Waht to upgrade?

[moodymk]

Hi all, im a new poster so please excuse any terminology mistakes.

I currently have a asus A7N8X-X, 512 of pc3200 Ram, athalon 2600+ cpu and a radeon 9600 pro,

Im planning to increase my ram to 1gig but i was also thinking of upgrading my CPU and/or graphics card. I know that the graphics card will have more effect, i mainly use my pc for gaming however i dont know weather it would be better to wait untill PCI express is more developed. any how i was thinking up upgrading my cpu to a athalon 3400++/3600+ and if i were to do my graphics card now perhaps get a radeon 9800 pro or save up and get a redeon x800 pro.

any thoughts on this will be most appreciated, thanks.

 

[TheRod]

Humm... Hard to decide, since all your stuff is not that bad...

The best thing to do for you right now is to overclock your stuff! Your Athlon 2600+ is currently runnign at 2.0GHz (tBred) or 2.083GHz (Barton). You can probably run it at 2.2GHz without too much trouble! If you have a Barton, you might even be lucky and run it near 2.4GHz.

Your Radeon 9600 PRO can probably be overclock too! Get Radlinker to unleash to true power of your GPU!

If you don't have "el cheapo / no-name" RAM, it cna probably be overclock to pc3500 (433MHz isntead of 400MHz).

And keep your money until the beginning of 2005, when Athlon 64 with PCI-EXPRESS will be widely available, then the upgrade path will be clearer and better!

At your point, a WORTHY system upgrade would cost you much!

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A7N8X/<font color=green><b>Sempron 2800+</b></font color=green> <- <i>Is this affecting my credibility?</i>
Kingston DDR333 2x256Megs
<font color=red>Radeon 8500 128Megs</font color=red> @ C:275/M:290 <- <i>It's enough for Wow!</i>

 

[moodymk]

Thanks for the advice, I havent overclocked before so ill look into it.

 

[jammydodger]

If you really wanna upgrade soon I would wait a few months for the NForce4 motherboards to become common. These support PCI-X, so unless you can get one the also supports AGP you will have to get a new graphics card as well. Couple this with an Athlon64 3000+ and you will be in business.
But this all depends on how much money you want to spend.

 

[TheRod]

You will see that overclocking GPU is quite easy with RadLinker, you only need a few games or synthetic benchmarks to evaluate your system stability. You can usually overclock GPU and vMEM by 10% at least without any problem at all.

For the CPU, there is some tool in Windows, but I prefer BIOS overclocking.

-
A7N8X / <font color=green><b>Sempron 2800+</b></font color=green> <- <i>Is this affecting my credibility?</i>
Kingston DDR333 2x256Megs
<font color=red>Radeon 8500 128Megs</font color=red> @ C:275/M:290 <- <i>It's enough for WoW!</i>