Onboard Video Questions

[Empty_V0id]

My B-Day is coming up and I'm slowly going to buy parts to put in my PC case which I have wanted to for a while, but we all now how well teenagers can save money. Slowly I am going to get parts, first I am going to an Athlon X2 3800+ Socket AM2 Processor and a gig of OCZ DDR2 800 RAM. Now, with the motherboard I am going to get it has onboard video and I will need it since I won't have the money to buy a video card yet. I really want an X1800XT, but not enough money yet. Okay to the point, with the DDR2 800 RAM and the onboard GeForce 6100 feeding off of it, will I see a rise in performance over the regular PC's using onboard video and DDR 400 RAM or DDR2 533? If you must know the motherboard is an ASRock AM2NF4G-SATA2 with a GeForce 6100 onboard video.

 

[mrquin27]

This doesn't answer your question but I was also short on cash so I put this card in my pc. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16814131415 You can oc the crap out of it and it ran CSS on lcd resolution with high textures, models, shadows, and reflect world at 40-50fps. ... No AA/AF or HDR.

 

[Empty_V0id]

I guess it could work except when there are lots of things on-screen suppose. Its sort of like running my run-of-the-mill Mobility Radeon 9000 in my laptop that is a total of 256MB of memory available to the processor (I think it is 256MB it might be 128MB version) but, it has 64MB on board and its pulling the rest from the gig of RAM I have.

 

[440bx]

I cannot answer your question authoritatively. It seems reasonable to expect the integrated graphics to work better/faster if you use fast RAM since it is shared.

I think your choice of motherboard is good for a budget board.

I'd suggest you buy the CPU *last*. The reason for this is that the CPU is likely to fall in price, you will probably pay less for it if you wait until you need it to complete the system.

HTH.

 

[Empty_V0id]

Thanks for the help, I guess my question is left un-answered until someone goes and does the benchmarks themselves. Which I should do when I get the board. About the processor being last, I really have a price constraint and my aunt has given me her old computer which has a 15 Gig HD, an AMD K6 running at 500MHz with 8MB onboard video and 128MB of RAM. So I really want to pop in the processor, memory, and hard drive to get the system up off the ground. Mainly I was wondering, if I should just get the Athlon 64 3800+, and wait to make the jump to dual core until prices drop even more? Although, it would be nice to be running to cores at once.

 

[440bx]

Thanks for the help, I guess my question is left un-answered until someone goes and does the benchmarks themselves. Which I should do when I get the board. About the processor being last, I really have a price constraint and my aunt has given me her old computer which has a 15 Gig HD, an AMD K6 running at 500MHz with 8MB onboard video and 128MB of RAM. So I really want to pop in the processor, memory, and hard drive to get the system up off the ground. Mainly I was wondering, if I should just get the Athlon 64 3800+, and wait to make the jump to dual core until prices drop even more? Although, it would be nice to be running to cores at once.

You're welcome.

If you have the money, I think that overall you'd be better off getting the dual core outright. I say this because if you bought something else, then the dual core would have to drop by the amount you paid for the single core just to break even. The X2 3800 is selling for roughly $160, the single core 3800 is selling for roughly $120.

In other words,

1. If you buy the dual core now the CPU expense is approx. $160

2. If you buy the single core instead, the expense will be $120 + whatever the dual core you'll upgrade to will be selling for at that later time.

Option 1. seems more economical.

HTH.

 

[AndyAldrich]

I applaud your consideration of Intel's new platform but if you're looking to build a system to a budget then I have a suggestion for you:

Everyone is very busy looking at the AM2/Conroe war and is forgetting that socket 939 is still very much available and the prices for all things 939 are plummeting.

DDR400 memory is cheap as chips (ho ho) and you can probably get some better quality DDR400 for the same price as lower quality DDR2 chips, which means you can overclock LOTS.

Athlon 64 X2 chips started off on socket 939 and can be heavily overclocked.

I would imagine that socket 939 will remain on the market for a year, after which its top range of chips will be dirt cheap and fast as fleas. Fleas are fast, by the way, they jump a long way.

So you might consider socket 939 a dead platform, but I'd like to convince you otherwise. The money you save will easily allow you to stretch to a cheap 7600 card by nVidia. Deal? Deal.