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Need thoughts on upgrade I am considering

J

jahutch

Member
Ok, I'm having thoughts of upgrading my system, but am having trouble deciding exactly what to do. My current system is a bit on the old side - about 2.5 years old to be exact. It is a Pentium 4 2.53 GHz running on an Intel E7205 ("Granite Bay") mobo with a gig of DDR266. I was running a Radeon 9700 (non-Pro), but recently purchased a Geforce 6800 which I got a good price on (180ish) and that I am very happy with. It is, of course, AGP.

After getting the card, and encountering clear indications in games that I am now CPU limited, I am seriously thinking I may want to revamp a few more things - do a full on minor upgrade of sorts. Budget is a consideration for me - I'd like to keep this below 350. So here is what I came up with:

EPOX EP-9NDA3J Mobo (Nforce 3 ultra chipset)
Athlon 64 3000+ (Venice core)
1 gig of DDR 400 RAM

I can get all that in the neighborhood of 320 bucks. My thoughts on it are as follows. It is socket 939, so if in a year or so I get an upgrade itch, I can always drop a newer Athlon 64 in, possibly even a dual core. It seems rather future proof in general. The only real down side I see is the fact it is AGP and not PCI Express. That said, PCI Express hardly seems to matter at current. Given that my current vid card (the new 6800) is AGP, AGP seems the logical choice. I figure in terms of being future proof, I am (a) unlikely to upgrade the video card any time soon (since the 6800, while not bleeding edge, is pretty darn good), in fact, I'm unlikely to upgrade it until I want to upgrade everything else too, (b) it seem AGP is not being completely phased out in the near future and probably won't be until some whole new socket/architecture is adopted, and (c) Given this whole thing is costing 320 bucks, if at some point I have to buy a mobo for PCI Express, I can probably live with that.

This leads me to my questions:

1) Will an Athlon 64 3000+ be a significant improvement over an OLD (Northwood, I think, but I'm not certain) Pentium 4 2.53 GHz on a dual DDR266 chipset? Everything I've read seems to indicate the performance bump will be considerable, but I figured I'd ask anyway.

2) Is not getting PCI Express really shooting me in the foot? I could try to send my new GF6800 AGP card back and get the PCI-Exp variant - but that will cost me 40 bucks more, if its not too late to send it back. Further a PCI-Express mobo will be a goodly bit more expensive than what I am looking at. I am worried these two costs will push me over budget and I'll end up back at square 1,which is using the AGP card in my current system and not upgrading for a year or two. Given my budget and situation, does my choice to stick with AGP for now seem reasonable?

Thanks in advance for helping!

PS: Note that being "bleeding edge" is not a concern for me - good speed from good components at a good price is.
 
Yes, you'll definitely notice the difference, and you can also overclock the hell out of it if you so choose. PCI-E is a waste. Since you're not cutting edge anyway you'll have midrange AGP cards still being released for the next two years so you'll be fine until your next system overhaul.

Overall, it sounds like a solid plan and I'm sure you'll be quite pleased with your new setup. Enjoy.
 
Bar81,

Thanks a lot for the info, thats exactly what I was looking for! I'll probably order the stuff at the end of this week - going to wait and see what kind of bonus I get from my internship this summer 🙂.

If its large enough, I may bump that 3000+ up to a 3200 or some such. We'll see.
 
looks good to me. except you think maybe you can take back the agp 6800 and go with a pci-e one? and than get a pci-e mobo.
 
I think it's definitely a worthy upgrade.
Staying AGP seems to makes sense for you at this time.
If you plan to OC, go with the 3200+ to get the 10X multiplier. IMO it's well worth the small price increase.
 
Basically I have what you want to go to: Venice 3000, NF3, 1 gig, 6800nu. I have my 6800 unlocked/oc'ed and have gotten the CPU to 2.67 GHZ, gives me around 4700 3d05. Compare with what you have for an idea on the upgrade. For me the jump to the 10x multi was 80 dollars which was too much.
 
Regarding overclocking: I doubt I'll do it, I'm just not the OCing type. Certainly not on a new setup. So, given that, is there any use in getting the 3200+? Or is the difference not worth the price unless you jump to a 3500?

Thanks!

PS: I've pretty well decided im going with that mobo and RAM - the only question now is what specific CPU.
 
You should at least do a little overclocking, like don't up your voltage and see how far you can get. Its free performance, especially if you don't increase the voltages. Are you at least going to try and unlock the 6800? I would stick to the 3000 anyway, the jump to the 3200 seems too high to me.
 
