Best upgrade route from X2 3800 & AGP board

[herulach]

Basically motherboard in the rig in signature has died,and as I'm getting sick of the mrs' laptop, as well as battlefield withdrawal symptoms, whats the best buy for £300 to upgrade it to PCI-E? Im currently planning on sticking wth 939, picking up a second hand nf4 board (which I'd like to solicit recommendations on as its a good long while since I knew what to buy on that front). Looks like about 45 quid should square that up,
£65 quid for 2gb of value select/crucial stuff
leaves a balance of about £200 quid for a gpu, whats good these days? 8800GTS? hopefully it wont be too CPU ltd, it sits at a stable 2.4ghz, so it shouldn't be too shabby, even by todays standards.

If anybody has any alternative suggestions feel free to say, I'tll be a couple of weeks waiting before i put the order in anyway (need to wait for sharesave scheme to mature) so if theres any launches coming up that'll knock prices down that might be handy.

Cheers guys/

[Hunain]

8800GTS is good no doubt, your X2 at 2.4Ghz is fine IMO, what would be your gaming resolution? Depending on that you could go with the 9600GT as well, dont really need to get the best when you can save some and make a small worthwhile upgrade.

[herulach]

Should have put that, Im on a decent 19 inch monitor, with no real reason to upgrade, so 1280x1024 for everything

[Hunain]

Yeah well then you could look at something cheaper, HD 3850 or 9600GT, since you are going to upgrade after a year or so I assume, a 9600GT should see you well till there, but if you want a longer investment, yes the 8800GT or better yet, an 8800GTS would probably last you 2 years+ IMO..do take second advices

[herulach]

I figure as long as its DX10, then I may as well have something that will last, no bother changing to a new cpu/board down the line. 6800GT lasted me from back in the socket A days.

[Biscuit]

funny i read this thread, i have an Asus A8N 32 SLI deluxe willing to give away for £45 and 2GB PC3200 corsair value select im about to put on sale for around £50, PM me if interested mate. I will say though, i ran on one of the older 8800GTS (320mB) ones and when i switched to C2D with 800MHz ram i REALLY noticed the difference ( i am overclocked though i suppose ). You do get quite a bottleneck with 939 and you may be better off going down the C2D route. It can be done within budget



The ATI cards dont perform aswell as the nvidia ones in most games but they are still pretty good considering the price and are improving as the drivers mature. I think this upgrade would give you better results than a 939 system with an 8800

[Hunain]

Yes the upgrades Biscuit has advised will give you a much better system herulach, I would also advise the same, but still if you want to get a gpu only, no doubt 8800GTS would be the way to go...but your AMD will be a bottleneck no doubt and the neck will get narrower over time

[herulach]

hmm, I suppose at the lower res it may present more of a cpu bottleneck. I'd be interested in feedback from anyone actualy running modern GPU & an X2 though, understandably benchmarks are hard to find.

[Biscuit]

hmm, I suppose at the lower res it may present more of a cpu bottleneck. I'd be interested in feedback from anyone actualy running modern GPU & an X2 though, understandably benchmarks are hard to find.

The bottlenecks with GPUs any more modern than mine was can only be worse or the same.

To put it into perspective - i had an opteron 175 running at 2.4 and on COD4 i used to run at 1280 x 720 with mostly low settings. My FPS on this system varied all the way from about 30/40 in really rough spots to 125 where it was capped. With the same graphics card on my C2D system i run at 1440 x 900 with medium to high and get much more stable FPS, VERYrarely drops below 60

[Hunain]

herulach, which mobo are you going to get? AGP? if so, I dont think you can get an 8800GTS, you could probably get an HD 3850 AGP, but that would be wasting money IMO, if you are not getting a PCI-E board, get one, dont settle for AGP now and waste money on getting an AGP card.

[herulach]

It'll pci-e, agp boards are like hens teeth now anyway. If i could get hold of a half decent one it'd stay where it is.

Looks like i might be back at the drawing board, may make more sense to put it back to payday & see about upping the budget a bit. Core2duo & 8800GTS sounds nice and would last a good while longer I suppose.

Wednesday night reading reviews for all sorts of gpus by the sounds of it.

[Biscuit]

I think you may be wise making a wise decision waiting off until you can up the budget a further £100-150 or so to afford a decent C2D and GPU.