Upgrade help needed.

F

ftgc

Guest
Some questions for all you high level hardware types.

It's obvious I'm going to need to upgrade to get the most out of P3 so I thought I'd get some input.

First my system is currently:
Processor; Intel Core 2 Duo E4300 Allendale 1.8 Ghz LGA 775
GPU; Geforce 8800 320 meg 320 bit GDDR-3 PCI express X16
Memory; 2GB 240-pin DDR-2 SDRAM DDR 800 (PC2 6400)
Motherboard; Asus P5B plus LGA 775 Intel P965 Express ATX

I guess my biggest question is am I cpu limited or gpu limited or both. With my current mother board I'm limited to cpus with front bus speed of 1066. So near as I can tell I'm looking at the E7300 at 2.93 Ghz as the best I can fit. And for video cards I was looking at the 9500 GT 1GB 128-bit GDDR2 PCI express. I'm trying to keep cost down so what do you guys think?

Scott
 
You'd be far better off going with an e8400 for an extra 40 bucks or so. The P5B does support it. It'll default to 1066 FSB but you can overclock the snot out of the e8400 on that board with a decent cooler to make up for it. An Arctic Cooler 7 Pro would do the trick....and cheaply.

The 9500 at that point would be the bottleneck. I'd consider it to be a bit of an entry level card. Wouldn't be enough of an upgrade over your current card (regardless of the additonal memory) to justify the expense. In fact, I'm not sure it'd be any kind of upgrade at all.

Best bang for your buck would be to swap out the CPU for now, then when you've saved enough coin, go for a more substantial video card.

You might also consider going to a decent 4 Gig kit of Performance grade PC6400 RAM. Can be had for a song these days.....and don't listen to these guys who tell you 4 Gig of RAM on XP32 is a waste of time and how it's going to blow your motherboard up. They don't know what they're talking about.....trust me. There are millions of people running that configuration with no ill effects at all. Quite the contrary....and no, the system won't be able to utilize all 4 gig, but you'll see better performance with 4 Gig than you will with 2.

Just my humble opinion of course.


Btw.....I've got a P5B Deluxe up in my son's room. Running an e6600 @ 3.2 GHz alongside an 8800 GTS Alpha Dog, and it'll run pretty much anything you throw at it. Oh.....almost forgot....with 4 Gig of OCZ Platinum XTC.....and oddly enough, his room hasn't caught fire yet either.

Cheers,

Parky
 
Parky said:
and don't listen to these guys who tell you 4 Gig of RAM on XP32 is a waste of time and how it's going to blow your motherboard up. They don't know what they're talking about.....trust me. There are millions of people running that configuration with no ill effects at all. Quite the contrary....and no, the system won't be able to utilize all 4 gig, but you'll see better performance with 4 Gig than you will with 2.
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Ditto on that. I got 4GB in XP SP2 32bit and havent experienced explosions yet :costumes:
 
You might want to ask Corsair why they have a specific warning on some of their 4gb kits then, not to put them in 32-bit XP systems. According to them XP-32 is unable to properly handle 4gb and it's attempts to run data in and out of the RAM causes it to overheat to the point of failure.

But what do I know, I don't make RAM, I just pay attention to those who do. Like anything, there will always be a number who can get away with it, for whatever reason (PCs can be odd beasts). ;)
 
Siggi said:
You might want to ask Corsair why they have a specific warning on some of their 4gb kits then, not to put them in 32-bit XP systems. According to them XP-32 is unable to properly handle 4gb and it's attempts to run data in and out of the RAM causes it to overheat to the point of failure.

;)
Click to expand...


My guess is it has a lot more to do with some motherboards not being able to provide the correct voltage to the DIMM slots at consistent levels, and guys attempting to overclock the crap out of the RAM on those specific boards, and nothing at all to do with XP's ability to run data in an out of the RAM efficiently. Mind you, I don't make random access memory for a living either, but that would certainly make more sense. If I were Corsair, I'd get tired of guys RMA'ing their RAM and put a warning on the package just to discourage 'em from buying it as well....lol.

