More memory or better graphics card?

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.

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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/graphic/20050217/gigab...

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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

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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

Read this!

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