Video card should give big boost over the 800, heck the 850 was a boost over 800.
Personally I recommend ATI's X2 cards others will likely mention Nvidia....
Personal advice: AVOID Sapphire because they had major cooling system issues, weren't
fixing them, continued to sell products with the bug, and were mum on the issues a
few months back before the ATI 4xxx series stuff hit. I'll never use them again after
2 swaps left me with a 3870X2 card that I was told by Sapphire support to "use ATI
tray tool to manually control the fan" for $400.
CPU wise C2D & Quad do give back on modern games from what I've seen.
LOL, I've spent $3000 between my old 2004 system & the new 2008 system!
Bino Gopal wrote:
<snip>
> the weakest link, the ATI Radeon X800 XT vid card
(PCIEx16 though).
So what I'm wondering is if I can make a budget purchase of a vid card to
make this system capable of running these and other games, as I think the P4
3.4 GHz is still a perfectly serviceable chip-I mean, how many games
actually use multi-threading to real effect nowadays? I can just add 2GB of
RAM (which should be cheap) as I am using 10k RPM HDs in RAID0 to run stuff,
so it should be a decently fast system even by current measurements right?
Or am I missing something in the equation?
Well, assuming upgrading the vid card would help, I got the Sapphire ATI
Radeon HD 4830 with 512MB GDDR3 RAM from Newegg for $100 (fyi $90 after
rebate which I never do, and special combo price with a OCZ Diesel 16GB USB
flash drive); I figured at that price I could handle eating it-it's only
$100! It's PCIEx16, thought my only worry is that is says it's PCIE 2.0
x16, but I think I read those are backward compatible with PCIE 1.0 x16
systems like mine.
Anyway, the card is *very* overclockable; some reviews had it ahead of even
the stock 4870 in tests, so I figure it was the best bang for the buck, and
that if a $100 investment could make my old system ($3000 at the time for
everything) last another year, it'd be worth it. The plan would be to go
with a completely new i7 system once all that stuff is cheaper, so new CPU,
MB, case then, and probably get a better vid card and HDs too.
Thoughts on any of this? One worry is that I've read that Oblivion might be
CPU-limited; couldn't figure out if that would happen to me or not. Only
other worry is if the card would work; guess I'll find that out soon enough.
So did I reason this all out correctly or would someone like to point out
the flaw in my logic? :P
BINO
