Upgrade Worth It?

[AtlantaBob]

At the moment, I've got an Athlon XP 1700+ running on an Asus A7N8X with 512 MB RAM.

I've been rendering movies with Pov-Ray (Ray Tracing Program) for some architectural design work. This is pretty computationally intensive, on the order of several hours for a one minute clip. In your opinion, would it be worth upgrading to a very fast XP or Semperon processor (~$80-$100), or upgrading the MoBo and processor to an AMD 64 socket 478 or 939?

Money is, as always, at a premium...

Thanks for your thoughts.

 

[montag451]

Personally, I would upgrade to a 754 mobo, or a PIV.

 

[Blain]

YGpm

 

[imported_Kensai]

I'd suggest grabbing a S939.

 

[l Xes l]

go 939

 

[robcy]

go with a socket 754

 

[Bonesdad]

What does "at a premium" mean? How much are you willing to spend? You can typically get an A64 with a socket 754 motherboard cheaper than getting the S939. If you want to carry over other parts (video card, other PCI cards) make sure you get an AGP board.

If we get some idea of a budget, we can make some recommendations...

 

[ArnoldLayne]

I think you should look for something better than POV-Ray to do animation.

 

[SLCentral]

If you don't plan on upgrading for a while and want to keep it cheap, 754 all the way. If you're looking for a more upgradeable system with a newer chipset, but for more money 939.

 

[AtlantaBob]

Thanks all, I guess I was just looking for some reason to stay with Socket A.

I suppose that the budget is somewhere around $200. I could bump it up some, but if it's much above that, I'd probably be more likely just to render the dang things on what I've got, and get a Mac Mini to play around with and do email/internet/word processing on. (It's the upgrade bug, I think). I'd also be tempted to go 939 if I upgraded, but, I tend to think that by the time I'd get around to upgrading it again, it would make sense to get something else. That, and the fact that I only have AGP graphics cards (and don't care about the high end stuff in the near (1-3 year) future would probably suggest that I go with 754, unless I found an incredibly cheap deal.

To make things more complicated, I've got a nice case, power supply, old graphics card, HDD and optical drive sitting around calling for some use... so, if I replace the Mobo and CPU, I'd probably move that to the old case, spring for some RAM and make the old Athlon a Linux Box.

And Arnold -- yeah, I should find something better than it, but for the stuff that I'm working on (lots of glass, and lots of rotations, and other symmetry-based transformations) it gets the job done pretty easily. But I'd be interested if you happen to have any specific suggestions for something else...

Does any of the above sound way out of line to you?

 

[Sentinel]

ive got a tbred 1700 on a shuttle an35n ultra with 1 gb ddr 2100 corsair (slow i know)

- wish i had better ram to oc but it does the job.

 

[edmundoab]

i went from AXP to A64 Socket939

 

[Blain]

Originally posted by: edmundoab
i went from AXP to A64 Socket939

I went from a black truck to a red one. :laugh: