upgrading, please advise

C

Corporal79

Gawd
Joined
Oct 28, 2004
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889
I'm looking to upgrade asap since I had a meltdown last night.

Old Rig:
Barton 3000+
Abit NF7-S Motherboard
2X512mb Kingston HyperX pc3500 I believe
Geforce 5900 (borrowed from brother)

Realistic $$ upgrade around $1000
AMD Athlon64 X2 3800+ Manchester
ASUS A8N-SLi premium Nforce 4
eVGA 7800GT
74gb Raptor HD


going to be reusing the memory and power supply (zalman 400watt)

I've been running this system for about 3 years now I think and have been out of the latest and greatest parts since then, my quick research makes me believe this is a good upgrade? Thoughts please, all welcome I'd like to order sometime today !

PS I plan on watercooling this new setup in a few months with an Koolance EXOS2 if that matters.
 
Might want to check to see if your power supply is up to par since you upgraded to 7800. Other than that you should be fine.
 
thanks for the prompt reply, I've got the newegg window open waiting for the "all ok" :D

As far as the power supply goes, what would tell me it's up to par or recommend one?

I see the dual core cpu is 2Ghz, that enough for modern games? again I've been out of the game for a bit. Thanks!
 
computerdude said:
Might want to check to see if your power supply is up to par since you upgraded to 7800. Other than that you should be fine.
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Seconded. Looks great, except your current PSU may not be sufficient for the new system. Use the PSU calculator to try and see if your current one is sufficient, or if you need something that'll provide a little more power.
 
Most likely a psu with good rails above 25A or so on the +12v side, high 30's on the +3.3 and +5v and 450w to cover the psu
wattage, Raptor and 7800. PC&P, Antec, OCZ, Thermaltake are all good and recomended psus. Newegg would have all of them at good prices.
 
Corporal79 said:
thanks for the prompt reply, I've got the newegg window open waiting for the "all ok" :D

As far as the power supply goes, what would tell me it's up to par or recommend one?

I see the dual core cpu is 2Ghz, that enough for modern games? again I've been out of the game for a bit. Thanks!
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An A64@2Ghz > P4@3Ghz+, especially when it comes to gaming. In modern games, as long as you're playing at a high resolution, the GPU is going to be the bottleneck. Example
 
Unless you really are you sure you are going to add another 7800GT really soon don't even bother with the SLI motherboard.
 
it seems the more I read the more I question the components. I've read some threads on people using 2 gigs of RAM versus 1 gig. Should I stick with the ram I have now or would it be worth my while to grab 2x1gb sticks?

KoolDrew made me think about the SLi option, I'm not sure if I would drop another chunk of change on another 7800GT or not. my previous board was an nforce2 so I felt like sticking with an nvidia chipset. and I liked the heatpipe cooler other than that I'm open to mobo choices. I've never OC'd and honestly it makes me a bit nervous! Maybe I'll search for a good OC guide. I see by previous posts that DFI makes a nice board. <sigh> I'm getting more and more unsure of my choices. Would anyone change anything without jacking my budget up?

It's possible that I don't quite understand the jump in performance I have here?
 
Here's a guide for OC'ing.

As far as the motherboard goes, DFI boards are the best overclockers. They're very stable, but wont necessarily be stable out of the box - would take some tweaking to get ideal settings. I would advise against the DFI, since judging from your posts you're not too experienced at tweaking BIOS settings. ASUS makes great boards, and if you go with them, you'll have excellent stability out of the box. If you dont see yourself adding a second 7800GT in SLI, then you might consider AN8-E, otherwise go with the A8N-SLI , unless you need the extra ports on the premium, that is.
Also, you'd be better off going with a 16MB cache drive than the raptor. 250GB for $142, 300GB for $168. They perform nearly equal to the raptor, but have a much better $/GB ratio, and both are cheaper than the raptor. Both of those have a 5 year warranty, the same as the Raptor.
Now you can take the money saved by not going with the AN8-SLI Premium or the Raptor, and get this Antec TruepowerII 480w PSU. The 430W would be sufficient, however the 480 is only 5 bucks more expensive right now, and would give you more room to add components, and provide enough power for 2 7800GTs in SLI if you eventually go that route.
2GB of ram will improve performance in newer games, however you can always add it later. On the other hand its better to get a high quality PSU is important now, since it will insure stability, and while having 1gb ram as opposed to 2gb isnt capable of killing your entire system, having a low quality and/or inadequate PSU can do just that.
 
The 400w Zalmans are rebadged Fortron-Source/Sparkle units.. that should power your rig just fine, but not much more.

