socket 754 still lives at my house

[rogue1979]

I keep looking for a reason to upgrade to a dual core, but frankly I don't encode, autocad, photoshop or do serious multi-tasking, or anything else where I can really use it.

I do some medium gaming with an X850XT at PE speeds, more than enough for my needs.

I have been running a Sempron 2800+ at 2.5GHz for about a year and a half. Since it was only $53 shipped I picked up a 3200+ at newegg. I was mildly surprised to see it easily hit 2.8GHz at 1.50v. I was even more surprised that my X850XT showed a significant boost with the extra processing power.

I gotta say socket 754 is still an incredible bang for the buck. With a fast video card, a $53 3200+ overclocked on a $50 socket 754 motherboard with decent overclocking options can still game fast enough for just about anything out there. I am sure that a 7900 Nvidia series or a X1950 ATI would run at full potential on this aging set up.

 

[Conky]

If you updated to a C2D and a cheap ASRock 775Dual-VSTA you could keep your old AGP card, your old DDR RAM, and the improvement in framerates would blow your mind.

Before I finished upgrading to DDR2, PCI-E, and a DS3 motherboard I ran my C2D with the above mentioned gear and it was absolutely the best under $300 upgrade EVER. :beer:

 

[Stumps]

Originally posted by: Conky
If you updated to a C2D and a cheap ASRock 775Dual-VSTA you could keep your old AGP card, your old DDR RAM, and the improvement in framerates would blow your mind.

Before I finished upgrading to DDR2, PCI-E, and a DS3 motherboard I ran my C2D with the above mentioned gear and it was absolutely the best under $300 upgrade EVER. :beer:

That's what I'll being doing with my Skt 754 A64 rig in the next few weeks....E4300 and Asrock 775 4coreDual VSTA.

I've pretty much reached the limit of what I can with my rig, but 2.87ghz is pretty impressive from an A64 3000+ setup.

 

[Conky]

Originally posted by: Stumps

Originally posted by: Conky
If you updated to a C2D and a cheap ASRock 775Dual-VSTA you could keep your old AGP card, your old DDR RAM, and the improvement in framerates would blow your mind.

Before I finished upgrading to DDR2, PCI-E, and a DS3 motherboard I ran my C2D with the above mentioned gear and it was absolutely the best under $300 upgrade EVER. :beer:

That's what I'll being doing with my Skt 754 A64 rig in the next few weeks....E4300 and Asrock 775 4coreDual VSTA.

I've pretty much reached the limit of what I can with my rig, but 2.87ghz is pretty impressive from an A64 3000+ setup.

That E4300 with the ASRock board should be a wicked combo. The ASRock board isn't good for more than 295-300FSB but with that 10x multiplier you are looking at 2.9-3.0Ghz easy which will really open your eyes!

 

[Stumps]

Originally posted by: Conky

Originally posted by: Stumps

Originally posted by: Conky
If you updated to a C2D and a cheap ASRock 775Dual-VSTA you could keep your old AGP card, your old DDR RAM, and the improvement in framerates would blow your mind.

Before I finished upgrading to DDR2, PCI-E, and a DS3 motherboard I ran my C2D with the above mentioned gear and it was absolutely the best under $300 upgrade EVER. :beer:

That's what I'll being doing with my Skt 754 A64 rig in the next few weeks....E4300 and Asrock 775 4coreDual VSTA.

I've pretty much reached the limit of what I can with my rig, but 2.87ghz is pretty impressive from an A64 3000+ setup.

That E4300 with the ASRock board should be a wicked combo. The ASRock board isn't good for more than 295-300FSB but with that 10x multiplier you are looking at 2.9-3.0Ghz easy which will really open your eyes!

that's why I'm going for the 4coreDual....it has official support for the 333FSB.

 

[Philippine Mango]

Originally posted by: rogue1979
I keep looking for a reason to upgrade to a dual core, but frankly I don't encode, autocad, photoshop or do serious multi-tasking, or anything else where I can really use it.

I do some medium gaming with an X850XT at PE speeds, more than enough for my needs.

I have been running a Sempron 2800+ at 2.5GHz for about a year and a half. Since it was only $53 shipped I picked up a 3200+ at newegg. I was mildly surprised to see it easily hit 2.8GHz at 1.50v. I was even more surprised that my X850XT showed a significant boost with the extra processing power.

