Upgrade question/info
 

I've just started to notice that my trusty system:-

AMD Athlon 3000+
512mb pc2700 DDR333 (2X256mb)
Asus A7N8X Mb
ATI Radeon 9600 (note NOT pro/GT)
120gb hd
XP SP2

is starting to creak a little when using more...ahem... graphic intensive applications like 'COD United Offensive'. So I've decided its time to splash out and upgrade in time for Half Life 2 blah, blah..

Given the processor I don't think its worthwhile wasting money on the latest generation graphics cards, but how about a 128mb ATI Radeon 9800 Pro (256 bit if that makes a difference)? Will I get a worthwhile improvement?

Regarding the memory would I get any improvement if I upped to 1Gb? If I did would I just be able to slot one stick of 512mb next to the two 256mb sticks? Also, and now I'm really confusing myself, can the mb suport DDR3200 RAM?. Would I get a worthwhile improvement if I binned the existing memory and replaced it with DDR3200?

Any other suggestions would be more than welcome. I ran Aquamark 3 benchmark and while I don't get hung up on such things, a score of 20,000 really showed up some graphics weaknesses.

Cheers SS

p.s. looking to spend upto about £300 quid.

Your memory is matched to your CPU and 512Mb is OK, I do not think you will notice any difference with more. The bottleneck would seem to be your graphics card. I´d blow the lot on a GeForce 6800GT Review

Personal opinion of course.... :cool:

Out of curiosity I ran the benchmark on my old 1.6GHz P4, 1 Gig of slow SDRAM and a GeForce4 Ti 4200 (which I think is probably worse than your card) but I hit 85% of your benchmark number - with the test slowing to <6fps at the end. Something seems a bit wrong. :confused:

For comedy value i'm running it on an almost-brand-new Dell 2400 (yeah, I know ... but it was under £100 brand new, incl. VAT and delivery from the outlet store and came with speakers and a Logitech wireless keyboard worth nearly that on their own). It's got a Celeron 2600, half a gig of PC2700 and "Intel Extreme integrated graphics" :yuk: and is managing a comical 1.2 frames per second on the "large scale vegetation rendering" benchmark, and hasn't even got to the hard bit yet! I'll let you know the final score... if it ever finishes!

At the risk of going a bit off-topic, it shows how bl**dy awful Dells can be. This machine is only two months old and retails at over £600, but can't play any modern 3D games. Worse than that, it has a bastardized motherboard that means you can't even add a proper graphics card to replace the junk it shipped with. If I didn't know better and got this for myself as a general-purpose computer, i'd be deeply fscked off with it!

As it is, I needed a fileserver and for the price I paid you can't go wrong :)

edit: a massive 3.3fps average for a score of 3277, go baby! It ended up as more like seconds-per-frame at the end :rolleyes:

Std Speed,

Going from the 9600 to a 9800 Pro would give you a very good boost in performance for playing games.

Your machine will run PC-3200 but you want to set in the BIOS for the CPU to RAM Ratio to be set to 1:1. You get the best performance when your RAM and CPU run at the same FSB Speed.

Take Care,

Richard

P.S. The Radeon 9800Pro 128Mb is the best bang for the buck out there. :ok:

Upgrading your RAM to 1GB will help in most new games like Far Cry, UT2004 and Doom3. Half Life 2 will probably also benefit from it.

I have PC3200 RAM in my AthlonXP 2800+ computer and it runs at PC2700 speeds. Unless you want to overclock your processor, PC3200 RAM probably won't get you much, although it may have better CAS latency.

If you have 3 RAM slots, and I think pretty well all nForce2 motherboards do, you could just buy a 512MB stick and plug it in. You will need to read the motherboard manual though to see what slot to put it in to enable dual channel memory though.

I also have a Radeon 9800 Pro and it does well in Far Cry and UT2004, but is starting to show it's age in Doom3. While not bad, it definitely doesn't compare to the new GeForce or Radeon cards. Although for Doom3 my processor is probably holding the computer back just as much as the video card.

One word of caution, many people upgraded last year for Half Life 2, and got burned when it didn't show up. You may want to wait until it comes out see what people say about it's hardware requirements first.

goates

goates,

With nForce you have to be very careful with RAM. That Chipset is very picky about RAM.

