Upgrading old system - 6800GT compatibility question

[jnelso99]

Hi -

I have just a (hopefully) easy question about upgrading an older system. I have a P4 2.4GHz, Abit TH7II-RAID, 1GB RDRAM system currently with a Leadtek Ti4600 card. I would like to upgrade that card to whatever I can get for $300, give or take. I've been looking at 6800GT's on Newegg, and of the eight models they have, I've narrowed it down to five within my price range. The TH7II is AGP 2.0, so that weeded out a couple more (eVGA and Gigabyte). I'm currently left with the ProLink, Elsa, and XFX models, and the ProLink is AGP 2.0-compatible according to the online docs. I've sent an email to XFX, and Elsa doesn't have any online tech support that I could find, so I was wondering if anybody knew if those other two were AGP 2.0 or not. I suspect somebody on the boards would give me an answer quicker than tech support...

Any opinions on the quality of these three cards would be cool, too, but I can do a search for that kind of thing.

Power shouldn't be a problem as FedEx should be dropping off a new 500W power supply later on today...

Also, are my sights set too high with a 6800GT with my 2.4GHz processor? Would the processor bottleneck the card? I've done a quick forum search, and from what I can tell, it doesn't appear that it would be too serious if it does. But it doesn't hurt to ask...

If it helps, the games I play are more racing sims - Papyrus' NASCAR 2003, EA's F1 99-02, Simbin's GTR, etc, but I will probably load up games like Doom3 and possibly get Half-Life 2 if I get bored with those.

Thanks!

 

[E4g1e]

Actually, all 6800GTs are compatible with AGP slots that are compliant with AGP 2.0 or higher standards. Which means that you should be able to use any of them with your TH7II-RAID motherboard.

As for your CPU bottlenecking the 6800GT, then yes, it would - somewhat. AFAIK, all TH7II series motherboards support only the 400FSB CPUs; thus, the 2.4GHz P4 that you have is of the 2.4 (plain) P4, which runs on a 400FSB (100MHz actual FSB clock speed). In addition, most of the games that you're currently playing cannot take full advantage of modern GPUs (your NASCAR 2003 and your EA F1 games will run just fine on a DirectX 7.0 generation GPU).

 

[jnelso99]

Thanks for the quick reply. I'm not sure about the AGP 2.0 compatibility of "all 6800GTs" as the Gigabyte manual explicitly states "One available AGP3.0 compliant slot or better" as a requirement. No biggee, as I took a closer look on the eVGA forums and it looks like they work with AGP 2.0 (it was the 6800 Ultra that required AGP 3.0 according to the KB - I should learn to read some time). Their forums also had a member that had a TH7II with a slower processor, and they hinted that it should be do-able. Might go with eVGA now as they seem to be the better card from what I've seen.

I'm not going to make any purchase for a couple weeks at least, so that will give me some thinkin' time...