Time for an upgrade?

[drkavnger99]

Ok heres the rig
2600+ barton Athlon XP
1gig kensington value ram pc3200 in dual channel mode
Geforce 4 ti 4200 128mb agp graphics card
Soundblaster live x-gamer sound card
Shuttle An35n-ultra Nforce-2 motherboard
ATI TV wonder pro TV capture card
Windows XP Pro
200 gb maxtor ata133 ide hard drive
40 gb maxtor ata100 ide hard drive
8x +R 4x -R 48x CD-R liteon DVD burner
48x CD burner Plextor
430w Truepower antec PSU
Dual 17" Sony trinitron CRT monitors

I know this machine is far from obsolete but I'm a power user by every sense of the word. I like to do gaming (although not as much lately because of the vid card) I played EQ and Freelancer a ton when they were big out there. I'm looking for something that would be more up to doing multi tasking though. It is not uncommon for me to be running 4-5 different programs at once (ie WMP, firefox, outlook, instant messenger, network monitoring software, bittorrent, and whatever else floats my boat at the time).

Now amd 64 looks promising to me but will it gain me anything in the area of quick launching and multi-tasking over my current system? I've built many machines but with Vista coming out I don't want to under/over buy my computer.

Any help appreciated whether I should upgrade my current rig or spec a new one. All comments are welcome.

 

[Nazo]

We need to know what overclocks you're getting to know just how outdated that is. For example, my mobile 2600+ is still a usable solution today running at 2.5GHz. I'm betting yours is a desktop or you'd have mentioned though, so it's probably not running nearly so much. If it IS a mobile, I've heard of people running as high as 2.7 with an expensive HSF, more with water cooling, however, most boards tend to limit the maximum multiplier to 12.5 (they don't recognize the way it sets multipliers right or something, so 13+ wrap downward to 5.0 or something unpleasantly low like that.) That means you have to count on FSB going up, and, about the only thing that gets FSB really really high are the DFI lanparties, though you can still possibly get as high as 2.7 on a really good board even if it doesn't support the > 12.5x multipliers. Frankly, shuttle isn't exactly known to be the ultra-high end stuff, so I wouldn't count on it.

The memory is fine probably, though low latencies never hurt. The video card is definitely outdated now (good card at the time, just, kind of old and nvidia refuses to support it, so some games won't even accept it on principle, plus, it doesn't do PS 2.0.) The SBLive was never the greatest card in the world, you'd get better audio quality from a SB Audigy 2 (preferably ZS) but, I wouldn't loose any sleep over it. You may wish to replace your CD burner with a DVD burner since they are dirt cheap these days (why do you have two burners?)

I'm inclined to say that you will see the biggest quality jump if you update your video card. The barton is cpu limiting, but, I for one see amazing quality out of games before FEAR (and yes, people keep telling me it might be further optomized and run more smoothly when it hits the shelves.) Mind you, once again, you get the best results running at 2.2GHz or so at least, which is a bit of an overclock for a desktop barton. Oh, and btw, if you are running that memory at 200MHz with the FSB at stock 166, you are going to be seeing huge latencies, setting the FSB and memory the same -- even if the memory is running slower -- will help your gaming a lot.

If you DO decide to upgrade, the general consensus is that about the cheapest Athlon 64 that offers best bang for the buck would be the Venice core chips, notably the 3200+ and 3000+. Either one should overclock a little bit even just using the stock cooling and if you replace that considerably more. All in all, you're looking at something like a minimum of $250, MAYBE $225 if you go really cheap on the board, ideally more like $275 to switch your mb and cpu -- excluding any cost to get a new HSF. Roughly an extra $25 if you decide you'd rather go PCI-Express. A decent video card (and I call 6600GT the low end, I wouldn't get less than that if I were you) is at least $150 or so, but, I'd really recommend you step up to the 6800 series (even if you can find a LE if you stick with AGP. It still has more memory bus bandwidth and such, plus the potentialy to unlock pipes sometimes.)

If you decided to stay with what you have now but upgrade the video card, you might cheat and get an athlon mobile 2600+ for an extra $100 or so and see what you can get out of it. It should at least go as high as 200x11.0 (that's right, you can usually get them on a 200 FSB even though stock for a mobile is 133.) You may be happier saving that money towards a venice since it isn't even twice the cost of a mobile 2600+ anymore. It all kind of depends on just how much money you have to burn and just how long you want it all to last (if you're going to continue to play older games, you may not want to jump all the way to A64 just yet. Like I said, FEAR was playable on this system, and Doom3, Half-Life 2, and Far Cry all run smoothly enough for me.)

 

[Jinx_player]

While i dont necessarly agree with Nazo regarding your overclocking (who says he wants to overclock at all?), He is right about your video card. The programs your running dont demand much on the side of your video card, more dependant on the ram you have (1gig is good for what you said you like to do).

What i would consider is just building a new rig outright, and keeping the one you have on the side. For the price of components now, you can build a nice gaming/multi tasking rig for under 800 bucks, depending on what video card you want to go after. If you only like to run with one computer (lamer ), The venice cores are the way to go, inexpensive and very overclockable.

 

[Nazo]

What is this "not want to overclock" think of which you speak? I am unable to comprehend this concept... d-: