8800GT and Pentium D, will they work together?
Hey all, I have a Pentium D 820 as my CPU currently. My graphics card is an ATI Radeon x1600xt. While it has served me well, it is now getting a bit long in the tooth.
I was looking at upgrading to a Gainward Bliss Geforce 8800GT card, as I have extremely limited funds and this looks to be the best value.
My question is, would this card work well with my current system? My specs:
Pentium D 820 2.8GHz
2gb DDR2 667MHz ram
Antec NeoHE power supply 480 watts
I really can only afford the graphics card, I would like to throw in a new motherboard and CPU but I have to wait until later in the year to do that. Any help is appreciated!
Re: 8800GT and Pentium D, will they work together?
It will work but may be bottle necked by the cpu somewhat, you can pick up an e2140 for £40 and from the outline of hardware you gave its quite possible you could drop one in (and overclock it for even more performance). what motherboard are you using?
Re: 8800GT and Pentium D, will they work together?
No the CPU will not be a problem at all.
Ok it might be a slight bottle neck but not much of one, most games are dependent on GPU not CPU and I can tel you now that I've not really noticed much differnce swapping from a 3ghz Pentium D to a e6600 C2D overclocked to 3ghz.
PSU should be fine, although it is a power hungery cpu, that's a decent PSU and should have enough power.
The only problem I can see you having might be from the motherboard.
There is a problem with some older motherboards & BIOS's that can fail to detect a PCI-e 2.0 card.
To elaborate, there's a flag in the Graphics card BIOS that says it's version 2.0 that cause the problem.
However this incompatibility is rare at the moement and you're fine with the Abit AW8D, might be an idea to update the BIOS just incase. ;)
If it does occure and a motherboard BIOS update does not fix it then there is another solution, but it's a little more complex and requires another pc that will work with the card.
Basically you need to flash the graphics card BIOS with a version with the pci-e flag set to 1.0 (and that is all pci-e 2.0 currently is btw a bios setting)
However the problem can be getting hold of said graphics card BIOS.
Re: 8800GT and Pentium D, will they work together?
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Aez
It will work but may be bottle necked by the cpu somewhat, you can pick up an e2140 for £40 and from the outline of hardware you gave its quite possible you could drop one in (and overclock it for even more performance). what motherboard are you using?
It's an Abit AW8D, so the C2D won't work in it due to socket incompatibility. The processor you mentioned looks very affordable, but then factor in the cost of a new motherboard and it rises a bit out of my price range... :) Thanks for the advice though!
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Pob255
No the CPU will not be a problem at all.
Ok it might be a slight bottle neck but not much of one, most games are dependent on GPU not CPU and I can tel you now that I've not really noticed much differnce swapping from a 3ghz Pentium D to a e6600 C2D overclocked to 3ghz.
PSU should be fine, although it is a power hungery cpu, that's a decent PSU and should have enough power.
The only problem I can see you having might be from the motherboard.
There is a problem with some older motherboards & BIOS's that can fail to detect a PCI-e 2.0 card.
To elaborate, there's a flag in the Graphics card BIOS that says it's version 2.0 that cause the problem.
However this incompatibility is rare at the moement and you're fine with the Abit AW8D, might be an idea to update the BIOS just incase. ;)
If it does occure and a motherboard BIOS update does not fix it then there is another solution, but it's a little more complex and requires another pc that will work with the card.
Basically you need to flash the graphics card BIOS with a version with the pci-e flag set to 1.0 (and that is all pci-e 2.0 currently is btw a bios setting)
However the problem can be getting hold of said graphics card BIOS.
Right thanks for the advice, much appreciated. I will upgrade my Mobo bios in preperation.
