PC Upgrade question

Ok, I'm looking at doing some upgrades to my old flogged to death PC, please dont laugh, but currently I'm looking at upgrading from a Pentium Celeron D to a ... ahem ... amd Athlon 64 3400+ ..yes, my idea is from one crap single core cpu to another marginally better cpu, but hey Im doing it on the cheap and freebie if I can. And honestly anything has to be better than this Celeron D shit.

So, have newish mother board coming for the Athlon 64, AGP only, have harddrives and all that ... My question is, whats a good AGP graphics card to look out for on Ebay and other online marketplaces.

Also ...good memory modules?

Also ...Does anyone have anything lying around, 'cos I reckon most folks have gone all PCI express and multicore goodness by now ...

I believe about a Radeon HD 3850 *edit the 3850 will cost a pretty penny though* would be the best you would ever find for AGP. Other then that I'd proberly suggest anything from the ATI HD 2950 to any of the HD 3000's. Most of them are alright cards and will be among the best you find for the aging AGP slot. If you choose to go with Nvida you're likely going to get a 7600GTX to be the best.

Edit again....

Brand new you'd be looking around $100 for a ATI 3650 which I know are capable of playing fallout 3 (At least the PCIE version) or roughly $200 for the 3850 which is over kill for a AGP card however you'd likely find something cheaper on Ebay.

Squeak.

Years ago I gave up fossicking through memory specs... I usually just go Kingston. How much you after, and in which config?

As for my AGP Radeon 9550... you can have it when you pry it from my dead cold.... and highly decrepit mainboard! I was originally planning on being buried with it... if some random PGer wouldn't just loot it from my cyber-crypt.

I would totally loot it from your cyber crypt and then probably hold onto it for months, using it in roleplay as I sit on the grass somewhere, or some stone talking to it, wondering what its' true worth can be and expecting it to suddenly talk one day.

I do that all the time..is it strange? They answer back too!

Memory = 3 gb pc3200, not sure about latencies and all that other stuff. they have to amtch dont they. .. I have 1.5 at the moment, which I can salvage.

ATI 9550, is that better than the 9250, 'cos thats in one of my PCs nowand it sucks, lol.

Thanks squeek, Id seen a couple of those ATI 3650 + 3850s and want sure about them.

Hah! the server is a Single Core AMD 3500+ and it is ideally suited for it's task. Myk noted this somewhere else in that unless you are building or running multiple tasks at same time as playing, then a single core is fine for the job.
I would seriously look at a board the has PCIE and can take your CPU, then drop on a cheap PCIE graphics card that will smash the AGP card back into the darkages. Do the maths, I reckon it will come in close.

Ram, DDR or DDR2, need to know this if you are altering motherboards etc.

Spor

Gigabyte GA-K8Ns mainboard nforce3 AMD 754 is the board I got ...$40 on ebay, by all accounts its a decent board, its used, but comes with al the packaging and cables, manual, cd drivers. Seller has a decent feedback score.

I looked at some 939 socket mobo's with PCIe instead of agp, but these were pushing my monthly ebay bidding allowance lol. Basically Im trying to build the best out of two PCs.

Memory mods are DDR.

I do have an nvidia graphics card, 7300 gs I think. Which seems to do the job (fails miserably on games like Stalker and Dark Messiah, but I think thats because of the crap celeron D and not the graphics card), but this needs to replace the crap ATI 9250 in one of my other PCs. The HD 3650 is tempting..particuarly if I can get them new.

i think the only multiple tasks I do are alt tabbing to check websites or the forums whilst Im playing lol. But now I have a laptop, which serves that task admirably and gets rid of the jingly jangly alt tab.

If you can afford it, get yourself a second HDD - doesn't have to be a big one. Then put your windows swap file on it, along with program data files. It'll make a noticable speed difference. Most SATA2 will connect to a normal SATA connection - prices from 70GB for $70 thru 750GB for $120 (Western Digital green power model).

For graphics cards, all I'm showing is a GeForce FX 6200 8X AGP 256Mb for about $90. Think I started with a 5600FX, so it should be ok. They used to do an AGP version of the 7900GS which worked pretty well - certainly ran NWN Ok.

Here we go again.

Going for a brand new gaming rig.

Budget = $1300

Please Discuss best within price ...

Will build myself. Sticking with Windows XP.

So the shopping list is;

Case (PSU)
MOBO
CPU
GPU
Memory
HDD

From Scorptech Im looking at this -

Intel - BX80570E8500

Gigabyte - GA-EP43-UD3L

OCZ Technology - OCZ2N1066SR2GK

Sapphire Radeon HD4890

Cooler Master - RC-690-KKN1
Western Digital - WD5000AADS
Western Digital WD5000AADS Caviar Green 500gb

Within my budget.

From a local supplier -

AMD 9950 BE X4
Gigabyte MA770 mobo
Leadtek GTS 250 gpu
... The other stuff isnt much diffferent.

What Im interested in here is wether Amd quad is better than Intel Duo Ive poured over a number of geek/tech forums and theres quite a lot of coinflict of opinion. lol.

Quad will let you do four things at once, duo only two. Whether or not you see any benefit from this depends on the clock speed - which determines how fast each thing gets done and whether or not the software for the things you want to do is capable of exploiting the extra do'ers.

If you're just playing NWN, then the clock speed is the only determinant, as it counts as a single thing.

If you're rendering video or ray tracing, then the quad is your better bet as most modern software will be able to use all 4 CPUs to go twice as fast as a 2 core (running at the same clock speed).

What sort of clock speeds are you looking at? I run an Intel 2.8GHz quad.

Oh, and a busy quad can make more us of 4GB of RAM than a duo can.

From NetPlus I can get this:

Code:

Intel 2.8GHz Quad CPU        - $324
ASUS P5Q-SE/R Mobo          - $189
4GB Corsair DDR2 RAM 1066    - $ 98
1TB WD SATA2 Harddrive      - $104
GeForce GTS250 w 512MB      - $189
2x Samsung SATA2 DVD-W      - $150  (out of stock of the cheaper ones)
Windows XP Pro OEM          -$189
7 in 1 internal card read    -$ 18

Total is $1261 - assembled and tested, pickup from their store (which is in Perth, so probably not much use to you directly)

Get the paper at the weekend and look through the ads for the computer retailers. Spec above sounds cheaper and gives more than the ones you\'ve quoted.

If you've got more cash (or you don\'t have to pay for XP Pro), you can probably up the video card (GPS250 w 1GB is 259, GTX 275 w 896MB is $348).

Basically - look around and try not to get ripped off to much. Lot of people selling old stock at high prices.

Basically I want to play newer games ..Left 4 dead, COD 4/5, Dawn of war 2 that kind of thing. Ill probably keep my old system for NWN or figure out how to run NWN on multi core processors which a few people already have done ...