The Real Deal - If you want a gaming rig, spend 90% of your funds towards a videocard and not the cpu.

[Gatecrasher3]

i think what im going to do is try the GT with my current set-up and let the game play decide. if its to choppy then i will invest in a 64 3000, MB and ram. but if im getting nice FPS with minimal lag then i will hold out till the years end or a nice price drop before i buy new components. i mean i was gunna need to upgrade sooner or later.

 

[Gatecrasher3]

i don?t like buying "in the middle" parts. things don?t last long and thats especially true for the pc world. so if i gunna go im going to go big.

 

[five40]

Great Post. Love to see the stats.

 

[PrayForDeath]

Originally posted by: DAPUNISHER

Originally posted by: Gatecrasher3
my MB is a ASUS A7S333

Grab the latest bios, buy a Barton Mobile, and multiplier overclock and you will have no worries about holding the GT back badly. You should be able to manage 2.3ghz easy with a good steping. The board may not ID it correctly but you can manually set eveything. If it won't boot *not likely* just set it up in the bios using the 2000+ then save, exit, turn it off before it can try to post and put in the mobile.

This is one great advice! :thumbsup:

And I love your post, OP. (Just added it to my favorites)

 

[hytek369]

sweet read

 

[IceMole]

Gate, I was doing the same thing you are planning on doing except I had a Ti4200. I was so impressed by the 6800 I decided to wait on going to an A64 chip and just overclocked my XP2200 to 2.2ghz.

 

[Genx87]

300% more money than other 80Gig drives for 10% more performance tops is a very poor utility of cost/benefit analysis ..or lack thereof.

Bah, it was a little treat to myself I didnt need space as much as the fastest disk I could reasonably buy.
I got the 2x160GBs just cooking away on the file server.

 

[Gatecrasher3]

The problem is that im not good at OC, I don?t know much about it
but im sure all the info I need to know is in this forum

but if I do get my 1.6 to run at a 1.7 or .8 then I will invest in some OCZ or pqi ddr 400 ram and enjoy the mayor FPS increase with the GT

 

[BFG10K]

Once you hit the mid 2 Ghz range on P4's (800FSB) or a bottom end Athlon 64, pairing that up with an X800/6800 is much better for games than 3 Ghz+ Intel or a high end A64 with a 9800 Pro.

In general yes but upgrading the CPU in such situations would still show a difference.

 

[jiffylube1024]

Originally posted by: BFG10K

Once you hit the mid 2 Ghz range on P4's (800FSB) or a bottom end Athlon 64, pairing that up with an X800/6800 is much better for games than 3 Ghz+ Intel or a high end A64 with a 9800 Pro.

In general yes but upgrading the CPU in such situations would still show a difference.

No question there, but in a relative comparison, something like an Athlon64 3500+ with a 9800Pro is going to get smoked by an Athlon64 2800+ with a 6800GT, especially if you overclock the CPUs.

Originally posted by: AnnoyedGrunt

Originally posted by: Gatecrasher3
i have a xp 2000, with 512 333mhz ddr and im getting a bfg 6800 GT
i know it would be a mayor step up from my 8500 LE 128, but would i even come close to pushing the 6800 gt to what it really can do?
or should i go all out and upgrade my cpu, motherboard and ram like i was planning on doing?
not having to spend all the money on new parts would be very very nice, but would i just be seeing a small percentage of what the 6800 gt could really do if I stayed with my current setup?
i mean i don?t even have a 8x AGP slot.

I'd say that it depend mostly on the game.

I have an XP1800+ with a 9700pro, and I cannot play Halo, FarCry, or Doom3 @ settings that I consider playable. I used to have a GF3 Ti200, and thought the upgrade would help my Halo feel, but that simply was not the case. It allowed me to play in higher resolutions, but the framerates were still too low to be much fun. I tried Doom3 anywhere from 640x480 low detail to 1024x768 high detail, and the performance was about the same on all settings - CRAPPY!

-D'oh!

Your system is a bit 'too dated' to see the full benefits of even a 9700Pro (although if you got a 6800GT or X800 Pro, you'd still have better performance in games, and probably 'free' AA and AF due to be so CPU limited.

Your system is behind in a few too many categories; 1.5 Ghz CPU, 133 MHz FSB with DDR266, on probably a KT266A motherboard. If you sold your setup and got even an NF2/Mobile Barton/PC3200DDR setup, it would yield huge gains in games; upgrading to an Athlon64 would be even better .

 

[AnnoyedGrunt]

Yeah, my system is definitely dated, but that's why I said there is a certain lower limit of CPU power you must hit before a video card becomes critical.

