If you check my first post you'll see I said to draw your own conclusions...
Again, an 8500 will not perform near it's potential in a p3 800. While this
isn't a reason to avoid geting one on a good deal it is a reason to avoid
paying top dollar based on reviews of how fast that card is because that can
be misleading. Lesser cards such as the 7500 are worth considering for that
cpu if money is tight because the difference won't be that big.
As for your first post, Ripflex was far out but so were you in inferring
that a 1.2G cpu is a reasonable place to leave a cpu, which is the only way
to read it.
And, again, because my system was much like his, I gave a useful benchmark
on what to expect from a card that was mentioned in this string as a good
upgrade. Again, AMD vs Intel differences, etc. are not relevant because he
is not upgrading the rest of his system.
You nicely ignored this point didn't you?
Yes I did, because again it isnt releveant to what I'm saying.
"...The point is tha it's not always/just the CPU that can be a
bottleneck in a system. It would be more relevant if you
could post experience of upgrading just the CPU in the same
base system. ..."
It doesn't matter what the bottleneck is because he isn't changing anything.
For the same reason, it wouldn't be more helpful to post only a cpu upgrade
difference because the issue is how an 8500 will perform in his system, and
what I was pointing out was that it will be choked badly; it doesn't matter
what component does it (although it is a combination of all things - slower
chipset, slower fsb, slower ram, slower cpu).
I'm not going further with the string analysis.
In a nutshell, so you can understand:
- A 1.2Ghz cpu, regardless of memory or chipset, is not a realistic gaming
cpu. Therefore, even though a 2G cpu may not be necessary, not much can be
expected of a p3 800 for gaming.
- The p3 800 wil not provide the 8500 enough power to run as it is reported
to. This is worth noting because the 8500 was suggested earlier. Ironically
I think it wopuld be a good card for the OP as long as he didnt pay much
more than he coulkd get a 7500 class card.
- Newer celerons are purposely crippled with higher cache latencies, etc to
avoid the competition p2 and p3 cpus got from them... AMD xp+ cpu's are more
bandwidth hungry than cpu cycle hungry and respond better to fsb boosts than
cpu speed... DDR ram is faster than original sdram (I benched both types in
an ecs k7s5a and ran 3dmark2001 6% faster with ddr)... etc, etc, etc... BUT
none of this requires mentioning to support the fact that I ran an 8500 in a
system with almost identical performance to the OP's (that era cpu used
sdram and similar performing chipset)... AND I know this to be true because
I installed the same video card (in an all around faster xp1700+ system) and
got huge performance increase, which shows that the video card was very much
held back by a system much like the OP's - the reasons for that are
irrelevant because my point is that the p3 800 is a huge bottleneck for the
8500, and a slower card will perform much closer to the 8500 than normal for
a newer (but still dated) system.
So, as I stated in my first post, draw your own conclusions on that.
My point, which I didn't want to bother to fully explain, is that the p3 800
wil not run fast video cars like they are meant to be, and a slightly lesser
card could be considered without a big drop in performance. This is
pertinent to your post because you were inferring that a 1.2GHz cpu is
sufficient for a new game like HL2; if this were the case, (disregarding the
issue about the variety of 1.2G cpu's), then a p3 800 would seem to be able
to fare pretty well for gaming, in which case... why not get a really nice
speed boost and get a 9800pro...
The OP can, if he chooses use the information I gave when choosing a new
card because I gave a benchmark of how a similar system to his worked with a
specific gaming card, and noted that it did work near it's potential.
Anyway I've said all I have to say on this matter... I'm sure most people
have long lost interest in this dispute even more so than me...
Mike
