Good Upgrade from an Athlon XP w/o Sacrificing AGP and DDR

[babutiger]

Since AMD has slashed prices across the board on it's family of processors (See Here) and I have free time over the holidays I figure now is a good time to upgrade my rig.

I am currently running an old but well-loved Athlon XP-M 2200+ Processor with Shuttle AN35N nforce2 mobo & Corsair PC3200 DDR RAM. I recently upgraded my video card from an ATI 128mb 9800pro to a 256mb X850pro thinking that would resolve my rig's sluggish performance in games. Unfortunately no such luck and now my XP-M is crippling the new x850's performance. I would like to upgrade my cpu/mobo combination while haning onto my RAM and AGP Video Card. With most mobos eliminating the AGP slot it's been difficult to find the right upgrade path.

Any help here is appreciated

 

[praeses]

Basically there are two recommendations I can make in that department:

ASRock 775Dual-VSTA
(cannot remmeber if the PCI-E is 16x electrically, although it should make virtually no difference)

ASRock 939Dual-SATA2

The first option is far more future proof, and you should be able to get more performance today with an E6400/6600 which are probably around your target price/performance range. The latter could be conceivably cheaper if you slap in an opteron 165/170 if you can still find one on sale. I went the latter route far before conroe was available, and have not regretted it, yet given the option today I'ld choose the first. (using an X800XL AIW btw)

 

[myocardia]

Originally posted by: praeses
Basically there are two recommendations I can make in that department:

ASRock 775Dual-VSTA
(cannot remmeber if the PCI-E is 16x electrically, although it should make virtually no difference)

That board has a 4x PCI-E bandwidth, even though the slot is technically a 16x (physical) slot. It wouldn't make much difference, though, with an X850 Pro.

 

[Yellowbeard]

WOW, AGP MOBOs are almost extinct. I did find one bundle page you "might' could use. However, I cannot vouch for the vendor and I would strongly suggest you research the vendor and make certain they have the item in stock before you pay them.

ASROCK 939 + AGP BUNDLES

If you don't like that vendor or the bundles, I'd shop for an ASROCK MOBO. THat is about the only MOBO name I would trust considering the options available.

ASROCK HOME

939Dual SATA2

 

[Arkaign]

Get this and a 6300 or maybe 6400 ..

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16813135027

 

[Yellowbeard]

Good ideas on the Intel unless those crazy low AMD prices are too good to pass up. I was stuck in an AMD frame of mind because of the OPs original system.

EDIT: If budget is a concern, you can have a 4000+ and MOBO for about the cost of a E6300. However, as the other guys noted, a C2D setup would be MUCH more future proof.

 

[praeses]

That board has a 4x PCI-E bandwidth, even though the slot is technically a 16x (physical) slot. It wouldn't make much difference, though, with an X850 Pro.

His x950Pro is AGP, so it would make no difference on his current card, however as a future upgrade path, it may have an ever so slight bearing. I cannot find the benchmarks from before, but there was a comparison of an x1900XT on both this board and a similar ASRock board with a true 16x PCI-E and the differences were almost immeasurable. Not sure how it would fare with an 8800GTX though.

 

[myocardia]

Originally posted by: praeses

That board has a 4x PCI-E bandwidth, even though the slot is technically a 16x (physical) slot. It wouldn't make much difference, though, with an X850 Pro.

His x950Pro is AGP, so it would make no difference on his current card, however as a future upgrade path, it may have an ever so slight bearing. I cannot find the benchmarks from before, but there was a comparison of an x1900XT on both this board and a similar ASRock board with a true 16x PCI-E and the differences were almost immeasurable. Not sure how it would fare with an 8800GTX though.

:laugh:That lets you know how short my memory is, huh? I knew that, when I started writing the post, but went to the bathroom, and had completely forgotten that his X850 was AGP by the time I got back. Anyway, I read that same article, and IIRC, there was like a 10 or 15% difference in performance.

edit: Not that 10-15% is a huge difference. I don't think the test was done with an X1900XT, though. It was with a slower card, I'm almost positive. They said it was because most people buying that motherboard and an E6300 or 6400 weren't gonna be using top of the line video cards.

 

[zephyrprime]

Do yourself a favor and just upgrade everything. There's not point to hanging on to such old hardware.

Sell your x850 pro on ebay where it can fetch about $150. Then buy the 7900gs from bestbuy currently on sale for $150.

Get a opteron 165 for $160 from newegg and the MSI neo4 for $42 from compgeeks. It still uses DDR but ddr2 isn't so great anyway and probably won't offer a big benefit except for people using quad cores some day.

Stick with the stock hsf which comes free with the 165 and you should be able to hit 2.6ghz pretty easily.

 

[babutiger]

Well I'm not interested in upgrading my recently purchased vid card and moving to pci-e at the moment and since DDR2 performance is not worth it's weight in $$ starting from scratch sounds even less appealing.

I like the idea of C2D, seems Intel hit a home run with this one. Of the mobos suggested, ecs & a-rock, or not suggested for that matter which reigns better for overclocking? I want to push this on air so will the retail hsf be up to snuff or should I go with a heavy weight hsf? I want to keep my cpu/mobo/hsf budget approx. $200.

Thanks for the help so far. I came to the right place

 

[Yellowbeard]

Asrock over ECS in my book.

 

[myocardia]

Originally posted by: Yellowbeard
Asrock over ECS in my book.

No doubt about that. Asrock is no highend board, for sure, but at least it's made by Asus, so you at least get BIOS updates. It overclocks slightly better, also.

 

[o1die]

I just bought a spare 939 3200 at newegg ($61) and chaintech 1689 board ($44). I won't be changing memory anytime soon. The chaintech board is discontinued, as chaintech went out of the board business, but drivers are still available at their website. It works ok, but doesn't overclock much. Just a basic board with agp only.

 

[babutiger]

Originally posted by: zephyrprime
Do yourself a favor and just upgrade everything. There's not point to hanging on to such old hardware.

Sell your x850 pro on ebay where it can fetch about $150. Then buy the 7900gs from bestbuy currently on sale for $150.

Get a opteron 165 for $160 from newegg and the MSI neo4 for $42 from compgeeks. It still uses DDR but ddr2 isn't so great anyway and probably won't offer a big benefit except for people using quad cores some day.

Stick with the stock hsf which comes free with the 165 and you should be able to hit 2.6ghz pretty easily.

Well zeph I think I should eat crow on this one and say your idea is sounding more attractive as I look closer at it and since I can create a more futureproof system in the process. But I am more inclined to stick with Intel C2D tho.

So what it comes down to now is upgrading to a new Intel Conroe CPU with a motherboard that supports DDR (not DDR2 which is key for me), PCI-E (goan to sell my AGP card now) and Ultra-DMA IDE (want to keep my hard drives for now).

I have a 25% off coupon that can be used at Amazon.com and they carry both E6300 & E6400. If someone can point me to a solid motherboard there I can achieve my budget of sub $200.

Cheers

 

[babutiger]

^^bump^^

would like to order any day now

 

[3chordcharlie]

As long as you're at 2.2+ ghz, it's higjhly unlikely that your XP-m is *the* problem.

I'm with the crowd that says just upgrade everything if your system isn't cutting it for you; AGP and ddr are dead-ends, and getting more difficult and expensive to stay compatible with all the time.

Now that I saved you all those headaches, you can send me the xp-m for my dinosaur system any time you like