I get paid this thursday (woo!) and rather then spend the money on crack and hoes I decided this month im going to upgrade my computer. The question is what do I get? I dont want to spend more the £200 (british). Here are my current system specs:
2.6Ghz P4 @3.25
2x256 Geil ultra PC4000
2x120Gb seagate 7200.7's in RAID0
Abit AI7
Radeon9800pro (flashed to XT)

The two things that really jump out at me are the RAM and the graphics card. I can get 2x512MB of crucial ballistix for £160 or I could get a radeon X800 SE for £193? Which would give the biggest performance boost? I want to be able to run battlefield2 really well when it comes out, and the levels are sposed to be big so im leaning towards the memory (also the memory is cheaper, which leaves more money for crack and hoes). Anyone got any better ideas?

The X800 SE has 256MB dedicated memory, whereas the 9800 pro only comes with 128MB.

I think you will benefit more in getting the graphics card.

____________________________________________________
"Memory with lifetime warranty? So, whose lifetime is that?"
<A HREF="http://www.brentcrowley.com/" target="_new">homepage</A>

Yeh but is the X800 SE that much better than the 9800pro? I dont know much about the new line of graphics cards. It would have to be significantly better than the 9800pro to justify £200 of my money.

Perhaps a wiser choice now would be to get 1GB memory, since the 9800 pro isnt a bad card, and upgrade the graphics card later.

But, the x800 is significantly better than the 9800 pro as you can see from the benchmarks:
http://graphics.tomshardware.com/g [...] te-02.html

____________________________________________________
"Memory with lifetime warranty? So, whose lifetime is that?"
<A HREF="http://www.brentcrowley.com/" target="_new">homepage</A>

Oh wicked, I really wanted a comparison of the new cards to the old ones. The card I was looking at was the X800 SE which i think has 4 less pipelines than the X800 though. So Im not sure if that would be worth it.

Most people compare the X800se to the 9800XT with an OC...your upgrade wouldn't buy you much at all. Get the RAM.

Maxtor disgraces the six letters that make Matrox.

Nice one. Cheers d00d.

Jump up to a gb of Crucial Ballistix and spend the rest on a hoe! Grab that biatch and load up her in-box till it's full!

Abit IS7 - 3.0C @ 3.6ghz - Mushkin PC4000 (2 X 512) - Sapphire 9800Pro - TT 420 watt Pure Power
Samsung 120gb ATA-100 - Maxtor 40gb ATA - 100
Sony DRU-510A - Yellowtail Merlot

Definitly RAM d00d(<-good thing Crash isn't here!).
A pair of Ballistix PC3200 is all you should need and I can garrantee you it'll run AT LEAST 250Mhz at 2.5-4-3

<font color=red><b>Life just gets better and better, first there was 9800SE->Pro, second 475Mhz on stock VGPU, third there's XT BIOS and now I've vVPU modded it! w00tz!</b></font color=red> <A HREF="http://www.maccrazy.net/9800" target="_new">http://www.maccrazy.net/9800</A>

Your running an Intel setup. First I would think the RAM is no doubt the way to go. The question that I have is whether you should get the 2X512 of Ballistix. Dont take this to be wirtten in stone, but somewhere over at Anandtech there is an article that talks about the optimal amount of RAM and also the best configuration or # of slots to populate. I may have this backwards, but I seem to recall that in the case of 1 - 2 Gig of RAM that the system would perform better with all 4 slots populated. So im wondering if you wouldnt be better off getting 2X256 of the same Ram that you have now for a total of 4x256. This of course would be based on the assumption that I am remembering this correctly. I will see if I can find that article.

BTW- I promise that I will PM the RAM info that we have been discussing sometime today. School has swamped me lately.

READ THE STICKY AND WIN A PRIZE! ALL PRIZES CAN BE CLAIMED IN THE SECTION TITLED "THE OTHER"

Gots to go RAM...the original bf 1942 runs better with 768 vs 512 and does a little better with 1024 vs 768. If you're playing DC on 1942, then 1 gig kills 512. I think i heard the guys who made DC were helping with bf 2...so they liked having lots of ram for their previous bf product...go RAM!

Btw-Chk out the post by Chipdeath on A64s under CPU, it has a couple of useful posts in it.

Current machines running F@H:
Athlons: [2000+][64 3500+][64 3000+][366][1.3x2][2500+]
Pentiums: [P4 1.4][X 3.0][P4 2.4x5]

It's not worth saying unless it takes a really long time to say!

Yeh I think I have decided to go for the RAM now, its cheaper and I think for BF it would give the biggest performance increase. Thanks for your help.

Really? I woulda thought 4x256 would but more strain on the northbridge. I kinda wanna go for 2x512MB because it gives me more upgrade options in the future and I can put my 2x256 in my other machine. The other thing is that ballistix will propably give me better timmings than my current RAM.

The idea is to populate all the slots of a given channel.

For a dual channel setup, it is optimal to populate each of the two slots with identical double sided 512MB modules.

____________________________________________________
"Memory with lifetime warranty? So, whose lifetime is that?"
<A HREF="http://www.brentcrowley.com/" target="_new">homepage</A>

I think it works like this. (Correct me if I'm wrong)
If you get 4x256MB with all sticks <b>single-sided</b> then you might get some performance increase when benchmarked with synthetic benchies.

The problem is ALL 4 sticks has to be the same to reduce conflicting problem while the extra load on the northbridge as you said will reduce OCing potential compared to 2 of the same stick.

4 sticks of <b>double-sided</b> spells for havoc!

<font color=red><b>Life just gets better and better, first there was 9800SE->Pro, second 475Mhz on stock VGPU, third there's XT BIOS and now I've vVPU modded it! w00tz!</b></font color=red> <A HREF="http://www.maccrazy.net/9800" target="_new">http://www.maccrazy.net/9800</A>

I have four slots, slots 1&2 make up the first channel 3&4 make up the second. Currently I have a 256 in slot one and a 256 in slot 3.

In your case you'll definitly want new RAM.
If your P4 can reach 3.25Ghz then it certainly can reach 3.5Ghz with decent cooling and better RAM @1:1.

If you have that extra bit of cash to spare, get the Ballistix PC4000.
They're better hand-picked Micron -5B G chips I think.

<font color=red><b>Life just gets better and better, first there was 9800SE->Pro, second 475Mhz on stock VGPU, third there's XT BIOS and now I've vVPU modded it! w00tz!</b></font color=red> <A HREF="http://www.maccrazy.net/9800" target="_new">http://www.maccrazy.net/9800</A>

Na my CPU cant get to 3.5, 3.25 is the best i can reach even with huge voltage increase and 2:3 RAM FSB ratio it just wont go higher. Its watercooled aswell, I think its because im using the 2.6c according to crash they are pants overclockers.

Only certain chipsets have problems with 4 sticks of double-sided modules.

Provided your chipset can handle all combinations of 512MB/256MB SS/DD arrangements, you get the best performance in filling up the banks completely.

____________________________________________________
"Memory with lifetime warranty? So, whose lifetime is that?"
<A HREF="http://www.brentcrowley.com/" target="_new">homepage</A>

<A HREF="http://www.anandtech.com/memory/showdoc.aspx?i=1839" target="_new">http://www.anandtech.com/memory/showdoc.aspx?i=1839</A>

Read this!

READ THE STICKY AND WIN A PRIZE! ALL PRIZES CAN BE CLAIMED IN THE SECTION TITLED "THE OTHER"