Give me a reality check on my upgrade

[SadisticOne]

At the moment I have the following system:

Abit IS-7
P4C 2.6G
2x512MB 3200 (corsair)
ATI 9500Pro
PC Power&Cooling TurboCool 350ATX
Audigy1 soundcard

My issue is performance is in high end raiding in WoW. Lots of BWL encounters require lots of AOE, and my rig is getting very poor FPS in these... almost a slide show. I'm running at 1024, with pretty minimal settings, and while I understand that Bliz will be providing controls to reduce spell effects, I don't find the situation acceptable.

I've been looking at new options, and while I can see a couple of upgrade options for AGP, it seems to me not to make sense: I won't be able to orphan down a graphics card in our multi-pc household, and I probably won't be able to upgrade the graphics card I get to a much improved one, if I stick with AGP.

So.. I'm biting the bullet and looking to go socket 939 and PCIe. I have a budget of roughly $600 now, but can spend $300-400 more by the middle of next year. So I figured go with a processor that should be fine for a while, but a socket type I can upgrade, and a graphics card thats a step up from what I have now, and again.. an upgradable slot.

I've heard SLI is basically a waste of time, as I'm never going for ultimate performance; keeping 3 pc's on the cutting edge is too expensive, and you can typically get excellent current performance at around $300-400.


Here is my plan (purchasing retail parts from Newegg & PCPowerCooling)

DFI LANPARTY UT nF4 Ultra-D Socket 939 $130
AMD Opteron 148- $250 (is this too expensive considering price/performance?)
XFX Geforce 6600GT $130 (and upgrade to whatever the best $300-400 graphics card is mid year)
PC Power&Cooling Silencer 470 $100 (+5V @ 32A +12V @ 26A, and supposedly should be okay on PCIe systems I heard... if not I need a recommendation)


Keep the RAM and Audigy1, maybe upgrading RAM Jan-Feb.

Any thoughts on whether I've made any incompatible choices, or whether other options would be better?

 

[Cynicist]

$250 is way too expensive for a 148 unless you are guaranteed a good stepping and are planning to overclock as much as possible.

 

[Ricemarine]

Mmm, can you get dual core? possibly an opteron 165 or 170...

For the same price, the Antec NeoHE can be just as good with 3 rails, just incompatible with asus motherboards...
I suggest an epox 9NPA+ mobo to lower the costs...

 

[alimoalem]

good choices

 

[SadisticOne]

Nearest non-Opteron chip that Newegg is selling.. and they really are my preferred vendor, is AMD Athlon 64 3800+ Venice 1GHz FSB 512KB L2 Cache Socket 939 Processor - Retail... for $282. Is this a better deal?

EDIT: I also see ZipZoomFly is selling the Opteron 148 Retail, for $238. Still too much?

Regarding dual-core, I've seen some annecdotal reports of problems in gaming with these. I can upgrade the processor in a while to upgrade, and deal with less than perfect performance, but instability for a year would be unacceptable. My thoughts is that stability>performance, any way you cut it.

 

[SadisticOne]

Originally posted by: Ricemarine
*snip*
For the same price, the Antec NeoHE can be just as good with 3 rails, just incompatible with asus motherboards...
I suggest an epox 9NPA+ mobo to lower the costs...

I've had some bad experiences with PSU's I spent a lot of cash on going bad, except for PC Power and Cooling.. and add to the fact that I'm supporting a US company, that produces in my experience, excellent products, and I'm happier going with that product.

As for epox... I'd consider it, I guess, but I had such an excellent and seemless experience with the DFI LanParty NF3, with a standard A64, that I used in my wife's upgrade last year, I don't see any reason not to buy that board. The company just makes excellent mobo's, as far as I can tell.

 

[Ricemarine]

Originally posted by: SadisticOne

Originally posted by: Ricemarine
*snip*
For the same price, the Antec NeoHE can be just as good with 3 rails, just incompatible with asus motherboards...
I suggest an epox 9NPA+ mobo to lower the costs...

I've had some bad experiences with PSU's I spent a lot of cash on going bad, except for PC Power and Cooling.. and add to the fact that I'm supporting a US company, that produces in my experience, excellent products, and I'm happier going with that product.

As for epox... I'd consider it, I guess, but I had such an excellent and seemless experience with the DFI LanParty NF3, with a standard A64, that I used in my wife's upgrade last year, I don't see any reason not to buy that board. The company just makes excellent mobo's, as far as I can tell.

then I might consider the fact you should look up information about corsair + dfi incompatibility and if you're willing to bios flash first thing without that corsair ram

 

[SadisticOne]

Thanks for the heads up.

Apparently from what I'm reading, this mobo has some issues running certain revs of RAM in dual channel mode, with certain BIOS revisions. Ram issues like that aren't that uncommon in my experience... you often see issues with either clocking or stability for every model of mobo.

Considering I'm probably looking to do something about RAM early next year, its not that big a deal, for me...