What to buy?

Do you Over Clock and how much?

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T

thomasbuonoman

Geek Trainee
Hello people. Please read this all

I am in another pickle. I cannot decide what to buy. Right now I have pretty crappy RAM. 2 512MB modules one is PC2700 and the other is PC 3200. I was thinking about buying some Kingston Hyper-X 1 GB Ram PC 3200 to replace the 2700 and then leave me with 1.5GB of RAM. The only reason why I thought of this is because I just over clocked my Prescott 3.0 to 3.6GHZ and now I want some nice RAM to go along. The other things is I just installed the Vista Transformation Pack (alot cheaper than real Vista) and alot of the graphics were fuzzy and I realized this is because my Graphics Card is not Aero capable (ATI 9250). So which one should I buy? If you do pick Graphics card could you tell me some inexpensive ones that are Aero capable. All I care is that they have DVI and TV outputs. I also attached a doc. with all my specs.

Thanks, Tom
 
Uh oh sorry about that. I hit upload but I guess it didn't go through. I will try to put it on by tomorrow. I just got a Radeon X1300 as a present so know I can jus buy the ram and have both. What are your guys opinions on the X1300. I haven't got a chance to put it in but I will see if I have time tonight. I am a little worried about fan noise seeing as I have never had a GPU with a built in fan
 
Generally they're pretty quiet as they don't draw a lot of power or get too hot. It's obviously a low end card but it's serviceable for games a couple years back or less demanding modern ones and yeah it's vista capable so you'll get those aero effects but just don't expect blazing performance or anything.
As for the memory what you chose makes sense. If you already have some PC3200 it's always best to compliment it with the same speed. I personally find Hyper X to be a bit pricey for what you get but if you found a deal then it will serve you well. OCz, G.Skill, and Patriot are others to concider however, with G.Skill often falling in the cheapest category.
 
Thanks. I have run full loads and stuff and it really isn't that loud. I can barely hear it over my 10 other case fans. I hardly ever game so it's not a big deal. It was still better then my old ATI one. Newegg has Kingston Hyper-X 1GB module for just $90 so I probably will get that. I am hoping to get it soon because this Vista Transformation Pack and all my other background programs are chewing up my memory. I also learned the GPU takes up a bit of ram for it's self. At Idle there is about 60% or 70% being used and 30% of the pagefile being used. I don't mind and don't care enough to do anything about but I would like my PC to have some nice RAM to hog up all the time. By the way Overclocking is so much fun and this Vista theme is awesome. If only Aero wasn't copyrighted then I could have that too. The XP-120 HS is the best. I am at 3.66GHZ right now and have these temps.
CPU: Idle: 40C Load: 43C
The fan is only at 56CFM so.... Also , I rarely see Idle because the Processor is trying to share the load with memory and it's usage is about 70%. Again, I don't care too much.
One quick question, will this added heat make me change the thermal paste more often.
Thanks, Tom
 
Nope, you never need to change your thermal paste unless you're changing out your processor. Otherwise let it go and you'll be fine. And those are some mighty impressive temps concidering it's a pretty substantial OC.
 
Thanks,
That's really good to know. I'm thinking about taking it to 3.7 but I always forget when I restart. Can't wait to buy that ram. . By the way, Awesome computer specs!
 
Really? Well thanks man but I'm definately in the market for a full blown upgrade, I've squeezed a lot more performance than I thought possible out of this old warhorse but I think it's well past it's prime now.
It's fun to play around with overclocking and all but the way I look at it is if you don't really need to oc beyond the norm, then it's probably best not to, there's rarely any harm but it keep things stable at least .
 
Well hope you had as much fun as I did upgrading. Just remember get all parts from newegg."if you don't really need to oc beyond the norm, then it's probably best not to" That's kind of always been my moto too. Still OC'ing is fun but for know, unless I get watercooling I don't think I am going past 3.7 where I am at now. The weird thing was when I went to 3.75 Windows would freeze at boot up until I changed it back to 3.7 and started windows in "last known good configuration". So I am not confident about going up too much higher.
 
oh yeah newegg is pretty much the mac daddy of online component retailers, I've spent a good $2300 there I believe between me and my friends computer I built him. I did have my dinky old 3000+ oc'ed to about 2.3 or so but it really wan't stable so I kept it modest. It made a pretty big difference for most games though. Generally the way I look at it is if you really need to oc to get something playable then you're hardware is really on bought time as is. But I can't blame you for wanting to push your proc, tweaking is undeniably fun and satasfying.
 
yeah it is Unfortunately know because of that I cannot run Prime95 torture test. For some reason it restarts the PC after a few minutes. When I run Hot CPU tester it's fine so oh well. It seems otherwise stable. I had to clock down to 3.69 GHZ. I was gonna have it repaired but until I get another crash I will just forget.
 
I wouldn't bother with prime, it's the real world apps the determine whether it's good for the long haul. A few hours of intensive gaming is all you need to figure out whether it's stable or not as you know. 3.69, nice dude, I always find it crazy to think that people are spending hundreds extra on processors just a few hunderd MHz faster when they could easily and safely oc a lesser proc at a fraction of the price.
 
Hopefully it stays at 3.69. The blue screens and restarts came back and more frequently and I couldn't find out what was wrong. It might be the video card, but it's brand new. Anways I brought it to my local computer shop (let them do the troubleshooting) and they said they will benchmark everything until they find the culprit. I hope it's no the Video card or the the CPU. So right now I am stuck using my old Pentium 1.6 GHZ 348MB of ram laptop w/ XP. God it's slow!
 
Yikes, that's a tough one to go back to, it's always hard after being spoiled by zippy hardware. But I'm sure they can sort things out. Taking the clock down a tick or two won't be the end of the world, 3.5/6 is plenty fine.
 
You're right hopefully they will have it back by Monday. Their techs are really good. For now I will just enjoy my very-needed weekend. I will post back when it's fixed.
Thanks so much for your help, Tom
 
If I have one good advice to give you right now, is to be satisfied with 3.6 GHz and not go higher... Pent 4s can't overclock much anyway. I had a sucket 478 Pentium 4 HT @ 2.8 GHz and burnt the mobo by trying to overclock it..:( fortunately I'd used it for 2 years or so, that didn't make it too dramatical. I sold the parts that weren't useful for a pretty good price on ebay! I even sold my ATi X1600XT for higher than I bought it!:chk:
 
Hey guys, It's Back. The techs could not get it to crash soooooooo. I booted up and it seems to run fine. I will let it run for a few hours to see if it's usb devices that are the problem. He did say he "set the graphics card back to default" so maybe that had something to do with it. I have never Overclocked my GPU so. I did mess around with AI overclock tuner. I set it to manual but maybe it still OCed it. Hopefully by the 15th I am getting a new case (mine is falling apart). I have had a hard time but does any one know or recommend a case. Attached is my specs, please read! Im sorry it's in Notepad but the original was Rich Text which is not supported here.
 

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