Hardware

[mangus]

Hello,
My name is Mangus Toyle and I own a 3 year old Alienware- 51 rig with the following:

• ATX 650 Watt power supply
• Asus-P5ND2 SLI motherboard (4 Serial ATA connectors)
• Pentium 4 - 3.8 Ghz w/Hyperthreading
• Nforce 4 SLI chipset
• 4 GB Dual channel PC-5300 DDR2 non-ECC ram/8GB expandable
• Windows 7(64-bit) OS
• (1)XFX Geforce GTX 285 video card 1GB GDDR3,PCI express 2.0 SLI ready
• Viewsonic VX2265/Nvidia 3d glasses kit
• 800 Mhz Fsb
• Panasonic Internal bluray(sata)
• WD 1TB SATA Harddrive

Look, I just spent an enormous amount of money upgrading my Alienware rig so that I can play 3d video games and watch 3d movies. I know an average amount about what I am doing and I am hopeful that you will have some kind words of wisdom. Will this system work(in my mind it looks fast enough) or was this an impulsive decision on my part? I also ran Nvidia’s 3D upgrade software and it revealed that at minimum requirements, I should only need to upgrade my graphics card from Geforce 7800GTX to one of their 3D cards(Geforce GTX 285).

 

[pepperman]

Pairing a GTX 285 (or any GTX or GTS series card for that matter) with a P4 will create a major bottleneck (though yes, it would work).

If you haven't already bought the card, and you still want to keep the system, I would recommend something like an HD 4650 or HD 4670 (on the ATI side) or a GT 220 or 9600 GT (on the Nvidia side).

Otherwise, you have the fastest cpu for your mobo, so if you want to upgrade that you'll need to buy a new cpu/mobo and probably ram at the very least.