Re: OT: System Upgrades
- From: "KingCreole" <shamble@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: 20 Jan 2006 11:43:29 -0800
Moif Murphy wrote:
> Although I work in IT I've not kept up on the hardware side of things for a
> long while and I'm thinking about buying a few bits off of ebay over the
> coming months with a view to completely revamping my system. The last time I
> did this was well over 18 months ago.
>
> ATM I have an Athlon XP 2200 with a corresponding bargain basement
> Kobian/Mercury motherboard and 2 x 512mb sticks of DDR RAM. I'm also running
> with an AGP Radeon 9500 (not overclocked). My WoW runs fine but I see these
> beautiful screenshots of WoW and I want that too!
>
> So what's a good thing to aim for within a relatively good price range?
>
> I'm currently considering another AGP card in the Radeon 9800 range.
> Processor wise I'm considering another Athlon, something closer to the
> 3.0ghz mark which I'm presuming is 64 now and of course 1gb if not 2gb of
> RAM. Is it all DDR2 now? Not to mention a new case & fan that doesn't sound
> like a tractor :)
>
> TIA for any advice.
>
> --
> http://www.the-suffering.co.uk
> MKDS: 343 658 678 638
Ok, first things first, stick with AMD and go for a 64 processor, for
gaming theres not much that can touch them. To do that you're going to
need a new motherboard as well, Asus being my personal favourite brand,
and make it PCI-Express, cause otherwise you're going to pay over the
odds for a less capable graphics card. As for the gfx, for the budget
wary buyer get a Sapphire GTO2, basically the card is tagged as being
an x800, which is a more than capable card, but, the gpu core is the
same one used in the substantially faster x850 PE, the r480 (i think),
so, via a simple bios flash and overclocking well within the core and
memorys range you can get it up to x850 speeds, actual x850 XT = £200,
GTO2 that can be clocked to match x850 = £135.
The GFX card you want must have a 2 at the end, GTO2, GTO without the 2
can not be flashed to match x850 due to the gpu core being different,
only Sapphire currently make the GTO2. So, reccomendations:
Gfx card:
http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/products/index.html?action=c2hvd19wcm9kdWN0X292ZXJ2aWV3&product_uid=98063
Mobo:
http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/products/index.html?rb=15379715360&action=c2hvd19wcm9kdWN0X292ZXJ2aWV3&product_uid=95458
CPU:
http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/products/index.html?rb=15379753841&action=c2hvd19wcm9kdWN0X292ZXJ2aWV3&product_uid=58431
(Cpu is a 3000 but basically the more you spend the better you'll get,
obviously)
And full instructions for flashing the GFX card are here, so you can
see how confident you feel about doing it before making the purchase,
it has a 100% success rate, i've done mine and its simply the biggest
bargain you can find in the gfx world:
http://www.techpowerup.com/articles/overclocking/vidcard/127
Hope this helps
.
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