When it comes to RAM, your best option is two matched sticks of RAM, so in Std Speed's case he would want a pair of 512MB Sticks if he wants 1GB of RAM. You can do 2 sticks of 256Mb in the first two DIMMs which belong to the first Memory Controller and 1 512MB stick in the second Memory Controller to still get TwinBank but it is very tricky to get running smoothly. If you are going to buy RAM today, you want at least PC-3200 since all the new CPUs have gone to a 400Mhz FSB (200 DDR). Should you upgrade CPU and/or Mobo in the future, you will want RAM that you can use.

Take Care,

Richard

Ok Guys thanks for the replies I think I'm getting there.:confused:

For the GPU I'll probably blow some money on an XFX 6800GT. That at least will buy me another 3.5 weeks of 'future proofing'.:rolleyes:

But I'm getting quite into the CPU,FSB,memory thing....no, really I am. :8

Whilst researching I came across this utility CPU-Z . As I understand it Barton 3000+ chips came in 333Mhz and 400Mhz flavours.

Cpuid shows the CPU bus speed of 400Mhz
FSB 200.5Mhz X10.5 = Core speed 2105.1

Memory shows Max bandwidth PC2700 (166Mhz)
Memory timings :- Freq. 200.5Mhz
FSB-DRAM = 1:1
Timings 2.5/3/3/7

So, and I'll cut to the chase now, am I effectivly underclocking my 400 Mhz CPU by using DDR333 memory?

Edited to say, I've been fiddling in the BIOS and the above is with 'Agressive' Set in system performance. If I then change this to 'Optimal' all that changes is the mem. freq. becomes 166Mhz and the FSB-DRAM becomes 6:5.

If the mem. max bandwidth is 166Mhz anyway what exactly does 'Agressive' achieve?

Explanations hugely appreciated.

I didnt want to start a new thread for a simple question so I hope you dint mind me hijacking yours a bit std speed.

Can anyone explain the benifit of AMDs Athlon 64 over the similar speed barton xp 3000+.

As there is no 64bit os, nor likely to be one for intel/amd until longhorn in 2007 (unless apple release tiger for the PC :} ) whats the point in a 64 bit chip at a price premium?

BTW std I just tried out "dawn of war" on a mates system that is very similar to yours but with a slower proc (2500 ish) but much more modern graphics card and it ran like an antelope. Hope that helps your upgrade path.:ok:

Red Hat and SuSE Linux support 64 bit CPUs... :} Dunno if that helps though..... :O

Std Speed,

If you are running PC-2700 with a 400Mhz FSB AthlonXP, you are choking its Memory Bandwidth. The first thing I would do, would be to get two matched sticks of at least PC-3200 (2x512Mb). That alone will show you a noticeable boost in performance.

Then I would look closely at the Radeon 9800Pro 128Mb, since the price of the Geforce 6800GT will come down faster than the mercury in a thermometer in the middle of a blizzard.

A good review to look at is:

NVIDIA GeForce 6600 GT: Bringing NV4x to the Masses

Take Care,

Richard

Daysleeper,

The Athlon64 3000 will blow away the XP3000 in pretty much every game and program out there.

Check out the link below for a review of the Athlon64 2800 (200MHz zlower than the Athlon64 3000). You can just skip to the performance charts if you don't want to read all of the details.

Athlon64 2800

I would ignore the 64bit feature for now. Consider it a bonus. Many people seem to get hung up on it and forget that the Athlon 64 chips perform very well on 32 bit programs. Except at the high end, there isn't really any price premium for either the Pentium or Athlon64 chips.

There is a 64bit version of WindowsXP in development, but there aren't many programs that will take advantage of it yet. A few games like Far Cry are supposed to have 64 bit versions in development, but I don't think any are out yet.

goates

Thanks Richard it all makes more sense now. Question is why did the gits who sold me the kit in the first place use the slower memory? Cost I supose :*

Right.... armed with my whoefully (sp?) inadequate new found knowledge, I'm off to try overclocking everything. :E

There may be trouble ahead!!!

Std Speed,

Personally I would never build a machine with underclocked RAM. I would go back to the place you bought it and show them that they sold you a machine with the wrong RAM (not the proper RAM for the speed anyway) and see if they will swap it out for PC-3200. It cannot hurt to try. ;)

Take Care,

Richard