo, 2.42ghz (stock 2.2) is the most it seems to be completely stable on. old mobo could get it to 2.47 with no issues, 2.5 is obtainable on both for benchmarking

Got £122 for my 128mb 6800GT AGP on the bay and i bought it for £146 off overclockers last July.

I would've bought the 6800 ultra too and put it on the bay, a profit would've been guaranteed!
 
Yeah, CTRL+F1 when in the BIOS menu and it's in one of the sections. You get the HT multiplier settings and RAM frequency settings in there. These boards pretty much won't boot with an OC if you leave the HT frequency on 4x.
 
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