Im upgrading my system that I baught and built 4 years ago.. Right now I have a ESC K7s5a with a Athlon XP 2100 (1.7) with 1 gig of Ram. I recently baught a Nvidia 6800 GT. My computer works well but when I play a game I have to put it on the lowest settings to get good frame rates. Obviously its not the Video card so Im thinking its the CPU and board. I dont want to buy another XP chip because well thats old technology. I have around $200-250 to spend and Ive been looking at Motherboards and the 64 chips. Im planning to buy a Athlon 64 3000 939 but Im not sure which board I should buy.. I want to buy a good board that I can overclock with and also later on upgrade the chip to dual processor. Can you guys help me pick which board is better for overclocking and also for future technology. 1. Gigabyte - K8NS-939 2. AS Rock America - K8 Combo-Z 3. Chaintech - S1689 4. Microstar/MSI - K8T Neo2-F I like the Microstar/MSI - K8T Neo2-F but its the most expensive one. I was looking at the As Rock America one and it doesnt look that bad. Can I overclock with that one and can I later on put in a Athlon 64 X2 chip in it? I want to get a good board but not the most expensive one.
Well first off, you should have bought a pci express video card, because new chipsets do not support agp, so there goes the future. I got an MSI and I really like it. Gigabyte is also a good, cheaper brand. Any of those two will do but I personally prefer the nforce chipset.
I understand that getting a AGP video card was not wise. but at the time I had a Geforce 2 mx(or something like that, def MX card though).. and I needed a huge upgrade because I couldnt play most of the modern games.. that was around 6 months ago and PCI-e was just starting out and I wasnt sure on it yet. But anyhow its a great card and I shouldnt upgrade again for a atleast a year. Thanks on your input about the MSI board, Ive heard great things about it. I just want to know what you guys think about the other boards. Thanks
The video card you bought is a great one, but its interface limits your mobo choices. I'm pretty sure that when you'll wanna' upgrade, someone will wanna' buy it from you.
Okay, this is what I baught: 1. AMD Athlon 64 3000+ / 512KB Cache / 2000 MHz FSB / Socket 939 / Processor with Fan (CP1-A64-30009). 2. MSI K8TNeo2-F Via Socket 939 ATX Motherboard / Audio / AGP 8x / Gigabit LAN / USB 2.0 / Serial ATA / RAID (M452-2800) Should I buy a better CPU fan since I do plan on overclocking to a 2.3? And if yes which one?
For the CPU fan, the stock A64 cooler is pretty good and the CPU's themselves don't run nearly as hot as some of the Athlons have in the past. I'd say try it, and if you see that the cooling is holding you back, then go ahead and buy a better cooler. Personally, I got a Thermaltake Silent Boost K8, and that works well. If you want something really high performance, you may want to check out the Thermalright XP-90 or XP-90c (the 'c' is the copper version of the heatsink) or their monsterous XP-120...which uses a 120mm fan...check with Thermalright about clearance on your motherboard, first.
nforce3 boards cant support the X2 line, because nforce3 is limited to the socket 754, the X2 family is exclusive via to 939 the MSI K8T neo2? my friend has that board, yea he had some problems with memory lately but i think its fixed.
The nForce 3 isn't limited to S939. Yes, many S754 boards are NF3 250GB's, but it's not limited to them. I think alot of companies knew the NF4 was coming down the pipes and that S939 was the power-users socket, so they just waited.
First of all you're video card is way too good for your CPU. You won't get much more performance over a 6600 or 6600 GT. Also adding to that is the fact that it is AGP. An uber fast AGP card is overkill. the card can process the information but it can't move it. Just the way I look at it...
You're probably right dude but AGP 8x will not limet any card made so far to my knowledge, remember when they wanted to see how much faster a X800XT would perform in a PCIe bus? About 1-2 percent and were're talking about a slower 6800GT so I wouldn't worry about the slot holding him back, though the CPU point is understandable sadly (that's the same one I've got).