I'd consider going 2 gigs if you can afford it at this point.
 
RavenD - Thanks for the outstanding reply. I think I will wait on getting the 2Gb of memory until a later time. The Antec truepower 480W power supply looks great, I'm not quite sure on the difference between that and the NEO power 480W is. Obviously the truepower for $90 is appealing :) Also the Maxtor 250GB drive would save me some cash too,would I be taking a noticable performance hit by not going the SATA route? I currently have a Western Digital 60gb 7200rpm drive and is only half full with my itunes/mp3's and pictures, not sure if 250 would be overkill since I could use the 60gb as a secondary to keep all that stuff on. Is there enough of a performance notice going from my 60gb 7200rpm drive to something else or should I just stick with it?

*Disclaimer* I hope none of this comes off as me asking for advice and shooting it down, I'm just thinking out loud here. I appreciate any and all insight, thats why I'm here :)

So as it stands right now...
ASUS A8N-E Nforce4 Ultra (non SLi, thanks guys!)
eVGA 7800GT
Antec TruepowerII 480W
AMD Athlon64 X2 3800+ Manchester
 
I posted before reading the Schros post, I'll double check my zalman power supply, I'm 80% it's a 400w, if thats the case I'll ditch the Antec power supply and pick up 2 gigs of memory. Can you reccomend something? I'm not really up on all the timings and what not. Thanks so much!

I'm home now and my zalman power supply is this one Zalman PS Will it handle the upgrade?
 
Corporal,

I just did a little research on the 7800GT, and it appears that different manufacturers have different requirements.... eVGA says you should have a "450w PSU", while MSI states a "400w and up PSU" for the same product and BFG states a 400w PSU with at least 26A on the 12v, which that unit isn't anywhere near (its rated @ 15A on 12v), however, this differs greatly from nVidia's requirement for a 350w PSU for a 7800GTX....

If I were in your shoes, I'd give it a spin, but be prepared to buy a new PSU if the Fortron *cough* Zalman doesn't cut the mustard.

As far as the RAM goes, assuming you don't care about timings, I'd check out a Corsair ValuSelect 2x 1gb pack.
 
That Zalman PSU wont cut it. Different manufacturers recommend different wattages, however watts mean very little these days - here's cheap 480w PSU that only has 15a on 12v. I'd go with BFGs requirements, even if you're getting an eVGA card, as they're the only ones that state how much current the card needs, rather than the vague wattage requirement.
For drives with the same capacity, speed, cache, and number of platters, there is no performance difference between SATA150 and PATA - only easier cable management with SATA. SATA150 uses an SATA to PATA bridge, it has higher bandwidth, but that makes no difference, since no single hard drive can saturate even an ATA133 bus. SATA2 with NCQ would be an improvement, however newegg only has one SATA 2 16mb cache drive right now, a WD that doesnt have NCQ, and only has a 3 year warranty. Go with the IDE 16mb cache drive for now.
 
Alright I got it all set in my shopping cart ready to checkout, just took a quick glance at memory on newegg.com at some 2x1gb sets and I remember back in the day cas 2 was good. Most of these sets I'm looking at are CAS 4 is that crap? I'm not up on memory timings and all that, what should I look for as far as what newegg can tell me about picking up 2 gigs of memory?
 
Corporal79 said:
Alright I got it all set in my shopping cart ready to checkout, just took a quick glance at memory on newegg.com at some 2x1gb sets and I remember back in the day cas 2 was good. Most of these sets I'm looking at are CAS 4 is that crap? I'm not up on memory timings and all that, what should I look for as far as what newegg can tell me about picking up 2 gigs of memory?
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Caution batman!

The cheapest 2 gig sets on the Egg are DDR2, which will not work in your setup.

Filter that memory list to give you only 184pin Dimms (aka, DDR1)- there's a Rosewill set just under 200, the corsair set is around $215. The Rosewill may do just fine- its the Egg's house brand.

Standard DDR only has 3 possible CAS Values- 2, 2.5, 3

If you see 4 or 5, those are certainly DDR2
 
great catch on the memory Schro! I woulod have been pissed.

I've got some extra cash together and am tempted to get a 7800GTX instead of the 7800GT. Would it be a waste with my cpu not being on the higher end of the X2 crowd? Would the Antec TruepowerII 480W still be able to run it? Would it be more beneficial to get more memory instead? Where would the extra cash be the most beneficial?

I finally have money to upgrade and didn't think it would be this difficult :)

Or if someone can get something better together for $1500 I'm listening :D
 
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