So in order to address that, I am planning on getting a new computer around december.

A64 3200 90nm
1 GB RAM
6600GT/6800GT
WD Raptor

I think that'll be a good upgrade.

I've been waiting for the AT DVD-RW roundup that Anand mentioned a while ago, but I just noticed that in the Mid Range Comp Article they recommended the NEC 3500, so I'm guessing that recommendation came out of the roundup and therefore that's the drive I'll be getting.

I'll maybe go buy a case, the dvd drive, and a card reader now, just to ease the addiction until december.

-D'oh!

 

[DAPUNISHER]

Originally posted by: AnnoyedGrunt
Yeah, my system is definitely dated, but that's why I said there is a certain lower limit of CPU power you must hit before a video card becomes critical.

So in order to address that, I am planning on getting a new computer around december.

A64 3200 90nm
1 GB RAM
6600GT/6800GT
WD Raptor

I think that'll be a good upgrade.

I've been waiting for the AT DVD-RW roundup that Anand mentioned a while ago, but I just noticed that in the Mid Range Comp Article they recommended the NEC 3500, so I'm guessing that recommendation came out of the roundup and therefore that's the drive I'll be getting.

I'll maybe go buy a case, the dvd drive, and a card reader now, just to ease the addiction until december.

-D'oh!

Grab the 3000+ if you plan to overclock since it ramps just as well and costs less. Other than that you will be "back in the game" in more ways than one

 

[jt8284]

My current system:
ASUS A8V Deluxe Motherboard
AMD Athlon 64 3200+ @ 2.2Ghz 31C idle 40C full load
Thermalright XP-120 heatsink 120mm Zalman fan w/ Artic Silver 5
2x 512mb Pc3200 @ 220mhz
fsb/ram: cpu/10
memory timing 2.5-3-3-11
8x AGP Sapphire Ati Radeon X800XT bios flashed to PE core/mem 520/560 33C idle 45C full load
Artic Cooler VGA Silencer 4
Sony CDRW 48x40x48
Sony DVD 16x
Antec 433 watt Power Supply

Couple of questions:
1) Is my cpu bottlenecking my Video Card??? A little or alot??
2) I get 61fsp Doom 3 @ 1280x1024 @ high setting with 2x AA 8x AF. I can't play on ultra setting otherwise I get choppy graphics even thougth the fps stays pretty high. Is this normal?? I tried having vertical sync on and off and it made really no difference.
3) What's the cheapest way for me to get 600/600 overclock on my Ati Radeon X800XT??
4) Should I have fast write on or off?
5) How do you do a pencil mod on X800XT???
6) I know my ram is already async to the cpu @ cpu/10 would overclocking higher and further asyncronizing the ram hurt the performance really bad??? I can OC to 2.5 ghz but I had to drop the ram to pc2700 speed = 250mhz to 208mhz memory.
7) I know they unlocked the multiplier for Intel Prescott CPUs with bios option on Asus motherboards called "CPU Lockfree" do you guys think they'll ever do the same for AMD Athlon 64s??


Sorry for the many questions but I've been wondering about these things for weeks now. Thank you.

 

[xtknight]

Hmm... uhh..what about Doom 3 and Half Life 2? <<< Sorry, I'm stupid, I didn't read your entire post. I agree for the older games that you posted though. Hell, I think my Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory is still CPU bottlenecked, but I don't have 50 video cards and CPU's to support that hypothesis. However I felt my change from an Athlon XP 1600+ to a Pentium 4 2.6C (OC'd to 3.4) made a tremendous difference.

 

[Chaotic42]

C?????? ?? ???? ?????????!

 

[PrayForDeath]

I think the 90% towards a video card is too much, I just ran Doom 3 on a system that has a 9800 Pro and an Athlon T-bird 1.3Ghz and 512Mb RAM and it ran slow as hell, somewhere between 2-20 FPS, it goes low during firefights and that's what makes it unplayable, that was on 1024x768 low settings no AA no AF, I tried to lower everything, turned off all advanced options, and set the res to 640 480 and even set the texture and mipmap quality in the CP to high performance, and the game is still the same, it goes below 5 FPS during firefights meaning it's 100% CPU bottlenecked, I think an Athlon XP 2500+ and a 9600 XT should score better than this in Doom 3.

 

[slash196]

Well, seeing as both CPU and GPU are horribly outdated, I'd say a full upgrade is in order.

 

[PrayForDeath]

I don't think a 9800Pro is horribly outdated, it's a pretty good midrange card.