Upgrade processor or motherboard?

[aslaiby]

I am trying to find out what means of upgrade is going to give me the most bang for the buck.

I have a MSI K8N Neo Platinum (754) with an Athlon64 2800+ procecssor with 1gb (2x512) 400mhz Kingston Value Ram

Does it make more sense for me to just replace my processor and maybe get some new memory, or should I get a 939 motherboard and new processor.

Thanks
Aaron

 

[mpasternak]

Depends what you're doing with the system,

if it's purely for gaming. I would be tempted to say Neither. with those specs, you're running a decent machine. sure not top of the line, but what needs it?

go for a new video card if you can. in gaming this is often the cause for any bottleneck of performance these days, not the RAM / CPU / Mainboard

 

[o1die]

If that's an nforce3 board, I would bump up the cpu voltage by .05 for some overclocking, and skip the memory upgrade. 1 gig is plenty.

 

[aslaiby]

My main reason to upgrade is because I do some video editing and I'm trying to see what will help me compress videos at the highest rate. So I guess the real question is, will a faster processor and maybe better memory help improve video compression?

 

[aslaiby]

Also I have tried to do some overclocking, with the automatic oveclock options that the board has, but they don't seem to work, which is why I wonder if the motherboard is bad or maybe the OC doesn't work well because of cheap memory or because the Processor is a lower end Athlon64.

 

[slvr_phoenix]

Your system seems pretty good. I'd try turning off the automatic OC and manually OCing it. But if you want to do the automatic OC thing, try slightly increasing the VDIMM and/or VCore if you can. That'd probably make the OCs more stable. My guess is that your RAM isn't holding up during the OC, so nudging up the VDIMM and/or relaxing the timings a little would be my first move.

<pre><font color=purple><i>Jesters do oft prove prophets.</i> -Regan in
King Lear (Act V, Scene iii) by William Shakespear</font color=purple></pre><p>@ 187K -> 200,000 miles or bust!

 

[mpasternak]

HAVNT had much testing in that area, but going from say a 2800+ to a 3400+ would defaintely give performance, but i wouldnt imagine that giant a boost. the memory is NOT an issue because unless you're maxing out that 1 gig, wont change anything. I say hold off till the Dual Cores are readily available. those SHOULD give you the maximum performance boost (if you can afford it) because the multiple threading will greatly improve encoding time considering there are a lot of applications in this market already designed with multiple threading technologies. again with this type of application, you want to do what you can to enable the maximum amount of data flow through your system. perhap if you're using giant files that are being read or written to your drives, the better option would be a better hard drive solution, like a raid 5 array (SATA or SCSI if available) to increase those write times

 

[aslaiby]

One thing I'm planning on doing is setting up a raid array of some sort. I have 2 80gig hard drives(1 seagate, 1 WD) and I might raid 0 those together to use for compressing video and then saving those files to a new larger harddrive, like a 200 gig or something, I don't know if there is an automatic way of doing that or if I just need to do it manually.