Best AGP u/g from Gainward Bliss 7800GS Golden sample + Corsair DRR 400 RAM

[segestria]

Looking for a "stingy" u/g path from my Athlon XP 3200 (2.2GHz)/EPOX 8RDA +PRO to a Core 2 Duo system. I am considering a Asrock 4Core dual SATA 2 M/B, with Core 2 Duo E7200 , thinking that my present system is probably CPU limited.

Tom'a Hardware seems to think that for AGP 8x, a Radeon 3850 would give a noticeable performance increase. I play Oblivion , Half-Life 1 and 2, FEAR, STALKER, and Prey, using Dell 2407WFP. 1 G of dual channel memory, probably will go to 2GB of DDR2 because I will have to scrap the present 2x512 M anyway to get 2GB.

Would this graphics card be a good option ?

 

[solog]

I was in a similar situation. Setup is Barton (forgot the actual rating but running it at 1.9GHz), Epox 8RDA+, 2x512MB and a BFG 76800GS. Was looking at that board and a few others and finally decided to part out my setup and just buy exactly what I wanted instead of some iffy motherboard. I know some of those motherboards get good reviews but I am really waiting for Nvidia's 9300 based motherboards because I want to be able to completely turn off the graphics card and run it from IGP most of the time.

I sold my 7800GS yesterday for $100. I've seen them go for more on ebay and I had mine listed at $120 locally. The person buying it wanted it for their son and I felt that $120 was a little high and even though she was willing to pay it, I sold it for $100. I'm using a Radeon 9100 right now and I can still play Enemy Territory at acceptable frame rates (I mostly play that game). I think I can probably get about $150 or so for the rest of my computer which is some older Antec black case, 2 hard drives (will leave just the 80GB in it for that price) and a Pioneer 16X DVD burner. I have the optional SPDIF out bracket also. I think that is a very fair price for the computer w a fresh install of XP and some other software.

 

[happy medium]

Seems to me it would be better to buy a pci-e board and sell your 7800 on ebay for 100.00$. You can get a 8800gs for 100.00$ now, which is twice as fast. And the Nvidia 8800 and Amd 3870 series prices are about to drop even lower with the new cards comming in 2 weeks.

Grab a cheap Gigabyte dsl p35 board 90.00$, 2 gigs of Gskill memory 44.00$, and a e7200 130.00$ and a 100/125.00$ video card and you'll have better expandibility and better overclocking options and twice the video power.

Thats roughly 400.00$

Sell of your old parts to recoup 150.00$/200.00$

Good luck.

 

[solog]

You can go even cheaper with an E2180 cpu. $60 at Microcenter. Intel will have E5000 class cpus soon which will be made with their 45nm process and should be cheaper than the E7200 (which should drop to about $113 by then). You can probably get an even cheaper motherboard that is still good with decent overclocking capabilities. Don't know which one to recommend on that but go to the motherboard forum and I'm sure you will get several answers.

 

[segestria]

Thanks for those thoughts, the 9300 Nvidia based boards do seem to be a gpood idea, and it wold be fine to be able to switch off the graphics card completely when not gaming. Good for the global warming and my electricity bill ! Where did you hear about them ? I had not heard about those E5000 cpus, though I know that "Nehalem" is coming eventually. In England parts seem to be 50% more than in the mighty US of A unfortunately, so that will affect my options somewhat...hence the "stingy" bias.
The Epox is a very fine board and has done good service, but I can't run oblivion at 1900x1200, with all the scenery and weather mods in.

Perhaps then I should wait a while. I'll keep the twin 250GB SATA I drives so I would have the MB, 1GB of dual-channel ram and the 7800GS for sale. perhaps someone might pick those up cheaply.

Any further thoughts on a graphics card if I did get the Asrock would be welcome. I forgot to menntion that the Asrock has plenty of PCI slots available which is a plus because I have need of them.

 

[happy medium]

The Asrock board is a dead end board at this time for gaming. The 4x pci-e slot will start to bottleneck at a 6800ultra card (5%), and with faster cards it will get worse.

If your running a 1900x1200 monitor, I highly recommmend a 8800gt/3870 series card.

Even if you decide with the 3850agp card and the Asrock board, you will be stuck buying another board when you want to upgrade your graphics card.

Again I suggest selling your old stuff and building a system thats purley based around pci-e.

 

[solog]

Originally posted by: segestria
Thanks for those thoughts, the 9300 Nvidia based boards do seem to be a gpood idea, and it wold be fine to be able to switch off the graphics card completely when not gaming. Good for the global warming and my electricity bill ! Where did you hear about them ? I had not heard about those E5000 cpus, though I know that "Nehalem" is coming eventually.

here are a few links:

http://www.tcmagazine.com/comm...shownews=20396&catid=2

that one claims around $84

and here is an old link with outdated info:

http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2...2/20/intel_roadmap_08/


As for being able to turn off your gpu, the 8200 based boards (for AMD cpus, available now) only turn off 9800GTX and X2 cards. I guess all the new Nvidia cards should use it though.

edit: Forgot to put where I heard about it. The feature is called HybridPower. It is available in Nvidia 8200 based boards right now. AMD has a similar feature but its current version only reduces the power use of the main gpu when not being used (instead of turning it completely off)

Here is a good article on Hybrid SLI (which are HybridPower and GeForceBoost):

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardwa...a_hybrid_sli_preview/1

 

[evolucion8]

Originally posted by: happy medium
The Asrock board is a dead end board at this time for gaming. The 4x pci-e slot will start to bottleneck at a 6800ultra card (5%), and with faster cards it will get worse.

wrong, there's some benchmarks around the web that showed that the only card that shows a sign of 5% of bottleneck was the 8800GTX, which it's strong texture performance loves high bandwidth while any R6XX based card doesn't, 512-Bit bus anyone? other cards showed little signs of performance bottlenecks through the bus. ASRock still a nice motherboard, but it's useful life is getting to an end soon. Better of sell everything you can and go to the Gigabyte board, don't go too cheap in components, as it would kill the advantage of upgrading, still will offer a nice performance boost.

 

[segestria]

One point I forgot to mention is that a Nebula DigiTv PCI card is occupying one of the expansion slots in the EPOX mb. Would it transfer to to the Gigabyte alternative which has been suggested ? It will be ok in the Asrock board which uses 4 x PCI-1 slots. I had heard somewhere that there was not much penalty for using the PCIe 4x video card slot; in which case I might go for the Radeon 3850 in PCI version, or something better...but what ? In that case I could transfer later to a better mb when the upcoming "Nehalem" CPUs and boards for them have settled down.
I'm still rather unsure about the actual as opposed to the theoretical throttling effects of the Asrock PCIe 4x slot, and any elucidation would be helpful; a 5% performance hit would be immaterial in view of the vastly improved performance over my existing setup.
Many many thanks for the useful comments which will be furhter help in my decision as to how to proceed.

The bit-tech article wazs very interesting, thanks for that, although I'm not sutre how long it will take for these power-saving boards to come alog.

 

[Denithor]

I would definitely recommend Happy's suggestion instead of dumping cash into an AGP system where the highest video card available is the old 3850.

If you are upgrading that much of your system, just go all the way. Besides, DDR2 is so cheap now you can get 2-4GB instead of being stuck with the 1GB of DDR you currently have.