What should I do? (athlonXP upgrade help)

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hungryduck

[H]ard|Gawd
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Mar 29, 2005
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Alrighty, so my current system is as follows:
AMD Athlon XP 3200+
ASUS A7N8X
1gig Corsair Value Select PC3200 DDR (2x512)
XFX 6600gt 128mb AGP
40gig Maxtor and 20gig western digital HD's

Right now, I'm looking for something to up the performance of my rather aging machine a bit. What would be a good way to give this thing some boost? Would another stick of 512DDR in the 3rd slot help a bit? I was looking to upgrade to perhaps an AMD 64 processor, but I don't have too much cash....would I see better performance with a 2800 or 3000 venice with a cheap mobo? What are my best options here?
Thanks in advance!
EDIT: My measly budget is rougly 200 bucks or so, and this system is primarily my gaming machine....hope that helps.
 
You forgot the most important info: your budget. Yes, an exact number is important. Around here, a "cheap" upgrade can mean anything between "$200" and "under $1500."
 
like the first part of your sig sac...thats reall funny imo

ram wouldnt really help you in perfomrance...with your setup...goin 64bit is really all you can do...
 
but is upgrading from a 3200+ athlon to a 2800+ venice a real upgrad eor downgrade performance wise....cause I'm in the same boat as he is.
 
darknite said:
like the first part of your sig sac...thats reall funny imo

ram wouldnt really help you in perfomrance...with your setup...goin 64bit is really all you can do...
Click to expand...

Darknite, just curious....
Why do you think that more ram wouldnt help?

I mean, reducing the ram would slow the pc. Why wouldnt adding more ram speed up the pc?

Also Hungryduck, I think it depends on what performance means to you.

better gaming?
video editing?
music creation?

I think it depends on what you use the system for...different components can be upgraded based on specific use.
 
well..im guessing your a gamer...
adding the ram might make a differnece but not a huge one imo
you would notice a bigger difference with same ram etc, just in a new board and 3k processor
but what is your budget and lets go from there.

guy here went from about the same system i got...with better vid card and upgraded to neo2, 3000 64 bit and 6600gt...it was like nite and day
 
Going from a 3200+ XP to a 3200+ 64 will be huge. The XP is running on a limited FSB, while the 64 has it's FSB integrated into the chip. Huge performance difference. I don't think going to a 2800+ would be downgrading in the least.
 
Sorry for the lack of info....this PC is primarily for playing games and serves as a secondhand music studio PC (reason 3.0 and the such) and my budget is about $200 or so....thats all I can scrape up.
 
Would I be better off with a Sckt. 754 2800 or 3000 or a 939 3000 venice with a cheap mobo?
 
For general desktop performance, a new disk would probably help the most.
More ram would probably only help BF2. If you do get more ram, getting a 1GB chip will let you run dual channel. Or course, dual channel only helps a little bit.
For gaming performance, I'd say a video card would be the order of the day.
You could hunt down an el-cheapo POS video card, sell your 6600GT, and then use the POS until you get a new board. 66000GTs seem to be going for around $170 new, so I'm sure you could get at least $100 for it. For around $300 you could get a 6800GT or an X800XL.
You could also sell the proc, mobo, and vid card. If you could raise $200 or so you could build an A64 PCI-e system with a similarly performing vid card. On a good day maybe you'll get $300+, then you can get a faster card as well. That may leave you rigless for a bit though.
 
hungryduck, I hope you don't mind me jumping in, but I have a similar system, in a similar situation, and I would love to find out what's the best path to choose also.

Anyway, my specs are the same, except that my card is 9800 Pro, and 1 Gig of generic PC2700 ram. I'm not sure if it's matters but, also my HDs are 80/100G. My budget is around $500.00...

Okay, the more I look at it the more I think we're not in the same situation here...
Anyway, I'll keep it here instead of creating another thread on this "very" similar situation we're in.

Thanks in advance.
 
By all means hellbringer, I don't mind at all. We AXP users really need to start looking at some options....
Right now I'm thinking I may be able to scrape together enough cash to grab me a venice 3000 and a decent 939 board....and maybe overclock the thing. Either that or go socket 754.....what to do...what to do....

Too bad these things don't grow on trees.... ;)
 
I'd say go 6800 GT.

http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2149&p=7

On that chart you see going from XP 3200+ to socket 754 2800+, you gain 10 fps on Doom3 with a 6800 Ultra.

That hardly seems like enough for me to justify buying a new mobo/cpu.

Look, at this point in time, to see some real significant increases in performance, you'd need to spend so much on a high end processor, you're better off just buying dual core so you'll be ready to run the next generation of software.

It's frustrating when new games come out and you can't run them max on current mid-range specs. But you have an odd choice to make since dual cores have already started to come out.
 
socket 939 definetly...biggest reason...upgradability
plus the 939 gives better performance
sac_tag recommend a good setup..i would go the 3k though

You wanna sell you 3200??
i got pretty much the same board...cant do 64 bit till around xmas or new year
 
3000+ venice is the way to go. Much more OCs, so you are getting more for your money.
 
ok, well I shall aim for a good 939 OC'ing board (whats a good one?) and a 3000 venice then.....thanks for all the help guys!
 
DFI is like always the best at OCing....especial the newer PCI-e ones hands down the best.

However when I upgrade I'm staying AGP until I upgrade to PCI-e caus eI got a 6800nu.
No need to upgrade it. So I will get a MSI neo plat 2

Asus is usuallyt the most stable with slithly loweer OCs thah MSI and DFI
DFI has good OCs
Gigabyte has features
Epox is a good cheap mob
ECS is cheap
MSI seems to perform very well and give decent OCs
Abit seems to cater to Intel better in terms of OCin (am i right?) and is a decent board...I think they are more bark and no bite...but thats me...others may differ.
 
I went from a mobile 2600 at 2.6 ghz on a dfi board to an amd 3000+ s754 and msi via board and i felt a big difference, windows just felt snappier and shit like that.
This was maybe a year ago and it was worth the upgrade then.
Venice cores got dual channel memory so youll get a good boost off of that as well compared to s754 with only single channel.

they both scored the same in sandra at about 10-10,500 k in cpu arithmetic, however the athlon s754 at 2.0 ghz gamed alot better to me.
 
hungryduck said:
ok, well I shall aim for a good 939 OC'ing board (whats a good one?) and a 3000 venice then.....thanks for all the help guys!
Click to expand...

They just announced on Tom's Hardware and theinquirer.net that AMD is going to launch a $345 US dual core CPU. They want them to be out before the school buying season starts. That should be like next month.
 
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