Re: Upgrade advice - Socket 939


Many thanks for your thoughts Alex, Steve and Cuzman. Always handy to
have a sanity check when spending this sort of money ;-)

In article <h4WdnQH16YbZmyfZRVnyrQ@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Alex Fraser
<me@xxxxxxxxxxx> writes

I think an AGP motherboard will limit future graphics card upgrades,

Next upgrade will be a baby-and-bathwater one rather than piecemeal.

and
your 6600GT will be a bit of a weak link in the new system. I am not sure if
you considered this or if it is an issue for you.

It's not an issue, as I'm not a heavy games player.

That clearly makes sense unless you are sure you only ever need
single-threaded performance.

I don't play a lot of games, but tend to have a large number of
different applications open at once (the machine runs 24/7), and felt
that the dual cores would be useful for the multitasking. The OS I use
is Win2k. Stability is far more important to me than all-out
performance.

Although the 4000+ is only a few percent faster
for single-threaded use anyway.

Tekheads had the X2 3800+ at a very attractive price, so I went for that
instead of the 4200+, saving 50 quid, and changed the motherboard from
Abit AV8 to an Asus A8V. The Asus specifically mentions support for
Cool'n'Quiet, which is attractive to me as the machine is on all the
time, and has good overclocking support, so I might go for some gentle
overclocking.

This means I've spent 200 quid instead of the 300 originally envisaged,
and can retain my 6600GT, memory, ATA hard drive, ATA optical drives and
move my SATA hard drive from a PCI card to the motherboard. This
upgrade should do me for another year to 18 months until the
Conroe/Socket AM2 dust settles.

I don't know if the following is still valid, but if so it might be worth
waiting a little while: http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=2800

Thanks for the link. I had expected AMD prices to fall in the wake of
Conroe, but not quite so dramatically. After some thought I decided to
go for the X2 3800+ now rather than wait, as Tekheads had it at an
attractive price. AMD is killing off S939 parts in December, so if
there are any bargains to be had, I might pick up a faster CPU then.

All in all, what you are thinking of seems reasonable at the very least. It
should last long enough for the dust to settle on Intel's new architecture,
which by all accounts looks very impressive

It does look very impressive, but a common theme in the Conroe reviews
seems to be that it's rather unstable. It's not clear yet whether it's
the CPU or the chipset at fault. The price is an absolute killer
though; it'll be very interesting to see what AMD's response is.


In article <bOnug.101967$wl.16852@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, SteveH
<steve.houghREMOVETHIS@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes

This is similar to what I did. I went from a XP3200 to an XP64-3500, on an
Asus A8V Deluxe. I too have a GT6600, and use this macine for gaming among
other things. It has no problem with Half Life 2, Far Cry, Oblivion etc.

I don't play a lot of games (should have mentioned this in my OP,
sorry), but good to know you're happy with the performance with similar
spec.

When AMD reduce their prices again (soon possibly!) I'm looking to get a X2
4400 to drop into my board, and then possibly a better AGP card, and that
will do me for a while longer.

My thoughts too, but probably won't bother with another AGP card.

--
(\__/)
(='.'=) This is Bunny. Copy and paste bunny into your
(")_(") signature to help him gain world domination.

.