Easy fix really. If it only affects 4 Gig Kits....then run with 4-1 Gig sticks. Quite honestly, I've yet to hear of anyone who's experienced a problem. I personally have put together about a dozen systems over the last year or so with XP-32 using 4 Gig (both kits and single sticks) and the only problem I've seen was a 4 Gig Kit of Mushkin where one stick was DOA.


And yes CJ.....right you are. P5B officially only supports PC6400 (which is what we have in the kid's tower). Thanks for pointing it out. Have edited my original post to reflect the limitation.

Cheers,

Parky
 
Parky said:
You'd be far better off going with an e8400 for an extra 40 bucks or so. The P5B does support it. It'll default to 1066 FSB but you can overclock the snot out of the e8400 on that board with a decent cooler to make up for it. An Arctic Cooler 7 Pro would do the trick....and cheaply.
Click to expand...

I'm with Parky, the E8400 is a great CPU for the price and can even run at 3.6Ghz with the stock cooler in a well ventilated case (Antec P182 in my case). I run a monster Noctua cooler and have had mine to 4Ghz reliably, running now at 3.6, 40C.
 
Parky said:
My guess is it has a lot more to do with some motherboards not being able to provide the correct voltage to the DIMM slots at consistent levels, and guys attempting to overclock the crap out of the RAM on those specific boards, and nothing at all to do with XP's ability to run data in an out of the RAM efficiently. Mind you, I don't make random access memory for a living either, but that would certainly make more sense. If I were Corsair, I'd get tired of guys RMA'ing their RAM and put a warning on the package just to discourage 'em from buying it as well....lol.

Easy fix really. If it only affects 4 Gig Kits....then run with 4-1 Gig sticks. Quite honestly, I've yet to hear of anyone who's experienced a problem. I personally have put together about a dozen systems over the last year or so with XP-32 using 4 Gig (both kits and single sticks) and the only problem I've seen was a 4 Gig Kit of Mushkin where one stick was DOA.


And yes CJ.....right you are. P5B officially only supports PC6400 (which is what we have in the kid's tower). Thanks for pointing it out. Have edited my original post to reflect the limitation.

Cheers,

Parky
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I only heard about it recently myself. And I've not heard of any cases where there was a problem either, or at least not a RAM failure that could be attributed to that particular cause. But RAM does fail, and if that turns out to be one of the reasons for it, it's worth letting people know of at least the possibility. Personally, considering how little gaming benefit there is to be had out of 4gb vs 2gb on a 32-bit system, I'll play it safe and stick with 2gb. :)
 
GaryR said:
I'm with Parky, the E8400 is a great CPU for the price and can even run at 3.6Ghz with the stock cooler in a well ventilated case (Antec P182 in my case). I run a monster Noctua cooler and have had mine to 4Ghz reliably, running now at 3.6, 40C.
Click to expand...

Have you run it with Prime95? That'll run your system at full throttle and you'll be able to see what temp it gets up to then, which is worth knowing. My OC'd Q6600 gets up to 60c, idles at 35c.
 
Siggi said:
Have you run it with Prime95? That'll run your system at full throttle and you'll be able to see what temp it gets up to then, which is worth knowing. My OC'd Q6600 gets up to 60c, idles at 35c.
Click to expand...

Yes, 58C at 4Ghz, 50C at 3.6Ghz with this cooler.
 
Siggi said:
Nice cooler! :)
Click to expand...

Noctua NH-C12P w/120mm fan and Arctic Silver Ceramique thermal compound.. thing is massive and very well built. Part of it is my case, it has two 120mm fans for intake (one in bottom front, one blowing accross hard drives just above it) and two exhaust (one out rear behind CPU and one on top, plus the fan in the Antec 850W TruePower... that's 5 120mm fans, plus PS, plus 4870's fan! Can you say airflow?
:ernae:
 
Parky,

You'd be far better off going with an e8400 for an extra 40 bucks or so.
Click to expand...

