Re: Time for upgrade but out of the loop

Tony Houghton wrote:

An 8600GTS looks like the best card to go for if I want to future proof
for DX10 at a reasonable price with silent cooling. But I read a review
of an 8800GTS (not much faster?) which said dual core is a must but it
would still be bottlenecked even with an X2 5000.

Common game benchmarks suggest that there's very little CPU bottlenecking in most modern games. As an 8600GTS is at least 2.5x slower than the fastest single card, I wouldn't worry about CPU performance for gaming.

By the way, a stock 8800GTS is typically ~80% faster than a stock 8600GTS in GPU-limited applications. An 8600GTS is only 20-25% faster than an 8600GT.


What is the situation with Intel vs AMD? I know Core 2 Duos are supposed
to be "better" overall than AMD X2s, but what does that really mean if
you want to pay about £100 or less for one? Are the Intel chipsets
considerably better than the ones for AMDs? And is nForce the best for
AMD or are VIA competing quite well this generation as they did against
nForce 3 IIRC.

If you're willing to pay more than ~130 quid for CPU+mobo, a c2d system is probably a better bet, particularly if you overclock. As far as I know, the VIA K8T890 is fairly solid, but you only see it in budget boards so it may lack flexibility and performance.


Also, I hear just as everybody's been forced to get DDR2 we're about to
move to DDR3. Is that likely to happen very soon and will it cost much
more than DDR2? It would be annoying to spend a lot on a big chunk of
DDR2 if it's about to become obsolete.

On the plus side, you can get 2GB of decent DDR2 for less than 50 quid atm. It's hard to worry too much about obsolesence at those prices.


Finally I'm concerned about my PSU. It's only 350W and doesn't have the
extra connectors that started appearing with PCI-E [1], but it's a
fairly good quality one by Nexus (FSP-based) and handles its current
load reliably. But will it cope with my proposed upgrades?

It might struggle with a high-end 90nm X2. Anything else should be fine, as the 8600GTS is pretty lightweight.

[1] Can you still get away with just a 20-pin power connector on the
latest boards?

Sometimes. Otherwise, the 20-24 pin adapters will work fine unless you're using multiple high-consumption PCI-E cards.


--
John Jordan
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