I gotta say socket 754 is still an incredible bang for the buck. With a fast video card, a $53 3200+ overclocked on a $50 socket 754 motherboard with decent overclocking options can still game fast enough for just about anything out there. I am sure that a 7900 Nvidia series or a X1950 ATI would run at full potential on this aging set up.

You've got a pretty decent system, I don't know if there is actually much of a performance difference between semprons and athlons but there may be as the sempron has very little cache to what I recall so you might want to check that out.

Otherwise in my opinion, I think you should wait it out before upgrading as the system you have is fairly decent. What resolutions do you play your games at? Playing at 1600X1200 and upping the quality settings should remove the CPU bottleneck. Heck even at 1280X1024 with 8XAA and 16XAF and high quality textures you should be able to avoid the CPU bottleneck.

What are your settings?

 

[Conky]

Originally posted by: Philippine Mango

Originally posted by: rogue1979
I keep looking for a reason to upgrade to a dual core, but frankly I don't encode, autocad, photoshop or do serious multi-tasking, or anything else where I can really use it.

I do some medium gaming with an X850XT at PE speeds, more than enough for my needs.

I have been running a Sempron 2800+ at 2.5GHz for about a year and a half. Since it was only $53 shipped I picked up a 3200+ at newegg. I was mildly surprised to see it easily hit 2.8GHz at 1.50v. I was even more surprised that my X850XT showed a significant boost with the extra processing power.

I gotta say socket 754 is still an incredible bang for the buck. With a fast video card, a $53 3200+ overclocked on a $50 socket 754 motherboard with decent overclocking options can still game fast enough for just about anything out there. I am sure that a 7900 Nvidia series or a X1950 ATI would run at full potential on this aging set up.

You've got a pretty decent system, I don't know if there is actually much of a performance difference between semprons and athlons but there may be as the sempron has very little cache to what I recall so you might want to check that out.

Otherwise in my opinion, I think you should wait it out before upgrading as the system you have is fairly decent. What resolutions do you play your games at? Playing at 1600X1200 and upping the quality settings should remove the CPU bottleneck. Heck even at 1280X1024 with 8XAA and 16XAF and high quality textures you should be able to avoid the CPU bottleneck.

What are your settings?

You don't even know the difference between processors so why are you trying to give advice? And the "cpu bottleneck"? Yeah, his cpu is a bottleneck. Dude, please. :roll:

 

[Philippine Mango]

Originally posted by: Conky

Originally posted by: Philippine Mango

Originally posted by: rogue1979
I keep looking for a reason to upgrade to a dual core, but frankly I don't encode, autocad, photoshop or do serious multi-tasking, or anything else where I can really use it.

I do some medium gaming with an X850XT at PE speeds, more than enough for my needs.

I have been running a Sempron 2800+ at 2.5GHz for about a year and a half. Since it was only $53 shipped I picked up a 3200+ at newegg. I was mildly surprised to see it easily hit 2.8GHz at 1.50v. I was even more surprised that my X850XT showed a significant boost with the extra processing power.

I gotta say socket 754 is still an incredible bang for the buck. With a fast video card, a $53 3200+ overclocked on a $50 socket 754 motherboard with decent overclocking options can still game fast enough for just about anything out there. I am sure that a 7900 Nvidia series or a X1950 ATI would run at full potential on this aging set up.

You've got a pretty decent system, I don't know if there is actually much of a performance difference between semprons and athlons but there may be as the sempron has very little cache to what I recall so you might want to check that out.

Otherwise in my opinion, I think you should wait it out before upgrading as the system you have is fairly decent. What resolutions do you play your games at? Playing at 1600X1200 and upping the quality settings should remove the CPU bottleneck. Heck even at 1280X1024 with 8XAA and 16XAF and high quality textures you should be able to avoid the CPU bottleneck.

What are your settings?

You don't even know the difference between processors so why are you trying to give advice? And the "cpu bottleneck"? Yeah, his cpu is a bottleneck. Dude, please. :roll:

Wtf are you smoking? You're trying to call me out while you're more likely than not on some sort of mind alterting drug, causing you to write out incomplete and irrelevant thoughts...

