I am currently running a Asus p4p800 deluxe with a 2.8ghz P4 and 512Mb of Corsair pc3500 ddr ram. I have a 64 Mb 3d prophet Ti200 vid card and a 120gig Seagate 7200 rpm hdd. I am a mmorpg gamer who is having trouble with lag and slow loading time. I have speced out a major upgrade which would include a 3500+ AMD athlon 64, Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe MoBo with dual Asus 6600GT video cards and a gig of pc3200 ram. My problem is that all of that costs a large chunk of change. I have found an Asus 6600gt vid card in AGP form and it would drop right in to my current system. Would that solve my horrible lag problem or do I need to do the complete (expensive) upgrade? Last question: Does Asus make an A8N-SLI that would accept an AGP (dual or single) vid card? Is PCI express that much better? Thanks for the help! Brian
Personally if I were you I'd get a single 6600GT or 6800GT if you want more 2x the power and another 512MB stick of PC3500 ram. That would be all you'd really need to play any game out now quite well and still have future potential. Your specs, aside from you're video card, are pretty good so there's no need to blow that much cash. And PCI-Express is the only way you can have 2 cards running in SLI, there is no such thing as AGP SLI. Currently PCIe offers no real advantage for modern cards but in the furture graphics cards will require a lot more bandwidth than AGP can offer so it's future concious.
if you want slightly more speed out of the CPU as well you could overclock it slightly, with some good air cooling (dont have to delve into water cooling to get decent temps) you can get a nice overclock and a significant speed increase. Go for an AGP 6800GT or an AGP X800XT PE, they'll probably be your best bets for Vid cards (also make sure your Power supply is enough for a high-power-requiring video card)
Thanks for the advice! The 6600GT is more in my price range. I'm torn between the MSI NX6600GT and the Asus N6600 GT. Is one better than the other? Thanks Brian
Just out of curiosity where are you located (country)? MSI are good and SO are ASUS, I honestly can't tell you as I have lots of MSI parts and they are good, but people with those cards might be able to tell you how they perform.
ahh *sings baton rouge by Garth Brooks* Sorry about the house. Really sucky. Well MSI and ASUS ae both good brands so I'd wait to see if anyone else can give ya a helping hand making your mind up.
I'd just go get some more ram and a 6600GT. A gig is almost necessary for a lot of MMORPG's. While the graphics aren't intense, There are a hell of a lot of textures. My brother plays Star Wars: Galaxies on a 2600+, 9600XT and a gig of ram will run it on high settings without lag.
Ohhh, really sorry about you're house there, man, really hope things work out for ya As for the cards, there is virtually no performance difference between cards of different companies, and just about all run stable so whatever one is cheaper, looks, cooler, or comes with better games is the one I'd pick. If you really can't decide then go ASUS as they usually throw in a bunch of tweaking utilities and are concidered pretty much the luxery company for vid cards.
