- Sep 6, 2006
- 2
- 0
- 18,510
Hey all, just gettin that end of summer paycheck and tryin to decide what to upgrade...got about $300 or so, and here's what I'm running currently:
AMD Athlon 64 3800+ Venice w/ stock cooling
DFI LanParty UT nf4 Ultra-D Mobo
1gb Kingston Value ram pc3200 w/ 3-3-3-8 @ 200mhz
ATI / Asus Radeon X800XL 256mb
2x 40gb Seagate Barracuda cheapy HD's on IDE
I'm mostly a gamer but I do some graphics as well and will be starting into animation, but I don't really do an exorbitant amount of rendering. I'm lookin to upgrade the system overall, and I'm not sure which path I want to take. As far as I can tell, the vid card is probably at the bottom of the list for ugprades; with DX10 still on the horizon and gains for moving up in cards being negligible for my purposes. I'm also not running a huge cinema screen that would necessitate huge resolutions that something like a 7800 or so would provide.
As for the processor, I am unsure of the stepping at the current time, but I know its not the early LBBLE that was renowned for the high OC potentials when the venice core was just released.
So, should I replace the RAM and go with a pair of OCZ Platinum pc3200 2x1gb's at 2-3-2-5 ($215 over at newegg)? Get a new X2 processor in socket 939? Is it possible to put together a water cooling kit for around $100 these days? If so, it seems that my best bet may be to knock out the biggest bottleneck (ram), get a cooling system that can cool all the components (like a water cooling kit) and start OC'ing the Venice. But I wanted to get some other opinions first.
AMD Athlon 64 3800+ Venice w/ stock cooling
DFI LanParty UT nf4 Ultra-D Mobo
1gb Kingston Value ram pc3200 w/ 3-3-3-8 @ 200mhz
ATI / Asus Radeon X800XL 256mb
2x 40gb Seagate Barracuda cheapy HD's on IDE
I'm mostly a gamer but I do some graphics as well and will be starting into animation, but I don't really do an exorbitant amount of rendering. I'm lookin to upgrade the system overall, and I'm not sure which path I want to take. As far as I can tell, the vid card is probably at the bottom of the list for ugprades; with DX10 still on the horizon and gains for moving up in cards being negligible for my purposes. I'm also not running a huge cinema screen that would necessitate huge resolutions that something like a 7800 or so would provide.
As for the processor, I am unsure of the stepping at the current time, but I know its not the early LBBLE that was renowned for the high OC potentials when the venice core was just released.
So, should I replace the RAM and go with a pair of OCZ Platinum pc3200 2x1gb's at 2-3-2-5 ($215 over at newegg)? Get a new X2 processor in socket 939? Is it possible to put together a water cooling kit for around $100 these days? If so, it seems that my best bet may be to knock out the biggest bottleneck (ram), get a cooling system that can cool all the components (like a water cooling kit) and start OC'ing the Venice. But I wanted to get some other opinions first.
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