In case you're wondering, there is an apparent CPU bottleneck stemming from the OP's comments: "I have been running a Sempron 2800+ at 2.5GHz for about a year and a half. Since it was only $53 shipped I picked up a 3200+ at newegg. I was mildly surprised to see it easily hit 2.8GHz at 1.50v. I was even more surprised that my X850XT showed a significant boost with the extra processing power. "

Reading that, even a midly retarded reader with basic computing skills could deduce that the CPU is limiting his gaming experience in some form as there is a direct correlation between increasing processor performance and better gameplay performance. Now if the OP doesn't want to get another processor, he can however avoid the processor from limting his game play experience and instead force the video card to be culprit by increasing quality settings. Why would someone do this? Well he did ask if it was worth it to get a 7900 series nvidia video card or X1950 card and to take advantage of those, he'd have to put more load on the graphics card opposed to the processor.

Oh and BTW I was correct in my assessment in that the difference between the sempron and athlon 64 is the reduction in cache, 64bit compatibility is disabled only in SOME semprons, not all.

Text

 

[Stumps]

the difference between a Sempron and Athlon 64 (skt 74 that is) at the same clock speed is very little, the 128kb L2 Sempron's show a considerable performance defeicit compared to the 256kb models.

I have a A64 3000+@2.87ghz and a Sempron 3100+@2.91ghz....there is pretty much nothing between them in most benchmarks, the Sempron tends to edge out the A64 in CPU benchmarks, but the A64 is faster in memory benchmarks, due to the extra 256kb L2 that it posesses.

 

[f4phantom2500]

Conky:

e4300 has 9x multi not 10x, but a C2D at 2.6~2.7 would still blow away his A64 at 2.8...however he seems rather content where he is and honestly I would expect his video card to be a bottleneck at that point. Speaking of which, he never said it was AGP, he could have a 754 machine with a PCI-e slot.

 

[Stumps]

Originally posted by: f4phantom2500
Conky:

e4300 has 9x multi not 10x, but a C2D at 2.6~2.7 would still blow away his A64 at 2.8...however he seems rather content where he is and honestly I would expect his video card to be a bottleneck at that point. Speaking of which, he never said it was AGP, he could have a 754 machine with a PCI-e slot.

that's why I'm jumping on the C2D bandwagon, it appears that my 2.87ghz A64 is a bit of a bottleneck for my AGP X1950Pro 512mb.

 

[Philippine Mango]

Originally posted by: f4phantom2500
Conky:

e4300 has 9x multi not 10x, but a C2D at 2.6~2.7 would still blow away his A64 at 2.8...however he seems rather content where he is and honestly I would expect his video card to be a bottleneck at that point. Speaking of which, he never said it was AGP, he could have a 754 machine with a PCI-e slot.

True but think of it this way. If hes got a PCIe video card, then you could argue he should upgrade to conroe anyways, but then if he upgrades to conroe, he just got a new board+processor, then you could argue that he should upgrade his video card because he can so he mind as well stick with the system hes got and wait until he can get a huge performance increase and or when the system he currently has doesn't suffice for what he does anymore...

 

[Maximilian]

Originally posted by: rogue1979
I keep looking for a reason to upgrade to a dual core, but frankly I don't encode, autocad, photoshop or do serious multi-tasking, or anything else where I can really use it.

I do some medium gaming with an X850XT at PE speeds, more than enough for my needs.

I have been running a Sempron 2800+ at 2.5GHz for about a year and a half. Since it was only $53 shipped I picked up a 3200+ at newegg. I was mildly surprised to see it easily hit 2.8GHz at 1.50v. I was even more surprised that my X850XT showed a significant boost with the extra processing power.

I gotta say socket 754 is still an incredible bang for the buck. With a fast video card, a $53 3200+ overclocked on a $50 socket 754 motherboard with decent overclocking options can still game fast enough for just about anything out there. I am sure that a 7900 Nvidia series or a X1950 ATI would run at full potential on this aging set up.

Good :thumbsup: Dont upgrade until you need to, sounds like your having a fine time with 754.

