Looking for some objective upgrading advice!

[evilryu]

I am interested in upgrading! Please give me insight, or direct me to other posts that will slake my queries.
I have recently acquired my cousin's PC. Here are its specs. The CPU and GPU are overclocked.

Athlon 64 3000+ E6 LBBWE 0544 GPMW @ 2.7 GHz
(9x300 MHz HTT), 1.4vcore
Thermalright XP-90 & Panaflo 92mm 35dbA fan
ASRock 939Dual-SATA2, BIOS 2.10, vmodded
ATi Radeon x800 GTO² @ 540/540 MHz, 16-pipes & ATi 5 Silencer Rev. 2
OCZ pc3200 Performance Rev. 3, 2x512mb's @ 2-3-3-10 1T, 200:133
Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 10 200GB PATA-133
OCZ Powerstream 520 watt psu
Creative SoundBlaster Audigy Gamer
Samsung SyncMaster 913V II
Antec Super LANboy

When asking for his advice and while surfing forums, I have taken the pose that a dual core upgrade at this time would be rather silly, considering statistics which show little or no performance boost in games that are dualcore enabled, to better performance with single core rigs. I am not a multi-tasker, so I'll just break everything down into small questions:

1.Should I upgrade to a better single core model and OC that, or is there real practical benefit to be had from a contemporary amd x2? My cousin insists that slight benefits to apps that I frequently use (games) will not be enough to warrant the purchase of a current x2, and to rather wait for triple or quad core processors...

2.Should I buy another stick of the same kind of OCZ memory? Can I simply match it with a better model such as gold or platinum series, or should I scrap the one stick of of Performance rev. 3 and get two sticks of plat/gold series?

3.My monitor supports up to 1280x1024, I cannot reach the extreme resolutions where the 8800 gtx shows its staying power. Would it be wiser to OC a 8800 gts, despite the gts' lower memory bandwidth.

However, before I upgrade my video card I do plan on waiting for the mid range 8000's, and maybe even the ATI's r600 release, to hopefully lower prices on the 8000 series, can anyone link me to a couple current articles pertaining to the r600's release date.

I am aware of the redundancy of waiting for inane periods of time in the pc world to upgrade hardware just to face obsoletion, I welcome your advice and my reeducation, but plllllease don't lecture me on the above topic, only if you must!

Thanks for reading, please educate me!

 

[lostandwandering]

I have taken the pose that a dual core upgrade at this time would be rather silly, considering statistics which show little or no performance boost in games that are dualcore enabled, to better performance with single core rigs

Not sure where you got that information. Look at THG cpu charts
An AMD x2 4000+ shows performance gains of 50% in COD2. The newer Core 2 cpus can double your frame rate. I would say that you should buy an X2 processor for the 939 MB that you have now to minimize your costs. Maybe this X2 4600+

Adding another gig of ram wouldn't be a bad idea either. You can combine the gold to what you have now, just by the same speed.

Your X800 is not a bad card and will last you until R600 comes out and the midline G80 cards arrive. I see no need to replace the card you have when gaming at the resolution you are.

 

[evilryu]

I saw the chart before, and planned on a x2 4400+ or 4800+ toledo core, but then I wondered if my cpu ranked a little higher given that the chart has stock speeds. My major beef was with Oblivion which averages 25 fps in outdoor areas on medium settings with x2 fsaa, without distant lands, a tweaked ini and will still frequent drops into the teens with outdoor hitching. When I mentioned upgrading my cpu and ram first, He insisted that my gpu was of major priority. He's a fairly knowledgeable guy with PC's, but I would sometimes get the odd feeling he's a dude that will skim a couple forums that has information radical to the accepted or substantiated norm, and hold its position for the sake of just being different. I immediately thought that upgrading my gpu would face a cpu bottleneck. Thanks for the help man, I got the gut feeling that his contrary ideas were a little sketchy!

thanks again!

Any more opinions/suggestions welcome!

 

[epsilon84]

I saw the chart before, and planned on a x2 4400+ or 4800+ toledo core, but then I wondered if my cpu ranked a little higher given that the chart has stock speeds. My major beef was with Oblivion which averages 25 fps in outdoor areas on medium settings with x2 fsaa, without distant lands, a tweaked ini and will still frequent drops into the teens with outdoor hitching. When I mentioned upgrading my cpu and ram first, He insisted that my gpu was of major priority. He's a fairly knowledgeable guy with PC's, but I would sometimes get the odd feeling he's a dude that will skim a couple forums that has information radical to the accepted or substantiated norm, and hold its position for the sake of just being different. I immediately thought that upgrading my gpu would face a cpu bottleneck. Thanks for the help man, I got the gut feeling that his contrary ideas were a little sketchy!

thanks again!

Any more opinions/suggestions welcome!

Oblivion is multithreaded, in such a case an overclocked X2 would provide higher framerates than your A64. Not by a whole lot mind you, but a 10 - 20% increase is possible.

Of course if you are GPU limited the fastest CPU will not help you, but if you upgrade to an 8800GTS that will obviously not be a problem.

 

[evilryu]

Of course if you are GPU limited the fastest CPU will not help you, but if you upgrade to an 8800GTS that will obviously not be a problem.

You think the 8800gts would be a better choice then the gtx then Eps?

 

[evilryu]

I also want to add for $38 CAD I can get an AM2 upgrade board for my MB, for an am2 core and ddr2 memory. Buy the board and get an am2 core and ddr2 800 memory or stick to the 939?

 

[epsilon84]

You think the 8800gts would be a better choice then the gtx then Eps?

I also want to add for $38 CAD I can get an AM2 upgrade board for my MB, for an am2 core and ddr2 memory. Buy the board and get an am2 core and ddr2 800 memory or stick to the 939?

The 8800GTS is not necessarily a 'better' choice, it just seems to be more suited to your CPU. A 8800GTX is an extremely powerful card and needs a fast CPU to match, it would be bottlenecked in quite a few games by an A64 @ 2.7GHz, even an X2 at such speeds would be quite the bottleneck. You'll still get better performance than the 8800GTS of course, but you won't be unleashing the full power of an 8800GTX with an A64/X2 unless you play at really high resolutions.

Anyhow, Firingsquad has an article on this subject, they test the 8800GTS/GTX and X1950XTX on a range of X2 CPUs from the 3800+ to FX-62, it should prove helpful in making your decision: http://firingsquad.com/hardware/geforce_8800_gtx_gts_amd_cpu_scaling/

To your second point, I wouldn't bother with an AM2 add on card, really. DDR400 is cheaper than DDR2-800 still (at least where I'm from, Australia) so unless you can find an equivalent AM2 CPU for far less than a S939 one it won't be worth the hassle or the money.

 

[evilryu]

Awesome help! Unless I can find it in the forums, would I face any issues with pairing a 1gb dimm of ram to my existing memory, compared to two more 512mb's?

 

[epsilon84]

Awesome help! Unless I can find it in the forums, would I face any issues with pairing a 1gb dimm of ram to my existing memory, compared to two more 512mb's?

I don't think it should make much of a difference either way, but are you sure your current mobo has 4 DDR slots? I always assumed the 'hybrid' mobos only have 2 slots each for DDR/DDR2.

Mixing and matching RAM of different size (or brand) is quite hard to predict, really. I know people don't recommend it, but I've mixed RAM from different companies from generic to Corsair to Kingston, and I haven't had any trouble so far.

On my office machine, I've had no problems mixing 2x256MB (Kingston ValueRAM DDR333) with 1x512MB for 1GB (generic DDR400), but your mileage may vary. I can make no guarantees.