Upgrade or Start over

J

jhtevans

Limp Gawd
Joined
Dec 14, 2002
Messages
374
Working with the system listed in the specs below in the sig - I'm not sure if I should bother upgrading within this framework or if I should move on to a board that supports the new Intel core architecture + DDR3 ... and perhaps more importantly, SLI of any variety.

I know DDR2 is super cheap now, so I'll probably throw another 2 gigs of RAM in even if I end up parting with this setup in the next couple months. I could also ditch the 8800GTS for 2x something ATI and use crossfire which is supported by this board - though I haven't been super impressed with ATi's offerings in the past couple years. I'm also not sure if a processor upgrade would be warranted.

Any opinions? Suggestions for upgrades or new platform?
 
You mention SLI and crossfire, so I suppose you might be a gamer and might choose that route. The first question is what resolution do you game at?

If your @ 1920 x 1200 (24") or lower, you might not need two GPU's.

What games do you play or plan to play?

If you thinking about Crysis or FarCry2, then a Quad core CPU would be a better ticket (along with a new GPU)

How much do you want to spend?

Yea, it always comes down to money. You wouldn't have taken the time to post (I hope not) if you weren't considering upgrading.

Let us know!
 
Your system is not bad by any means, so I'd say there isn't much of a point in upgrading it aside from the video card and the RAM. It would be more worthwhile to just do a whole new build once you have enough cash. Fortunately, should you decide to upgrade your RAM and video card, RAM is cheap so that won't make much of a dent in your wallet, and a newer video card can also be carried over to a future build. I wouldn't bother with switching to a better CPU or different motherboard though.
 
Yes, gaming is mainly what I use my machine for (My current LCD maxes out at 1280x1024 - so not exactly high-res) - though I do dabble in some multimedia production. Time permitting, I like to play just about anything so staying on top of the tech has been my one monetary indulgence. Sadly, this is about the most 'behind' the curve that I've been for a number of years - even the GTS was a step down from the flagship GPUs that I usually get. Every time I do a major upgrade I usually end up dropping about $1200 - but cash has been tight recently and I was none too pleased to find out that my mobo doesn't actually support SLI - meaning with this setup I'd have to got with ATI to get the dual slot solution.
 
Minor Update:

I went ahead and purchased another 2gigs of the same memory for $26 shipped - probably the cheapest upgrade I can find.

I'm gonna go ahead and keep working on this platform - I'll probably wait for the 'next' socket revision after the LGA1366 to make the switch to a new motherboard/processor/memory setup.

So with that in mind, my question becomes what is sensible to do with what I have. In terms of video cards, would I be better switching to an ATI crossfire setup or just upgrading to a similarly priced Nvidia single-card solution?
 
I wish I was in a position to drop $500 on a video card like in years past, but now that's just impossible.

I guess I'd look to spend $300 max, but would prefer to spend less - whatever will yield a really noticeable upgrade in performance over the 8800GTS - I haven't stayed current with the GPU roadmaps like I once did, so I'm slowly reading through the reviews and performance comps, but as always, I welcome any input from these forums.

As an aside, I think I'm also going to invest in a new hard drive.... I'm currently using a WD2000JD and am looking to grab one of the 32mb cache 3.0gb/s drives from Newegg (the moderately sized drives are a steal) - this is just because my system performance in general seems a bit more sluggish than I would like - Vista just isn't as snappy as it could be.
 
Just about anything will be significantly faster than your current card. What games do you play or want to play?
 
Dropping $175 on a new screen (should get you a 22") (and keep the old, multimon is awesome) and $200 on a 4870 or a GTX260 would be the best bet. Sell the GTS, get a new 7200.12 500GB for the HDD.
Total net cost- around $325.
 
Zero82z said:
Just about anything will be significantly faster than your current card. What games do you play or want to play?
Click to expand...


Note sure about that...

I upgraded from a 8800 GTS to a 9800 GTX and didn't see much of an improvement.

Personally if I had that setup I'd try to o/c as far as I could and wouldn't upgrade anything just yet if it was just games.

Granted if you were looking at getting a 295 that's a different story but for that cash I'd go with an i7 and pick up a second 8800 GTS in the forums.
 
tlc4tvm said:
Note sure about that...
Click to expand...
I'm talking in terms of reasonably fast current-gen cards, so in other words a 4830/4850 or better. And he's coming from a 320MB GTS, not one of the 512MB models. That particular version is considerably slower than more modern cards, especially at high resolutions and graphical settings where it will be heavily bottlenecked by its low memory capacity.
 
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