4 Part Upgrade - for WoW

[hotel77]

My current Base system is:

Athlon64 3000+ at 2.2ghz
MSI Neo-2 Platinum
1 gig of Ocz 3500 EB (link in case you don't remember that far back)
Leadtek 6600gt (agp)
Power supply and other componenets are a non-issue.

I know I need to upgrade the video card...but it's an upgrade path issue at this point. I currently use a 2 monitor setup, (1280/1024 LCDs) and have multiple browsers, music and WoW or CS:S going at any given time. I want to increase my FPS in WoW, and possibly run 2 WoW clients without much lag (dual core?).

I'm looking for suggestions on what pieces would be the most beneficial to upgrade, or if I should at all. Looking at the AM2 performance, i'm not sure when the DDR2 setups will outperform the high end DDR, but should I wait anyways?

I'm in college and don't have a lot of money to spend; should I just go with a 7800GS and pigeon hole myself even further with the outgoing AGP socket? Looking at the 7800 GT, it seems to be the best price/performance at the moment...but that means upgrading a lot of other parts in the system.

Thoughts? Price range should be $2-300 for an ideal upgrade to my FPS...a $5-600 upgrade would ideally last me for another 2 years...into Vista.

 

[Ricemarine]

Actually power supply could be a possible issue. Please tell us what it actually is. My suggestion is to save up and wait until AM2 comes out, so you can afford dual core, ddr2 ram, etc.

 

[hotel77]

OCZ PowerStream 420W

 

[hotel77]

bump

 

[markkleb]

You could get another gig of memory and a video card at Newegg for the $300. Big diff.
Dont forgrt to check the "refurbished" stuff.

 

[vertigofm]

That power supply should be ok... but its still a little low for my tastes.

If your looking to run dual clients, dual core is the way- I'd suggest an Opteron and OC that bad boy... An extra Gig of ram would be nice too

Honestly dont play the waiting game for the AM2... All your gonna get is DDR2 and from the speculation I have heard, its not worth investing in a new motherboard and processor just for DDR2 support


Read this about the DDR2 hype:

mostly hype (3:26pm EST Tue Nov 01 2005)
systems that have DDR2 do not exhibit a 2x increase in over all performance, in fact you're probably better of maxing out everything else 1st. Your overall performance is defined more by the lowest performace piece of the system and further speeding up a faster piece often buys you nothing. In computers this is called Amdahl's law and you can learn more about it here.

http://www.google.com/search?source
id=mozclient&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&q=Am
dahl's+law

Your memory or any other component only needs to be significantly faster than your slowest contributor which in PC's is usually the disk or in games the display.

That's why adoption rates for DDR2 aren't huge, right now DDR speeds aren't the largest bottleneck, other things are.

I personally would rather have the capability to address a lot more DDR than have much faster DDR. More DDR equals less context switching which ultimately means less time spent in shared memory and more time spent in much faster more tightly coupled memory doing real work. Fetching faster does not always mean doing more work faster, in fact it can even kill your overall performance if the ammount of fetching becomes the limiting factor which it often does.

More memory is always a lot better, faster memory is better too, but it varies tremendously and is almost never as good as just having more



I don't think that the jump to AM2 for DDR2 is worth it... Not now at least. Maybe in 2-3 years after I have seen extensive DDR2 Ram Modules being released for AM2 mobos with AM2 processors- but for now there is no justifiable reasone to make that leap