Ahh ok; thanks Jim; my only question is (to what Bobby said) will upgrading
the video card actually make a difference in my system?
Bear with me, but it's been a while since I've done anything with my
system...I guess what I'm trying to figure out is how much of a perf
difference will having a 4830 OC'ed in my system be vs having it in a more
recent system...I mean, I have a PCIe x16 slot, 3.4Ghz CPU and pretty fast
HDs...
Maybe I'm asking how to benchmark my system, lol. I know it might seem
pretty n00b, but as I said I haven't had to deal with that in a while, and
what would you guys recommend as a speed test software (that I can easily
get) that I could run on the system (it's WinXP MCE btw) that would give me
an idea of perf before I upgrade of CPU and vid card, and then after, of the
CPU and vid card, which I could then compare to online reviews of a newer
CPU and the same vid card so I can see how much the old CPU is holding me
back...and I guess I should test framerates of the game too, right, since
that's what I care about?
Like I said, sorry for sounding so n00b but it's been a while and I've just
been mostly working the last few years and now with the GF, no free time to
keep up on all that! :P Thanks guys!
BINO
-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of maccrawj
Sent: Saturday, January 10, 2009 6:47 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [H] Thoughts on a new system?
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
