Would ATI3850 be a good upgrade for an Athlon64 3500+ system

[IntoTheVoid]

I am going to build myself a system to eventually use the ATI 3870X2 when it comes out and was thinking of getting the 3850 card to tide me over. The plan being to give the 3850 to my son.

My sons system is running an AMD Athlon64 3500+ single core processor, 1GB DDR400 Ram on an Asus A8N board and his current video card is an Nvidia6800GS 256MB PCI-E card.

Would his system be quick enough to make reasonable use of the 3850?

 

[gurusan]

He'd definitely see a huge increase in performance, but it will be bottlenecked by the CPU. A bit of overclocking even to 2.5-2.6ghz will help.

 

[IntoTheVoid]

Yes, I suppose I could also drop him in an Athlon X2 3800. They are only £46 on Overclockers, plus an extra 1GB of ram. that should see him ok for a while. All in with 3850, processor and ram would be around £200. Not bad really.

 

[fraps]

Yes, I suppose I could also drop him in an Athlon X2 3800. They are only £46 on Overclockers, plus an extra 1GB of ram. that should see him ok for a while. All in with 3850, processor and ram would be around £200. Not bad really.

Yes, not bad total price.

I would do ALL those three things mentioned above

 

[IntoTheVoid]

Yes, My minds made up, thanks.

 

[phatboy]

If you are going for a 3800x2 and extra ram with this card.

Can you please post up some results when you get all the bits, im running the same cpu and ram setup with an x1950 and would love to know the kind of power i would get for the £93 from one

If you could stick up some 3dmark and game results that would be ace

 

[IntoTheVoid]

Will be in about two weeks time. Although the 3850 costs £123. (512MB version).

 

[phatboy]

ahh cool

well i wouldn't mind either, so 512mb would be good comparison as thats what me x1950 is

look forward to seeing the results, your son will love it i reckon, there isn't much i cant play pretty well at mid settings + now on my system

 

[IntoTheVoid]

No problem, i'll post back when I get the stuff.