The e8400 uses an FSB of 1333, so what would I get running it at an FSB of 1066?

Thanks for the info. I've also sent you a PM.
 
First of all, there are two revisions of that CPU. The E0 and the C0. Your mainboard's BIOS revision 1103 allows support for the E0....and BIOS revision 1002 allows support for the C0 version. They can be found on the Asus support website. Both of these BIOS versions are offered in Beta form only. I believe these BIOS versions eliminate the FSB limitations found within the P5B Plus chipset. If not, the worst thing that can happen is the CPU will default and be limited to a 1066 FSB....however, I doubt very much that would be the case. Even if it was, the e8400 will literally run circles around your current CPU even at reduced BUS speeds. It's still a better upgrade than the 7300, but only if you've got the moxy to be messing around with BIOS flashes and a whole bunch of fiddling with multipliers, clock speeds, voltages, memory settings and a host of other variables within the chipset BIOS.

Chances are you'd be able to flash the BIOS, drop the CPU in, run it at stock speeds and you'd still see a fairly nice perfomance increase. The same would be true of the 7300 but I believe you'd still be looking at updating to the 1002 Rev. BIOS in order for the board to accommodate it.

In answer to the question in your PM....nope, I don't do that. Too many variables come into play. Too many risks involved, and it's impossible for me to monitor system temps and voltage peculiarities in anything other than a hands-on environment. I'd be more than happy to point you in the direction of some relevant information though, and at that point you could make an informed decision and proceed at your own risk.


Cheers Mate,

Parky
 
GaryR said:
Noctua NH-C12P w/120mm fan and Arctic Silver Ceramique thermal compound.. thing is massive and very well built. Part of it is my case, it has two 120mm fans for intake (one in bottom front, one blowing accross hard drives just above it) and two exhaust (one out rear behind CPU and one on top, plus the fan in the Antec 850W TruePower... that's 5 120mm fans, plus PS, plus 4870's fan! Can you say airflow?
:ernae:
Click to expand...

Sounds like the same case as mine. The one in the roof is huge. I have a Zalman fan & heatsink though. Not too shabby but not as good as yours. I've turned off the roof-fan, it was too noisy.
 
ftgc said:
Some questions for all you high level hardware types.

It's obvious I'm going to need to upgrade to get the most out of P3 so I thought I'd get some input.

First my system is currently:
Processor; Intel Core 2 Duo E4300 Allendale 1.8 Ghz LGA 775
GPU; Geforce 8800 320 meg 320 bit GDDR-3 PCI express X16
Memory; 2GB 240-pin DDR-2 SDRAM DDR 800 (PC2 6400)
Motherboard; Asus P5B plus LGA 775 Intel P965 Express ATX

I guess my biggest question is am I cpu limited or gpu limited or both. With my current mother board I'm limited to cpus with front bus speed of 1066. So near as I can tell I'm looking at the E7300 at 2.93 Ghz as the best I can fit. And for video cards I was looking at the 9500 GT 1GB 128-bit GDDR2 PCI express. I'm trying to keep cost down so what do you guys think?

Scott
Click to expand...

I case off the last sense, why not optimize your MS XP or Vista system. Go for Google en search the web for speeding up and get rid off all the performance eating "things" and old non excisting software. I went back to XP because of the performance issue and tweaked the XP to make it lean and clean.
In case of playing OFF3 not online: Close all the running programs at your PC, Virusscan can be a hudge performance eater. Enditall is a smal program to illiminate all the no necesery programs on your PC, can help here, it even closes your virus/adware programs, [Warning when your online, scans must be on these days and restart your JoyStick program thats also closed].
These are small things which will cost no euro's

But I must admit upgrading will bring you more, but also more $$$$$ and spending more $$$$ is good for the economics, to releave the World Wide crisis issues. :amen:
 
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