Ok, now you guys have me curious about OCing. If its possible to do it without having to buy special memory, etc, I may just try it out. A little extra performance for free is a good thing.

Does OCing still void the warranty?

Some questions / facts about my situation:

1) I will be getting good, name brand (likely Corsair Value or PNY) DDR400 RAM. Not cheap junk (in case that's the impression I gave). What I WON'T be getting is ultra pricey stuff with heat spreaders and whatnot.

2) My case has excellent cooling, and I have a 400+ watt (450 I believe, don't feel like cracking the case right now 😛) Enermax power supply, so I anticipate no issues there.

3) If from what I've read, to OC it sounds like I simply up the FSB. Say, for example, to 233 from 200. With the 3000+ that would give me 2097 Mhz (effectively 2.1 Ghz). Then, I would test stability, and up the voltage if necessary. Is this correct?

4) Would I need to up voltage for that OC (FSB to 233)? How much on average?

5) Could my RAM handle running at 233 (DDR 466)?

6) Are there voltages other than the CPU voltage I'd have to contend with?

Thanks in advance!
 
Warranty, in theory yes it voids but how can they prove it. I have had to send procs in for RMA that were overclocked at some point in their lifes but their deaths were unrelated. They never said anything and replaced them with no problems. If they had died due to overclocking i would not have RMA'ed them.

You don't have to overclock the memory if you don't want to, with the right divider the ram stays at its stock speed. I actually have old DDR 400 and although it has slow timings I cannot find a real-world benchmark that shows its more the 1-2% slower than others. Since you are buying new you should be able to get some good timings on the ram.

You are upping the FSB, mine got to 295...233 should be easy. You might not need to touch the voltage for that. You sould not have to mess with any other voltages. There are some good threads in the cpu forum to check out.
 
Crashedout:

Thanks for the info! I did indeed read some of the threads in the CPU forum... I'm starting to get more and more intrigued, these things sound insanely easy to overclock.

So, I'm thinking now I may go with the 3200+. Its about 40 bucks more. Then I can bump the FSB to 250. This seems like an ideal speed to me - you get 2.50 GHz out of the CPU, you can knock the Hypertransport multiplier back to 4 and have it at exactly 1000MHz, and you can change the DRAM clock to 133, giving you 410, which I suspect is close enough to 400 that I should have no trouble with good memory.

Further, this is a significant overclock, but is well within the possible range, so it seems I should be fine with stock cooling and such.

And who knows, after a while of running stable at 2.5, maybe I'll bump it up some more..

From what I've heard this should be rock solid with an Athlon XP Venice, so I'm quite tempted to try it out... the overclocking bug is taking me!
 
I would stick with the 3000+ and use the ram divider. The 3:2 ram divider is the way to go, and lower your multiplier to 8. Then up the voltage to around 1.5 and you should get a stable overclock of around 2400 MHZ. You do not need to raise the FSB of the ram. I would suggest that you not get teh 3200+.

I'm not sure if the AGP lock still aplies to socket 939, but remember to lock your PCI/AGP slots.
 
Hacp:

I'm not sure I understand... to get 2400 with a multiplier of 8 I'd have to bump the FSB all the way to 400 would I not? That seems on the high side. Even with the RAM divider at 3:2, that seems like it would clock the RAM at a whopping 600Mhz. Further, that doesn't seem to work as well with the Hypertransport - since it needs to be under 1000 in most cases, I'd have to use a multiplier of 2 (400*2 = 800).

Maybe I'm not understanding something about overclocking in general, but isn't this a rather drastic option?

Also, why specifically is the 3200 a bad idea? Just not worth the 40 bucks?
 
If you get on the e-wiz deal the 3000 is about 118, but you would need a heatsink. The retails are 150. If you want to do retail then the 3200 is not that bad a deal.

Anyway you should get 2.5 easy with decent temps. Since you are new and worried, and have the money get the 3200 retail. I would not count on 4x htt most have to go back to 3x on NF3 even though they are supposed to do 1000. The agp is locked but the sata 1&2 slots are not, stick to the 3&4 and you should be fine. hardforums.com has a good sticky on overclocking as well in the AMD cpu section.
 
Crashedout: thanks for the info. Regarding the SATA - I will be using an IDE hard drive (WD Special Edition) - so do I have nothing to worry about?

Thanks!

PS: I am going to post something about this on the Overclocking forum - given the direction this thread is taking it seems the more appropriate place.
 
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