Sorry but another upgrade or not question

[elcamino74ss]

First I have two rigs. One I use for gaming/daily and had built a 2nd for testing/side work. I work as an IT security person having a spare test/linux/vm box really helps.
Both are s754 and no major gaming right now. Mostly car games and mmorpgs are my style. If it helps planning I have 3 boys ages 5-8 that currently share one Dell GX150 P3 933, 512mb ram, and 32mb gf2 mx400.

I've got a 2 port KVM and running dual monitor on the daily box with the 19" Norcent WS LCD and my old NEC 19" Flat CRT on the KVM to both boxes

Both setups are running a mild oc from 1.8 to 2.25 ghz.

Will I gain much from going to dual core or pci x? I hate to spend more $$$ on agp or s754.

edit: I forgot to add I also do some music recording of my trumpet playing so I've also debated just getting a mac mini and using that for web/email.

My two current boxes :

XP/daily box

Soltek nforce3 s754 board
Athlon 64 2800
2 x 512mb gskill cas 2 ddr 400
evga 6600 gt 128mb
seagate 250gb sata
maxtor 250gb pata
sb xfi extreme audio
antec P180 case
Ultra X 500w
old pioneer 4x dvdrw

Test box (currently trying out vista)
ECS NFORCE3a
3100 Sempron
1gb Kingston value ram
radeon 9200se 128mb agp
160gb sata
dvd drive
antec lanboy
antec true blue 350w

 

[elcamino74ss]

bump. any ideas?

 

[Ruptga]

You mean PCIe, not PCIx, the two are entirely different specs.
PCIe has theoretical advantages over AGP, but really modern cards aren't bottlenecked much by AGP 8x, ie a 1950pro AGP will do you just fine for a good while, though obviously your CPU will bottleneck that.

Anyway, dualcore is very nice to have for multitasking, and there are no s754 dualcore CPUs so you don't have to worry about dumping money into a dead-end

If you want to upgrade on the cheap, look for a s939 (4200 or so) in FS/FT, it will be a nice upgrade over what you have. PCIe is unavoidable in a modern system, though there are a few boards with PCIe and AGP if you don't want to upgrade your graphics just yet.

1GB is minimum to take advantage of dualcore, 2GB ideal for XP.

As to whether upgrade or not, do the things you do run slowly enough to aggravate you? If not, don't worry about upgrading, you'll just be spending money before you need to.

 

[Zap]

Originally posted by: ADDAvenger
As to whether upgrade or not, do the things you do run slowly enough to aggravate you? If not, don't worry about upgrading, you'll just be spending money before you need to.

That's what I was wondering as well. For the OP, what is the reason for wanting to upgrade? Is there some target application which you hope to run faster/smoother? Is there something about the current setups that you aren't satisfied with?

 

[elcamino74ss]

thanks for some of the feedback. I know the s754 is a dead end line and the 6600gt is a tad dated. The 3100 box didnt seem to lag till I threw vista at it. Looks like I'll be holding off on the vista upgrade. I wouldnt mind a newer/faster dvd burner and not sure if I need to go to 2gb on those boxes.

I know there are better AGP cards I just hate to throw any more money into AGP cards. I might keep an eye out for a 939 option but for what I use the boxes for they run things ok. If anything I can just beef up the ram on the test box and run virtual environments. The kids will just have to wait and for just web browsing their p3 933 gets by ok.