[cliffg]

Hi folks, nice place this is, just wondered if you could recommend a grfx card I could upgrade to..

My current setup:

Asus A7N8X m/b (Nforce2 chipset)
AMD Athlon XP 2800+ (2.1 Internal clock, 128k L1, 512k L2)
1GB PC3200 Ram
Geforce 6600 (standard AGP grfx card) 128mb

Ideally I would love to upgrade to mb to support PCIe and go for a cheap (but good) PCIe grx card.
Is it possible to upgrade to a nforce4 chipset MB with PCIe supported (and sata too if poss) and keep my processor + ram?

If that is possible, could anyone recommend to me a good MB and Grfx card?

Cheers

ps. not sure about a budget but maybe sub £200 for both?!?!

[Mertsch]

no, you can not keep anything is you plan going to PCIe
if you want a nForce 4 board I would advice you to take a S939 Athlon64
this is on its own already way better then your hardware ...
I had an AthlonXP Overclocked to 2400MHz and the stock Athlon64 3000+ with 1800MHz was already much faster and cooler
as for GPU I would recommend going for a 6800

[Dark Biene]

the only thing u can keep is your ram if it´s a good one

the 6800 is a good price choise


but hey, i´m playing with my old PC (AMD 1400 TB + Geforce 4 ti 4800se) many "newer" games very well
so, if u don´t want to play High End Games but only "older"

the question is....what do u want to do with your PC ?

[Mertsch]

oh sure
the RAM you can keep
and maybe you should think about a 7600 card which seems to be a quite good choice
6800 are quite pricy due to the low avail.

[cliffg]

Cheers guys

the question is....what do u want to do with your PC ?

a bit of lite gaming, (WoW, civ4, demos etc)

So, If I understand right, my best bet is to get the following:
1. Athlon 64 cpu
2. S939 nforce4 chipset MB (with PCIe, sata etc)
3. 6800 or 7600 grafix card

1. I can get AMD Athlon 64 3700+ San Diego Core 64 bit 1MB L2 Cache Skt 939 oem for £140, Is that good value?
2. What's a good Mobo? - I've used Asus for a while and enjoy it's stability, and I think the A8N32-SLI/Deluxe looks the biz (but a tad pricey)
3. As for grfx cards, i may well go for the Gigabyte GF 6800GS, @ £135

If I went for the A8N32-SLI/Deluxe i'm about £200+ over my budget, but whatever way I look at it, my budget wasn't enough to upgrade my system.

[Dark Biene]

The Price for CPU is really good
After using a MSI K8N NEO 4 and after a test with an ASUS A8N i would prefer the Asus board
but IMHO all NForce 4 boards are great, but u can also look at the DFI LANparty (all good boards are going with Sata2 and GLan)
GFX i would go with the 6800 GS (or GT and OC to Ultra) (if u want to spent a little bit more money, take a look at the "cheap" 7800GT)

with that rig u should play high end games without framerates under 20


(like i said, i can play some really "new" games still with a good framerate, but that depends on your moneybag)

[Mertsch]

if you can get the Venice core for a significant lower value you may consider using this CPU because the extra 0,5MB cache do not justify the +200 rating
anyway thats a good choice and will provide you very much performance (more then you will need right now)

I don't know if you plan to OC your graphics card or unlock any pipelines
but if not you may be better with a 6800GT (or 7xxx) because this card has almost the identical level of performance but this is due to the more pipelines not due to the higher clock rates. This means a GT will run much cooler and consumes less power than a GS

[Chernobyl]

I have just done a similar upgrade and would certainly recommend what I bought which is

Asus A8N-E S939 Motherboard
X1800XT

I already have a Venice 3000+ chip but would recommend to you the Venice 3200+ chip for around £100.
That will let you spend the money saved on a better graphics card which will impact your gameplay a lot more than a slightly faster CPU.

The 3200+ chip should clock with default cooler to anywhere from 2.5 to 2.7GHz, maybe more if lucky.
When gaming the extra cache on the San Diego is of very little use when gaming so pure MHz are what you need.

I was running an AGP A64 motherboard with the same CPU at 2.8GHz (water cooled) with an 6800GT. It was a very nice setup until Oblivion came along. The 6800GT (clocked to Ultra) isnt good enough so I ended up getting a new NF4 mobo and pretty cheap X1800XT.
Money wisely spent as Oblivion and everything else runs extremely well now!

Overclockers UK were selling the Sapphire X1800XT for £180 delivered a few weeks back. Its gone up about £10 now but thats still awesome value.

With this motherboard, my Venice 3000+ runs at 2.7GHz with default cooler/volts.
I'm using an older Enermax 430W PSU with only a 15A 12V rail. The X1800XT is specced to need 23A on the 12V rail for the system but its works flawlessly, even with the X1800XT clocked to 700/800

I dont think I could have got more bang for my buck,