Yea the CPU pretty much has you screwed. It can run full load and won't keep up with the video card. Also, Isn't that video card more expensive than the CPU? That is usually a sign. Anyway, I don't know about the AGP but I know you can overclock it. Just a thought. And another thing, if you were worried about playing games, you didn't think about it too much. The CPU is just as important as the video card, well, actually more so. You should have spent money evenly, because that huge upgrade that costs around $300 has only been worth around $100-150 with that CPU.
Maybe it's not the greatest ever but the 3000+ S939 is nothing to sneeze at, these days games focus more heavily on amazing grahical quality and huge expanses or enviroment and not as heavily on physics and AI. Sure they're good but I don't know of any system requirements that call for more than a 2GHz P4 and those are ancient chips really. While the same game may want as much as 128Mb's or vram and at least a GeForce 5xxx card, preferably GF 6 even. After all the Havok physics engine is still raved about but we've been hearing about that for years.
FarCry's sytem req's are thus: AMD Athlon 1 GHz or Pentium III 1 GHz (AMD Athlon Xp model 2000+ or above or 2 GHz Pentium 4 recommended 64 MB DirectX 9.0b Compatable graphics card While this isn't much you would be hard pressed to run it and have any fun with anything near here. Half Life 2 is higher (recommended): 2.4 GHz Processor DirectX 9.0 Compatable Video Card Now I realize the XP series is nothing to laugh about, but it definately isn't anything amazing. The thing however, is that, especially on Half Life 2, CPU speed is very very important. There is an article in Computer Shopper that talks about how CPU intensive HL2 is. Also he says he has a XP 2100+ instead of 3000+. I haven't looked but I tend to thjink there is a quite considerable difference there. Also, everything that enters the GPU has already been through the CPU. While it hasn't been rendered it has been directed there by the control unit. In the end, I think, GHz still out-do GigaFLOPS.
He's got a 3000+ now. You've got some very good points there, no doubt the CPU is more important than the video card, after all it came first. But I don't think he's going to go back on himself and buy something different. The S939 3000+ is a very nice cpu, and being 64-bit he'll have fun with 64-bit ready games like Cronicles of Riddick, assuming he overclocks it anyway. You'd be surprised what old hardware can do actually, I have a friend with a 1.9GHz P4, 512MB's or PC133 ram, and a GeForce 4MX and he can still play HL2 with character detail on high, texture quality medium, with great frame rates. FarCry looks great and plays very well too, I think he had some settings on high and some on medium, frame rates were at least 35fps. It impressed me anyway. Those are probably two of the most CPU intensive games out there too as you obviously knew, with FarCry's AI, and HL2's physics engine it's any wonder his p4 didn't explode but it works great to this day, with no ocing at all. You do have to admit today a p4 2.0Ghz with a X800XT is better than a FX57 and a 6200 for any game really, sure the cpu will calculate the physics and AI perfectly but there will be uber lag on the screen if the gfx detail is too high, the card will be trailing way behind of the cpu trying to render everything. Wow this is a fun little debate huh Max:good:
Yea, I mean in no way am I saying that the video card isn't important, just that, at least I think, the CPU should out-do the GPU, but I guess thats where our opinions differ. But none of this is that bad, because you haven't played Half life 2 until you've played it on 2.0 Ghz Celeron with 128 MB of memory and Intel Unextreme integrated graphics
Yeah, true, the only thing is you can't truely compair the GPU and CPU as they do different sorts or calculations, the GPU is more complex in some respects though, the transistor count for one is amazing, the new 7800 series has over 300 million transistors, not too shabby, I don't believe CPU's can even tough that. The thing is the cpu is like the heart of the computer, the GPU is almost a computer in it's self, resting in it's own private mobo practically. Ha! I suppose that's possible with everything on low or disabled, 640x480 in windowed mode
Well the thing is that CPU's have large caches whereas GPU's have little ones (or do they have any, need to check that one). Also GPU's do mainly only floating point, where CPU's do floating point and control most of the computer, along with the chipset.
