New to forums and looking for (yes, you guessed it...)advice

[WitsEnd]

Hey all!

First I'd like to introduce myself and say I've been reading Tom's Hardware site for quite a while now, but only recently ventured over here to the forums. I've been messing around with computers for...geez I'm getting old...14 years now, but I am still learning new stuff every day and still manage to do incredibly stupid things more often than I care to admit!

I am interested in getting your opinions regarding a decision I am facing at the moment. I'm getting less and less happy with the performance of my computer but because of poor planning I think I am in a really tough spot now.

Here's the scenario: I have 2GB of G.Skill ZX PC3200 DDR ram, a GeForce 6800GT AGP graphics card, and a (cough) AMD64-3200 cpu. This is all installed in a socket 939 MSI K8N-Neo2 Plat. board.

I am mostly a gamer, so my games are both cpu and gpu limited at this point. I actually ordered and installed an Opty 165 but it turned out to be defective and I returned it, which has now given me a second chance to re-evaluate my options.

The trouble is, I really can't afford to fork out money for a new mobo, processor, ram, and video. But sadly I guess the only thing I can really hope to save is my ram at this point...or do you guys think that my cpu would be powerful enough to drive a good videocard?

Sorry for such a long post, and thanks a ton if you stayed the course, and for any insight you care to give!

P.S. I posted this in the mobo forum because I was reading a post about the ASRock VSTA boards, which may end up being part of my solution.

 

[BUFF]

why don't you try overclocking your CPU?
The K8N Neo2 isn't too bad at all as long as you avoid the 2 SATA ports that aren't locked (nF3 chipset problem common to all boards)

 

[Newf]

The Opty didn't work because your nF3 chipset won't support dual cores.

I'm afraid that you are kinda stuck. If you had PCI-E instead of AGP this would be easy. The only cheap way to boost performance is through a mild overclock. If you are willing to throw away the Asrock board down the road, then the $ spent on a new Conroe won't be wasted. BUT, you will not get a huge gaming performance increase using the same videocard.

 

[sirheck]

you might try to oc the cpu, should be able to get to 2.4ghz.

and you can oc the gpu a little to.

this will give a little performance boost, not much though.
as oc,ing doesnt make much difference in gaming.


other than that, a whole new build is in order.

 

[WitsEnd]

Hey, thanks for the replies.

I should have been more clear about some things I see. The Opty was defective which is why I had to send it back; my mobo supports the 165 and 175 with a bios flash. I had a great stepping too--CCBBE 0615 EPMW.

As to overclocking my cpu--I can get maybe 200MHz extra stable out of this one. In fact, I tried again today before I answered this post but it failed Orthos after 40 mins. And that was with very relaxed memory timings of 166MHz, 2.5, 3, 3, 7 (mem is rated at 2, 3, 2, 5). When I was testing to get higher fsb speeds I was using a cpu multi of 9 and bumping the voltage all the way up to 1.5 (inc. +3.3 boost) and ran into the same speed range limitation--245 FSB with 9 multi was the highest I could go. Didn't do lengthy Orthos with that setting though. But as soon as I set it to 250, even with ram at 3,4,4,8 and voltage at 1.525 it would fail Orthos within 3 mins.

Well, here I've gone and ran off at the mouth again lol. Sorry about that!

 

[Newf]

Well then, the next question is whether you are willing to spend another $120-250 on an AGP card upgrade. Check out Tom's January article on best bang for the buck (includes AGP) and then look at the Newegg offerings starting at $120 X1650pro up to the $250 7800. It's up to you whether it's worth the money. An Opty is up to the task for support.