Would an Athon64 help?

[Justin Baker]

I've just bought a 24" widescreen flat panel for my main PC, so I'm looking
to improve the performance of my system in games at high resolutons. I
mostly play City of Heroes, Battlefield 2 & Dawn of War. My current system
is as below:

Athlon XP 3000
Abit KD7
1Gb DDR333
256Mb Radeon X800XL

Would it be worth changing the motherboard for an AGP Socket 939 board and
an Athlon64? Would I get much of a performance increase? Or would I be
better waiting for the new socket and replace board, CPU and graphics card
at that point?

 

[General Schvantzkoph]

I've just bought a 24" widescreen flat panel for my main PC, so I'm looking
to improve the performance of my system in games at high resolutons. I
mostly play City of Heroes, Battlefield 2 & Dawn of War. My current system
is as below:

Athlon XP 3000
Abit KD7
1Gb DDR333
256Mb Radeon X800XL

Would it be worth changing the motherboard for an AGP Socket 939 board and
an Athlon64? Would I get much of a performance increase? Or would I be
better waiting for the new socket and replace board, CPU and graphics card
at that point?

You should probably wait another year or so. An XP 3000 is pretty fast. As
a general rule of thumb it's not worth doing an upgrade unless you get at
least a 2 to 1 improvement, personally I usually wait until I can
get a 3 or 4 to one speed up. I don't think that any current processor
will give you a two to one speed up on single threaded applications. The
dual core processors like the Athlon 64 X2 4400+ have several times the
throughput as your XP 3000 but you won't see that on any current game. If
you are happy with a 50% increase then you could upgrade to an Athlon 64
4000+. The performance improvement won't be life changing but you'll be
able to notice some gain. A 4000+ and an MSI K8N-Neo2 will set you back
$400. You'll be able to use your current RAM and graphics card with the
K8N-Neo2.

 

[David Simpson]

I've just bought a 24" widescreen flat panel for my main PC, so I'm
looking to improve the performance of my system in games at high
resolutons. I mostly play City of Heroes, Battlefield 2 & Dawn of
War. My current system is as below:

Athlon XP 3000
Abit KD7
1Gb DDR333
256Mb Radeon X800XL

Would it be worth changing the motherboard for an AGP Socket 939 board
and an Athlon64? Would I get much of a performance increase? Or
would I be better waiting for the new socket and replace board, CPU
and graphics card at that point?

Someone just ask about this a short time ago. I play CoH on 2 machines at
1600x1200. My "good" machine is a 64 (3800+) based machine, but it also
has a 6800GT, and my other has a ATI slightly slower than yours. I can
almost run lag free on the 6800GT with everything set to max, but the other
machine everything is set VERY low. It was fine until I went to 1600x1200,
so I think this is the problem, not the CPU (2700+ on slower machine). All
the reviews I've seen, says CoH is mainly video card bound, not CPU. Now
your other 2 games, this might not be true. I think your big problem with
your current machine on getting a better video card, might be the video
card interface.

I'd suggest a system, and can even give you a rough cost:

A64 4000+
A64 socket 939 SLI MB (SLI incase you need even better video)
Fast HD (Any on the new fast ones)
NVidia 7800 (GTX if you can) (The new ATI would be fine too)
Case with a VERY good power supply.

This should come in around $1500 or a little higher, and be better than my
machine (mine was build 6 months ago, and the prices have dropped, so I
updated the list to newwer hardware. If you can afford this, get it now,
if not, wait, as you'll need to upgrade almost everything at once to make
it right.

If you used my hardwre (A64 3800 and a 6800GT) you could save $200 to $400
(I'd have to go re-price to be sure).

If you have LOTS of money, upgrade as follows: CPU 4800+ 2x ($450+) or FX-
57 ($650+), Video Dual 7800 ($475+)


I would sure hate to waste that 24" monitor with a lower res setting on the
video card.


BTW, a lot of gaming people don't like the dual core CPUs, but the next
version of the Nvidia drives will be multi threaded (use the dual cores
correctly), plus if you run ANYTHING in the background (like all the
services that Windoze ALWAYS runs) Windoze will become much "snappyer" with
the dual core. I personally would rather have the dual core (at the
highest speed), but then I multi task, which most Windoze users do not
(they task switch - have multi programs running, but only use 1 at a time).


--
____________________________________________
/ David Simpson \
| City of Heroes, Basic Stamp, RPGs, War Games |
| (e-mail address removed) |
| http://www.nyx.net/~dsimpson |
\____________________________________________/

 

[Guest]

David,

You mention that nvidia will be releasing drivers for x2 core cpu's - any
idea when?

Thanks,
Shane

 

[Guest]

I found this link that refers to the nvidia graphics drivers:

http://graphics.tomshardware.com/graphic/20051102/

I was hoping that there might be nforce3/4 based drivers.

regards,
Shane

 

[David Simpson]

David,
You mention that nvidia will be releasing drivers for x2 core cpu's -
any idea when?

Wow, that was an old post.

Sorry, I'm not sure when, but I know where there were talking about it:

http://www.nforcershq.com/forum/

Can't remember if it was in the nforce 3 & 4 area, or the driver area. I
think it was in a NVidia press release, too. I don't have a dual core
(Want one BAD, lol) so didn't keep up with it, but no $$$.

You understand the drivers are for the video card, but they will be multi-
threaded, right. I don't know how much this will help, but it should help
some, as the game can be running on 1 core, while the drivers and any other
progams could be on the other.




--
____________________________________________
/ David Simpson \
| City of Heroes, Basic Stamp, RPGs, War Games |
| (e-mail address removed) |
| http://www.nyx.net/~dsimpson |
\____________________________________________/