 

[rogue1979]

Originally posted by: f4phantom2500
Conky:

e4300 has 9x multi not 10x, but a C2D at 2.6~2.7 would still blow away his A64 at 2.8...however he seems rather content where he is and honestly I would expect his video card to be a bottleneck at that point. Speaking of which, he never said it was AGP, he could have a 754 machine with a PCI-e slot.

Yes, it is a PCI-e video card.

If you updated to a C2D and a cheap ASRock 775Dual-VSTA you could keep your old AGP card, your old DDR RAM, and the improvement in framerates would blow your mind.

Before I finished upgrading to DDR2, PCI-E, and a DS3 motherboard I ran my C2D with the above mentioned gear and it was absolutely the best under $300 upgrade EVER.

C2D is nice, but from my understanding it's about 20% faster then a dual core Athlon64 at the same clockspeed. Since the Asrock board tops out at 300Mhz, combining that with a 9x multiplier gets you 2.7Ghz max. Most games show very little improvement from a dual core vs. single core. So correct me if I am wrong, but for gaming that upgrade wouldn't show a big improvement in framerates, not worth the expense.

Seems like the sweet thing for C2D is overclocking to 3.2Ghz and beyond which gives it performance untouchable from AMD X2. If I feel the need to upgrade I would spend the extra bucks for a better motherboard to put the E4300 on.

But my point was for gaming only a fast and cheap socket 754 system is still a viable alternative with an unbelievable value. Not trying to say it can keep up with C2D.

 

[rogue1979]

double post, sorry

 

[Zap]

:thumbsup:

Really good value for a $53 investment. Plus, if you sell that Sempron CPU, can knock another few bucks off.

 

[Texun]

I'm with you on the S754 Sempron's. I've got 3 of them (plus a S939 FX-55) and have built several for others and have found them to be a great value. I still game on a 3100 with a 6600GT and HL2 looks amazing. It may not do the heaviest games, but then again I don't have a wad of cash tied up in it either. I thought about C2D but really have no need for one right now.

 

[nyker96]

rock on man! I'm in the same boat but probably will get the following in Aug or Sept after my Java web service exam just as a present for myself.
E4300, DS3, 2x1GB SuperTalent DDR2-667, 7900GS, 5150GH power supply.

 

[Stumps]

Originally posted by: rogue1979

Originally posted by: f4phantom2500
Conky:

e4300 has 9x multi not 10x, but a C2D at 2.6~2.7 would still blow away his A64 at 2.8...however he seems rather content where he is and honestly I would expect his video card to be a bottleneck at that point. Speaking of which, he never said it was AGP, he could have a 754 machine with a PCI-e slot.

Yes, it is a PCI-e video card.

If you updated to a C2D and a cheap ASRock 775Dual-VSTA you could keep your old AGP card, your old DDR RAM, and the improvement in framerates would blow your mind.

Before I finished upgrading to DDR2, PCI-E, and a DS3 motherboard I ran my C2D with the above mentioned gear and it was absolutely the best under $300 upgrade EVER.

C2D is nice, but from my understanding it's about 20% faster then a dual core Athlon64 at the same clockspeed. Since the Asrock board tops out at 300Mhz, combining that with a 9x multiplier gets you 2.7Ghz max. Most games show very little improvement from a dual core vs. single core. So correct me if I am wrong, but for gaming that upgrade wouldn't show a big improvement in framerates, not worth the expense.

Seems like the sweet thing for C2D is overclocking to 3.2Ghz and beyond which gives it performance untouchable from AMD X2. If I feel the need to upgrade I would spend the extra bucks for a better motherboard to put the E4300 on.

But my point was for gaming only a fast and cheap socket 754 system is still a viable alternative with an unbelievable value. Not trying to say it can keep up with C2D.

the Asrock 775 4coreDual VSTA is the same motherboard as the 775 Dual VSTA, only it has offical support for the 333FSB (1333mhz), that would allow a E4300 to reach 3.0ghz or a E6300 to reach 3.33ghz, which is faster than any A64 Dual core.

But I do agree with you, the Skt 754 platform is a nice setup and is still very fast, both my skt 754 setup are considerably faster than most single core Opterons or the 939 4000+.

even after I upgrade I still plan on keeping my A64, no need to get rid of a perfectly good setup...it will go with my collection of rigs, it means 1 more friend can join in on some LAN action.