Upgrading question.

[jarvo]

I've decided to upgrade my CPU and MOBO and I'm wondering what type of performance increase I might see.

Current Setup:

AMD Athlon XP 3000+
Asus A7V8X-X
1 gig (512 PC 3200, 512 PC 2700)
Geforce 6800 @ 16x1,5vp

I am going to buy

Athlon 64 3700+ San Diego
ASRock Dual SATA2 939

I plan on OCing the CPU to around 2.6 or 2.7
Also, my RAM is not DUAL channel and I am going to be buying 2x512 PC 3200 very soon. Will I see much of a performance increase with just the new CPU or will I see a larger one if I get better ram in dual channel?

 

[endyen]

Tough question. Without the OC, on very cpu intensive games, like fartcry, you would get ~50% more frames, but on gfx limited, or capped games, almost nothing.
I should say though, that the A64s feel a lot faster.
Ram is fairly cheap right now, prices may go up. Still, being the cheap sob that I am, I would manually set the ram to DDR333, using the timings that your slower ram has in spd, and see if it works in dual channel. If so, save up for some good Gskill TCCD ram, for OCing, or maybe some OCZ.

 

[jarvo]

Hmm, I'll do that. Thanks for the reply.

 

[mpasternak]

based on your system, stame as what said above... BUT,

that ram has to be replaced. it's non matching pair, you're taking a small performance hit by not running a dual channel setup. get yourself a 1 gig dual channel kit, you'll be impressed. Especially with the 3700+ which has the on-die Memory controller. the video card is pretty good and should keep ya up to date on just about everything. upgrading it would be a waste of money unless you go t a 7800

 

[jarvo]

Yeah I was planning on buying a dual channel kit in a few days. This brings me to another question. Should I run the dual channel kit I'm going to buy and also run the memory I am using now? I would have 2 gigs total but only 1 gig in dual channel. Would that be a good thing or should I just run the 1 gig dual channel and wait and get another 1 gig of dual channel in the future....

 

[mpasternak]

option two.

mixing pairs like that will hurt performance. get rid of the unmatched pair, and stick with ONLY matched pairs. 1gig of dual channel PC3200 ram will do you wonders.

 

[slvr_phoenix]

Not that you need absolutely perfectly matched pair kits, but certainly having the same speeds would be good, and the same timings even better...

 

[jarvo]

Alright, so I should not use the 512 DDR 2700 stick. I know the other stick of 3200 is noname because in CPU-Z all I get is the timings for it. What is the best thing to do:

a) Use 1 gig of Dual Channel

b) Use 1 gig of Dual Channel and buy another stick of 512 3200 and use that with the noname stick of 3200.

c) Use 1 gig of Dual Channel and the noname stick by itself.

I am aware that using the stick of 2700 is nonsense even if it brings my total system ram to 2 gigs.

 

[slvr_phoenix]

I don't think that you can even do c, because that'd throw the system back into single channel mode.

Personally I'd just do a. If you find it doesn't perform well enough in the future, then maybe buy more. Or just buy two gigs matched in pair in the first palce and not use the old mem.

 

[jarvo]

OK thanks a lot for clearing this up for me. 8)