Advice on upgrading my mother!

[jammydodger]

I currently own a gigabyte GA7-ZXR motherboard a 1.1Gig athlon Tbird and 512MB of PC-133 SDRAM. I'm considering upgrading to a motherboard with a KT266A Chipset (most likly a Soltek one) with a Athlon XP 1.47GHz and 256MB DDR Ram, would I see a big performance increase with this new system configuration relative to the old one? I think it will cost me about £260 is it worth it? I know it would b more sensible to save up more money and properly upgrade but I h8 my current mother and I plan to build a second system with the old motherboard CPU and RAM so it wont b a complete waste of money. Any input u could give would b helpful. Cheers

 

[jflongo]

It of course depends on what you are doing. If you are surfing the web, reading email, and maybe playing a few games, then NO, you won't see a difference. You probably shouldn't bother upgrading, until amd's next version(thoroughbred(sp?)) comes out, and you can get it for $140 - $150ish retail.

I basically just built a Athlon XP 1600+, which is overclocked to 1500.5 Mhz. It has 512MB of DDR ram, and a 7200RPM harddrive. It also uses the new kt266a chipset. Before I had a PIII 500, with 512MB PC133(running at 100) RAM, and a slow harddrive.

I can tell a HUGE difference in benchmark tests. Can I tell a huge difference in reading email and browsing the web, NO.

I will be doing some software development and CAD, so I will see some improvements there.

The thing is, your Tbird 1.1, would have smoked my PIII 500. I've ran benchmark tests, and if you do cpu ones, then my XP 1600+ running at 1400Ghz, doesn't do any better than a Tbird at 1400Ghz. But I do smoke it in memory tests and multimedia.

So it all depends, if you are doing 3d modeling and rendering, then yeah you will see a small difference. If not I wouldn't bother for awhile. I think you should probably wait for their next line to come out. Hopefully they will have, 1.7, 1.8, 1.9, and 2.0 ghz models. Then maybe you can pick up a 1.8 for relatively cheap. Who knows when this will be, but you may just want to wait, you already have a screaming machine.

Now if you MUST, I currently have a Gigabyte GA-7VTXH board which has the KT266A chipset. Along with that I bought a Athlon XP 1600+ processor, Antec Workstation Tower Case(comes with 2 fans), Maxtor 40GB 7200RPM ATA133 Harddrive, Pionneer 16x DVD Rom, 512(256 x 2) PC2400 DDR RAM(OCZ Technology), ATI Radeon 7500 Video Card(OEM), Microsoft Elite Keyboard, and a Logitech 2 button w/wheel optical mouse.

Basically, I reused my burner and monitor. With all of that in mind, I did it for under $800 with shipping included. I would be more than happy to post any Sisoft Sandra benchmark tests, if you want to compare them to your system.

James

 

[jiffy]

My 2 cents. I switch my Abit KT7A - Raid mobo with the Abit KR7A which is DDR and with the test I did I didn't see much speed increase. I'd say the CPU increase would make more of a difference, then just the mobo from SDRAM to DDR.

defrage is child's play-fdisk

 

[jammydodger]

If you could post your si soft sandra results I would be very gratefull, I currently use my computer for games (sometimes network games using my old 450Mhz system), a bit of programming with Delhi 6 and I've recently been playing about with the UT level editor.

What I wanna know is if I will see a performance increase when playing high spec games like Max Payne as I would really like to play games like this in resolutions like 1024x768 or above while keeping the framerate up and not getting a headache after 5 mins of play.

I think it will probably b best 4 me to wait for XP prices to fall then get somthing like a 1900.

Would it b better to get a P4 with DDR motherboard than a XP? P4's r a bit overprices and I think and the P4's performance is dissappointing with older games but a lot of people seem to prefer it.

 

[pike]

Personnally, i would never upgrade my mother.
She is now 79 and i love her. :redface:
Sorry just could not resist this one

Danny & Pike

Electric coolaid for everyone, except me, never touch the stuff !

 

[jflongo]

I don't think Intel is ever worth the price right now or in the past, but that's just me ;-)

Sisoft Sandra Version 2001.0.7.10

Gigabyte GA-7VTXH KT266A MBoard
OCZ Technology 512MB PC2400 DDR(256 x 2)
Athlon XP 1600+ Processor(1400Mhz)
Maxtor 40GB 7200 RPM ATA133/100 Harddrive

I have set the bus speed on my board to 140, which is overclocking my memory some and putting my processor at 1470 Mhz. Probably overclocking my harddrive slightly as well.

CPU Benchmark

Dhrystone ALU 4102 MIPS
Whetstone FPU 2025 MFLOPS

CPU Multimedia Benchmark

Integer SSE 8170 it/s
Floating Point SSE 9390 it/s

Memory Benchmark

Int ALU/RAM Bandwidth 780 MB/s
Float FPU/RAM Bandwidth 863 MB/s

Drive Benchmark

Drive Index 22797
Buffered Read 74 MB/s
Sequential Read 33 MB/s
Random Read 6 MB/s
Buffered Write 69 MB/s
Sequential Write 29 MB/s
Random Write 8 MB/s
Average Access Time 8 ms


Now here's a few more, with my bus speed at 146, putting my processor at 1533 Mhz.

CPU Benchmark

4279 MIPS
2104 MFLOPS

CPU Multimedia

Integer SSE 8522 it/s
Float SSE 9785 it/s

Memory

Int ALU/RAM 843 MB/s
Float FPU/RAM 921 MB/s

I didn't do the drive one again, since that takes so long, but my drive index probably would have broke 23000.

As you can see overclocking further definitely increased my performance quite a bit. However, I did see a little bit of unstability at that speed. It was ok for the most part, but from time to time bringing up heavy programs would cause my computer to reboot.

Hope that helps ;-)