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Worth upgrading from 3.0 to 3.4?

K

kreidel

Senior member
I was wondering if it was worth upgrading from a 3.0 to a 3.4 as far as real performance in gaming goes? Here are my system specs now. Thanks for looking.

Pentium 4 3.0 with Aero cooling Fan
Asus p4C800-E Deluxe motherboard
1 Gig of DDR 400 PC3200
BFG 6800GT OC
Seagate Barracuda 200GB 7200rpm ST3200822A Drive
Antec 350W psu
Sony DRU-510A DVD RW

My other question is does using the onboard sound hurt performance overall? I just use headphones 99% of the time so sound quality is of no importance.
 
Have you tried overclocking that puppy. You might get 3.4 out of it free. 😀

Most onboard sound does not support hardware acceleration, so it is a bit of a drag on the CPU.
If you run those sound tests in DXDIAG, and it won't do the hardware accelerated tests, then you'll know.
 
Onboard sound might add 5-10% to processing time, depending on the amount of data being processed by it and the quality of the onboard sound card. You might be able to find a sound card with less CPU utilization, but it probably won't affect you too much unless your current one is a particular hog of performance.

Going to 3.4 would likely be a more noticable increase in computing power, ~13% increase in performance in most applications. Though if you're only getting, say, 30FPS in a game, it'll probably only go up to about 33-35 FPS. It depends on which games you play and how the GPU scales with the processor in that particular application.
 
I am not much on overclocking, I had a bad experience back in the 400Mhz days, it was a faulty chip to start I am sure but needless to say I have been gun shy since.

So what would be a good sound card to get that won't slow down my system that is cheap since I dont use sound like most people would.

I mostly play Counterstrike Source, BF: Vietnam, WoW, and Nascar 2003, thats about it. 3-5 frames would be great, my system seems to run great now so I am not complaining. I don't spend money on customizing my car or stereo system, nor do I party so I don't feel bad when I spend money on this hobby.
 
With the PCI and AGP buses locked, overclocking is not the danger or the problem it used to be. I can understand, though.

You meant sound card, I'm sure. 😀
 
You have one of the best motherboards for overclocking, so why don't you give it a try, you can hit 3.4ghz easily with that 3.0. No reason to spend a bunch of money on a 3.4ghz chip, when the one you got can run at that speed..Nice system by the way..
 
I just finished drafting a "new topic" to solicit comments about the P4 Prescott "E" socket 478.

Your P4C800 is the i875P equivalent of my P4P800 (i865PE chipset). And, to be sure, it has socket-478.

But you didn't say whether you were using the Northwood processor, or the PRescott processor.

With my Northwood 3.0C and some OCZ DDR500 memory, I have been able to over-clock to 3.6 Ghz with marginally tighter memory timings, no voltage increases, idle/load temperatures that are either the same as "stock" or not noticeably hotter, and rock-solid PRIME95 torture-test results. Best computer I ever built (but see my "Prescott" thread). And that's a 20% over-clock setting with 240 Mhz external frequency and 960 Mhz FSB.

So what is it? Prescott -- or Northwood?
 
I am almost sure it is a Prescott, but is there anyway to be sure. I actually bought this rig from the Juice here on the forums and love it.
 
No way, negligible performance gain with just a 400MHz increase, considenring it is a P4 and it doesn't scale well with clock speed.
 
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