Waht to upgrade?

moodymk

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Nov 23, 2004
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Hi all, im a new poster so please excuse any terminology mistakes.

I currently have a asus A7N8X-X, 512 of pc3200 Ram, athalon 2600+ cpu and a radeon 9600 pro,

Im planning to increase my ram to 1gig but i was also thinking of upgrading my CPU and/or graphics card. I know that the graphics card will have more effect, i mainly use my pc for gaming however i dont know weather it would be better to wait untill PCI express is more developed. any how i was thinking up upgrading my cpu to a athalon 3400++/3600+ and if i were to do my graphics card now perhaps get a radeon 9800 pro or save up and get a redeon x800 pro.

any thoughts on this will be most appreciated, thanks.
 

TheRod

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Aug 2, 2002
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Humm... Hard to decide, since all your stuff is not that bad...

The best thing to do for you right now is to overclock your stuff! Your Athlon 2600+ is currently runnign at 2.0GHz (tBred) or 2.083GHz (Barton). You can probably run it at 2.2GHz without too much trouble! If you have a Barton, you might even be lucky and run it near 2.4GHz.

Your Radeon 9600 PRO can probably be overclock too! Get Radlinker to unleash to true power of your GPU! :)

If you don't have "el cheapo / no-name" RAM, it cna probably be overclock to pc3500 (433MHz isntead of 400MHz).

And keep your money until the beginning of 2005, when Athlon 64 with PCI-EXPRESS will be widely available, then the upgrade path will be clearer and better!

At your point, a WORTHY system upgrade would cost you much!

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A7N8X/<font color=green><b>Sempron 2800+</b></font color=green> <- <i>Is this affecting my credibility?</i>
Kingston DDR333 2x256Megs
<font color=red>Radeon 8500 128Megs</font color=red> @ C:275/M:290 <- <i>It's enough for Wow!</i>
 

jammydodger

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Sep 12, 2001
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If you really wanna upgrade soon I would wait a few months for the NForce4 motherboards to become common. These support PCI-X, so unless you can get one the also supports AGP you will have to get a new graphics card as well. Couple this with an Athlon64 3000+ and you will be in business.
But this all depends on how much money you want to spend.
 

TheRod

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You will see that overclocking GPU is quite easy with RadLinker, you only need a few games or synthetic benchmarks to evaluate your system stability. You can usually overclock GPU and vMEM by 10% at least without any problem at all.

For the CPU, there is some tool in Windows, but I prefer BIOS overclocking.

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A7N8X / <font color=green><b>Sempron 2800+</b></font color=green> <- <i>Is this affecting my credibility?</i>
Kingston DDR333 2x256Megs
<font color=red>Radeon 8500 128Megs</font color=red> @ C:275/M:290 <- <i>It's enough for WoW!</i>