Bottleneck? : Pentium 4 and a ATi HD4650.

lauxenburg

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Feb 9, 2009
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[Moved from CPUs & Components Forum]

Hello,

Standford University has had this Folding@Home project for quite some time now, and I figured it was time to help out. The problem is, I am super limited budget wise. I mean really limited.

Heres how it is:

The 24/7 F@H computer will be a IBM ThinkCentre. It has a 2.8GHz Pentium 4 HT processor. I plan on adding 1GB of RAM to it, totalling 1.5GB DDR1 RAM.

My question of concern is with the video card. I would like to purchase a PCIe ATi Radeon HD4650 card as it is cheap and provides decent performance. However, the 4 series Radeon cards are fairly new and the P4 is fairly old. It is hyper-threaded and on a LGA775 socket, but....are we going to see performance decrease in the graphics department.

Thanks. I am trying to determine whether buying the card would be a waste, although I could use it future systems. Comments/Answers greatly appreciated.
 

lauxenburg

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Ok, thank you very much. I suppose we will be seeing performance close to the 3xxx series cards. I have no problem with this. I plan not to use this PC for any use other than folding at the moment. Of course, it would probably be fine as a PC anyway. I am not so certain about have DDR1 memory in it though, as far as futureproofing it. Seeing we are on DDR3 now...otherwise, I seem confident with this choice.

Thanks.
 

kakkoii

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May 25, 2009
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Uhhh..no, lol. The 4650 is basically a 3850/70. Which is the highest end from the last generation. Sure, compared to the 4870/90, it's not THAT awesome, but even still, it's hardly an entry level card. It's a mid range card for the 4000 series, and a high end from last generation.