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Upgrade to retail edge package? Or not worth the price?

V

V00D00

Golden Member
My friend has a retail edge bundle he'll give me, but I'm not sure if I want it. It's damn fast, but I'll have to buy a PCI express video card, and some DDR 2 memory. I would like at least a gig of ram, but I can only afford 512mb for now, which is kind of a downer to it. Overall I'm just not sure if it's worth the price. It's a nice upgrade, and the new video card would probably be nice, but I'm just not sure if I want to throw down that much cash for it. What are your guys' opinions?

My current setup is a Athlon XP 2500+, 1gb PC3200 DDR, GF3 ti500 = $0

The new setup would be P4 550 3.4ghz, 512mb PC4200 DDR2, Radeon x600 Pro = ~$520
 
If you're going to upgrade with $500 to burn, either just get a new 6800 GT (you might be CPU limited if you can't overclock your Barton), or maybe a vanilla 6800 or 6600 GT and a cheaper A64 setup. Your RAM right now is fine to upgrade to an A64. If you're gaming, the 775's not worth it--especially not with just an X600 (9600 with a different interface) and just 512 MB of RAM.
 
Should have mentioned, I'm not really into gaming. I would have gone for the x300 radeon, but I want the VIVO features of the x600 pro.

I DEFINEATLY don't want to blow it all on a new video card. I think I would rather smash my head with a hammer than do that.

And it's either going to be this upgrade or nothing. I only want this because I'm getting a deal on it through my friend. If I don't do this, I'm just not upgrading.

It's more of a "is the performance gain worth the price" kind of thing. I don't want an Athlon 64 either, I want to go with a P4 for my next one for the multimedia features, and they've always been faster at encoding.
 
barton does ok with decent video card. forgot which site did benchies with hl and doom3 using older chips and fast cards.. doh
 
For media encoding, yes that upgrade should give you a decent increase in performance, but would be better with 1 gig of ram.
 
keep what you have and get a 9800 pro, 9800pro is a better video card than the x600 pro, which is nothing more than a rebadged 9600xt

You won't notice the hugest difference going with the Intel proc over the Barton, hell you could even OC the Barton to run at 3200 speeds without and trouble at all, that would close the performance gap a lot

BTW 9800 pro should be less than 200 bucks by now, you might find a good deal on a 6600gt which go for about 220 or so... and get a little better performance, but some newer technology.
 
I'm NOT into gaming. I do NOT want a new video card. I only wanted the x600 beacuse I needed a PCIe card.
 
Or you could buy the Retail Edge deal and:

Get a 915P motherboard that support both DDR and DDR2 - use your exising ram. Also, some 915P motherboards also have an AGPe or GEAR slot that allows you to use your AGP card. You wont get the full benefit of your video card since this slot is really a PCI slot.

Then sell the Intel motherboard and the XP pro to cover your motherboard cost.

I run a Gigabyte board in a similar fashion.

IMHO

Lou
 
If you have a Fry's nearby they have generic dual channel DDR2 kits they put on sale fairly often. I picked up a 1GB kit for $160. It is off-brand Leagcy Electronics memory, but it memtests just fine in the board and seems quite stable. It is a bit pokey at 4-4-4 compared to low latency PC3200, but then again the Corsair XMS or Kingston Hyper-X 1GB low latency kit costs quite a bit more than what I paid for my DDR2, so I'll live with a bit less bandwidth.

If you seriously don't plan to game at all, the cheap X300 non-SE video cards are a pretty good option, like the Sapphire model that Newegg sells for around $82 shipped. It is based off of the 9600NP, so it still has all the video goodies the X600 has (like DivX and WMV hardware acceleration) for about $40 less. Like the other recent ATi cards also uses the Ati onboard TMDS for DVI output, so the image quality is nice on a large flatpanel like the 2001FP or 2005FPW.

Also don't forget that the 915PBL only comes with one IDE connector, so if you currently have and IDE hard drive (or drives), you will have to upgrade to SATA as well. I got one of the new Seagate quasi-SATA-II drives that support NCQ at Newegg. It was around $90 for the 120GB version when I bought it a few weeks ago, but now the price has jumped up to over $100 in the last week for some odd reason. It is a nice fast drive. Not sure if the NCQ is really making a difference (or the Hyperthreading), but the new system feels very smooth and responsive - even when I'm defragging or running a Norton AV scan while I'm working on another application.

I used the bundle to build a whole new system for my wife, so the relatively small price increase over a comparable system using older technology wasn't that drastic. It is also a good chance to play around with some of the bleeding edge tech for a fairly low price if you like that kind of thing.
 
Sadly, there aren't any Fry's near me. I think I might take LouPoir's idea and just get a different motherboard. There don't seem to be any real performance increases with the DDR to memory to justify the higher price. A lower-end motherboard would be good, but I really wanted to keep the copy of XP Pro because it has all the updates into it, and I don't want to have to mess around with slipstreaming it into my current copy.

I do have 4 hard drives and 3 DVD burners, but I could just get serielle adapters for them. I also have an PCI IDE card that is running all the hard drives.

I guess if I can find a motherboard that I can use for the processor, my current RAM, and has a few extra IDE ports, I would be on easy street. Not sure if I can sell the included motherboard alone to cover the costs though.
 
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