Would this be a significant upgrade?

[TJones2]

Would I notice a significant improvement by moving from this machine:

- Asus P4P800SE w/ P4 3.2ghz
- 1.5 gb DDR (Mix of Mushkin black and generic)
- ATI x860xt
- Maxtor 100gb SATA
- Maxtor 20gb IDE


To:

- Asus P5B w/ E6400
- 2gb DDR500 Mushkin Redline
- ATI x1950 256mb
- Seagate 7200.10 320gb

This is my "cheap" option. I have an expensive and a stupidly expensive option (Mac Pro) but thought I'd get some feedback on the cheap option before forking over thousand of dollars on a new system. If I go with the cheap option, I plan to upgrade in about a year. Expensive option means at least two more years before upgrading.

 

[DaveSimmons]

For what uses?

For gaming, it's the video card that will make most of the difference, and an 8800GTX would be twice as fast as the ATI.

 

[TJones2]

But how would the x1950 be? I'm an occasional gamer, I want my games to be playable but it doesn't have to be a screaming system.

 

[DaveSimmons]

Depends on the game, and what resolution you want to run it at.

For an idea of this and next year's games, click the Video tab at the top of the page and look at the Rainbow Six article (Unreal 3 engine) and at the Oblivion benchmarks in the 8800 articles.

 

[vailr]

The Asus P5B uses DDR2 memory only.
However, there are VIA chipset Socket 775 boards that do allow re-using DDR memory, such as ASUS P5VD2-X, ASRock 775DualVSTA, GIGABYTE GA-8VM800PMD-775-RH, ECS P4M800PRO-M (V2.0), BIOSTAR P4M800-M7, MSI PM8PM-V, Foxconn P4M800P7MA-RS2, and others.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductLi...8+107171110&Submit=ENE&SubCategory=280

 

[JEDIYoda]

Originally posted by: TJones2
Would I notice a significant improvement by moving from this machine:

- Asus P4P800SE w/ P4 3.2ghz
- 1.5 gb DDR (Mix of Mushkin black and generic)
- ATI x860xt
- Maxtor 100gb SATA
- Maxtor 20gb IDE


To:

- Asus P5B w/ E6400
- 2gb DDR500 Mushkin Redline
- ATI x1950 256mb
- Seagate 7200.10 320gb

This is my "cheap" option. I have an expensive and a stupidly expensive option (Mac Pro) but thought I'd get some feedback on the cheap option before forking over thousand of dollars on a new system. If I go with the cheap option, I plan to upgrade in about a year. Expensive option means at least two more years before upgrading.

Depends on what your using it for....
I have a p4 3.2 EE which I only use for gaming but it`s o/c`d to 4.4....and I have a nice video card!

I also have a core duo 6.6 machine that I never game on. But I use it for photo editing and all my music and stuff....

You have a p4 3.2 get a real nice video card and as a gamer your all set to go

 

[Daleon]

I don't know why everyone is making it so difficult. Yes, its a very nice performance boost. A 1950 will still do a solid job. I'd maybe look at getting a P5W DH or crossfire mobo so you have the option since crossfire is easy to do with 1950 pros. Also as mentioned get DDR2, any decent DDR2-800 will be great.

 

[engiNURD]

If you're not gaming at resolutions higher than 1600x1200, then you don't need a dual card setup. Go for the P5B-E instead of the P5B, since it can overclock nicely. OC'ing with these Core2Duos is nice... you don't lose any stability and gain a whole lot of performance, especially since they reach pretty damn high speeds. What's your budget? Look at the g.skill 2gbnq kit for some nice, affordable ram. If you want to oc higher than 400Mhz FSB, then go for some Patriot LLK sticks or Buffalo Firestix instead. If you want to go higher than 3Ghz, get a Scythe Ninja Plus Rev.B. You can easily push an E6400 to 3.2Ghz with that g.skill ram. I'm running an E6400, DS3, 2GBNQ, Scythe Ninja Plus Rev.B at 8 * 400 = 3.2Ghz @ 1.33125vCore (stock is 1.325v). Ram is at 5-5-5-15 @ 1.8V (stock speeds). No cold boot issues with the board, rev2.0 F7 BIOS.

 

[DaveSimmons]

An x1950 pro is good enough for 1024x768, but starts to bog down at 1280x960 for 2007 games. Look here - Rainbow 6 Vegas

At 1280x960 High Quality, an X1950 Pro is only getting 22.3 fps, a X1950 XTX gets 31.5 (good enough), and an 8800GTS gets 43.9 fps.

At 1600x1200 the x1950 pro is down to 14.2 fps.

 

[CDC Mail Guy]

Originally posted by: JEDIYoda

Originally posted by: TJones2
Would I notice a significant improvement by moving from this machine:

- Asus P4P800SE w/ P4 3.2ghz
- 1.5 gb DDR (Mix of Mushkin black and generic)
- ATI x860xt
- Maxtor 100gb SATA
- Maxtor 20gb IDE


To:

- Asus P5B w/ E6400
- 2gb DDR500 Mushkin Redline
- ATI x1950 256mb
- Seagate 7200.10 320gb

This is my "cheap" option. I have an expensive and a stupidly expensive option (Mac Pro) but thought I'd get some feedback on the cheap option before forking over thousand of dollars on a new system. If I go with the cheap option, I plan to upgrade in about a year. Expensive option means at least two more years before upgrading.

Depends on what your using it for....
I have a p4 3.2 EE which I only use for gaming but it`s o/c`d to 4.4....and I have a nice video card!

I also have a core duo 6.6 machine that I never game on. But I use it for photo editing and all my music and stuff....

You have a p4 3.2 get a real nice video card and as a gamer your all set to go

I have a P4 3.6 Prescott, and I OC'd it to 4.1 (15%) with pretty stable temps with a Scythe heat spreader and 120mm fan. How are your temps with a 4.4 overclock(?) and what are you using to cool it?

 

[bob4432]

op - we are not mind readers thus the questions. for gaming i would not go any less than x1950xt 256MB at this point to game @ 1280x1024 or 1440x900 or possibly 1680x1050 (?). as far as encoding you will notice a large increase in performance especially if your encoder is smp/smt aware.

i know that when i went from a p4 2.8(3.0) to a opteron 144 (1.8GHz) the encoding rate was approximately 50% faster, then when i moved to the x2 i got another nice speed boosts because the encoder was smp/smt aware.

now if i would go a c2d there would be another boost....so the end result is yes for gaming and encoding you will notice a noticeable difference. for surfing or playing solitare, no difference

also you are going to need ddr2 and you may as well go ddr2800 and make sure the board supports o/cing (not familiar with that board).

also, what psu do you have?

also, remember that they have the x1950pro, x1950xt and x1950xtx and also a x1950 in agp flavor. so if you are just wanting a gpu upgrade there is an option over the x850xt