Gaming on Opteron 240

[tungtung]

Can anyone suggest a mid-range video card that will pair up well (without bottleneck on the CPU or video side) with a dual Opteron 240 system?

A friend of mine has a dual Opteron 240 system (1 GB RAM), he's currently using an old AGP Radeon 32 MB (he's mainly working with Photoshop and Illustrator, so this card was more than enough for him). He wanted to get an upgrade for the video card for occasional gaming and driving his new Dell 1905FP (the old Radeon has no DVI Port). He mainly plays strategy games (C&C Generals, AoM), Sims2 and NFS2. He want something that will last him about 2 to 3 years.

Our main stubling block is that there seems to be no article out there that compares the performance of the Opteron to the mainstream CPUs (like the Athlon64 or P4). I did saw one benchmark that seem to suggest that the 240 is almost at the same performance as the XP 2500+. My initial suggestion was the Radeon 9800 Pro. However it seems that the 6600GT or maybe even the X800XL looks like a better investment for the next 2 to 3 years for him.

By the way his budget is about US $200 (certainly not more than $250).

 

[Genx87]

6600GT

I am not familiar with the clock speeds of opertons. However they are usually slower than their desktop counterparts in gaming. This is due to opertons requiring ECC registered ram. This adds a little latency to its ram that slows her down.

But a 6600GT is probably a good fit for this machine.

 

[Fenuxx]

BTW, Opteron 240 clocks in at 1.4GHz.

I would also recommend a 6600GT. It is considered to be the "best bang for your buck" card out there today. You could also get a used 9800Pro\XT for the same price, but thats used, so it would be up to you.

 

[Frown66]

I am not familiar with the clock speeds of opertons. However they are usually slower than their desktop counterparts in gaming. This is due to opertons requiring ECC registered ram. This adds a little latency to its ram that slows her down.

True, but opti's also have 1meg (vs. 512k) of L2 cache. And it also has dual channel memory, so I'm guess it maybe roughly the same as a Winchester at the same clock speed. The FX-51 was essentially an opteron at 2.2ghz.

I could be wrong, but I think the extra L2 cache usually gives 2-3 percent performance boost, but then there is a hit for using registered RAM. So it evens out (in relation to A64's...)?

Edit: Regarding the original post, 6600gt for the 180-200 range. X800XL for about 300. You can also get a 6800gt for about 350.

 

[hans030390]

dont get an x800xl card, or any from the x800 line. no shader model 3.0 support, and if he wants this to be going for 2-3 years...at least get a 6600gt. i would recommend a 6800.

 

[leedog2007]

Hey hans, the x800xl has TWICE the amount of pixel pipelines as the 6600gt, so you cannot tell me that the 6600gt will ever be faster than the 6600gt even on SM3.0 games. Your justification makes little sense in this case. However, the agp version of the x800xl is alittle bit more expensive, and probably hard to find.

 

[Machine350]

6600GT.

 

[bersl2]

A 6600GT will last him. However, those 240's will probably need to be upgraded eventually. Opteron 244's go for just over $200 right now, and who knows how low the prices on the old chips will be in a few months, or a year, or whenever 1.4GHz ends up being too slow?

 

[The Green Bean]

Originally posted by: Machine350
6600GT.

 

[tungtung]

Well seems that 6600GT is the way ... we did manage to find a store here (in Toronto, Canada) that has the X800XL AGP in stock ... though it's like CAD $140 (about US $110) more than the 6600GT ...

Now ... his only concern for now is that we have heard that several VIA chipsets just don't play nice with the 6600GT AGP (due to the problem with the AGP bridge and the VIA chipset), though there is no guarantee for now that the X800XL AGP will work smoothly either (it uses an AGP bridge too) ... so does anyone who has a VIA chipset (especially the VIA KT800, I think that's what his board has - it's the MSI K8T Master2) confirm that the 6600GT AGP or even the X800XL AGP work fine? (this was actually the first reason why I suggested the 9800Pro to him)

By the way we know that the Opteron 240 may be "obsolete" any time now ... since the dual core Opteron was supposed to come out later this month ... *grin*