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Newbie needing advice
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gheckles
Junior Member
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12. April 2006 @ 00:24 |
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I currently have a 5 year old packard bell imedia pc.
2 x 200gb IDE hard drives
1 gb memory
nvidia 6600GT graphics card
500w PSU
I am looking to upgrade my machine and use some of the old parts i.e the hard drives and Graphics Card.
My machine will be mainly used for at home gaming.
Can anyone advise of some components ie motherboard, processor and memory, case etc. I am looking for a machine that will run FEAR on decent settings is my 6600gt capable ? I don't need a top end machine as I am on a budget. Do they still make IDE Motherboards or is everything SATA now ?
Thanks for any help and sorry for being such a newbie
Gav
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Senior Member
3 product reviews
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12. April 2006 @ 08:31 |
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I think all boards have IDE as well as SATA support, you'll be able to run the IDE drives in RAID0 to speed things up.
Is the memory in 2 identical modules? if so you'll be able to run in dual channel mode.
The main problem will be the board would need AGP support, and you are limiting yourself to a smaller number of newer/better boards.
The 6600GT card is a far entry level card, but I personally would change it for a newer PCI-E card, selling it should raise £30-40 towards a new one, otherwise you'l be stuck in medium quality when playing.
Best bang for buck card at the moment is the 7900GT which is almost as good as the 7800GTX at a far lower cost.
I've just bought the XFX 7900GT for £199 including postage, as I want to use the SLi, and the 7800GTX is too expensive to have 2 of them.
You really need to think about the CPU as well if playing newer games, are you inclined towards AMD or Intel, as AMD are better for gaming rigs in all tests.
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gheckles
Junior Member
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18. April 2006 @ 02:19 |
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Thanks for the advice.
So if I bite the bullet and say I am going to buy a new machine.
What do I need to look for
What motherboard ?
AMD or Intel and what speed ?
What PSU ?
What Case ?
If I am going to buy a new machine I want it to be able to play the latest games on full res but not cost the earth, is this possible?
What would you recommend ? and roughly how much would it cost ?
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Senior Member
3 product reviews
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18. April 2006 @ 05:04 |
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For gaming you need to look at AMD, they beat Intel hands down for gaming, you should get a 939 pin board at least, or wait until June and get an AM2, but they will cost more.
Either way, it would be best to wait until then as the new CPUs will bring the 939s down in price (hopefully)
You should also look at either Crossfire or SLi as an upgrade path.
Personally I would recommend SLi as you just add a second identical SLi capable card at a later date to almost double the graphc performance.
Next look at the memory, you need 1GB and better still 2GB will become more essential.
The HDDs need to be as quick as possible, if you can afford Raptors, you won't be dissapointed in the access speeds.
Otherwise look at SATA 2 drives with at least 8MB cache and look to get at least 2 of the same drive to run in RAID0.
If you don't need dual core capability, then look at the Opterons, they are very high quality processors which overclock very well on the right board.
I would look at either DFI or ASUS, they have good reputations for a reason (they make very good boards).
To start with you should be able to use your HDDs, RAM and PSU, you'll be able to sell the 6600GT to help pay for the new GPU.
It really depends on just how much you are able to spend to start with, and what sort of upgrades/overclocking you want.
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gheckles
Junior Member
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18. April 2006 @ 05:20 |
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Execellent !
another stupid question...
If I buy a socket 939 motherboard would it support AGP or do they only run PCI Express ?
As I have a budget and a really crappy machine at the moment. I would rather buy the board, processor and memory and then look to change the GPU. Is this possible ?
What is SLi and crossfire...sorry I really am new to this.
What AMD processor and board would you suggest and where would you buy them ?
Plus what Case would you suggest, some are mega expensive. I have see watercooling as well is this necessary or can the right case and fans still meet the cooling requirements..
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Senior Member
3 product reviews
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18. April 2006 @ 05:43 |
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You don't need watercooling at all.
SLi and Crossfire ae methods of running two GPUs together to almost double the graphics power of a system.
SLi is the Nvidia solution and Crossfire is the ATI solution.
If you go down the AGP route, you can't use either of the above, as it is only supported on PCI-E.
Asus A8V-MX has an AGP slot, and I'm sure that there are models from most manufacturers.
I would look at an Opteron 146 or above, but that will overclock to 2.5ghz which makes it a very cheap cpu for what you get.
As for case, then just get something which has the capability to mount fans where you need them.
I prefer the 12CM fans as they normally run slower and quieter.
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gheckles
Junior Member
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18. April 2006 @ 05:55 |
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Thanks for all your help.
I have been looking at some of the components you have, Your machine is as good as it gets.It must eat games like FEAR and DOOM3
I have a motheboard from an old HP XW6000 (there is a picture on another forum thread under my name if you want to have a look.
It has dual xeon processors and 2gb of RAM, but I can't find a case that will fit it Its not ATX. would this be any good for gaming or would I be better selling it. if so roughly how much would it be worth. The Xeons are 2.6 ghz it is perfect with massive heatsinks and all the memory installed.
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gheckles
Junior Member
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18. April 2006 @ 06:04 |
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I am probably looking to spend between £500 - £600
I have a 19" HP TFT Monitor and all other peripherals.
Just need a Sys board
Processor
memory
graphics card
case
PSU
Can it be done ?
I see your board is around £120 but your processor is off the scale. how much do I need to spend on an AMD do I need socket 939. If I am going to upgrade It would be best to be as future proof as possible.
The 7800GT is around £200...
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Senior Member
3 product reviews
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18. April 2006 @ 06:41 |
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ASUS A8N-SLI/PREMIUM NF4 SLI, S939 £105
http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/ProductInfo.asp?WebProductID=225008
AMD Opteron 64 146 Socket939 , Venus Core, 2.0GHz , 1MB Cache, OEM £118
http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/ProductInfo.asp?WebProductID=311094
Arctic Cooling Freezer 64 Pro (SKT 754/939/940) CPU Cooler £19
http://www.tekheads.co.uk/s/product?product=605126
1GB (2X512MB) Corsair TwinX DDR, PC3200 (400), 184 Pin, Non-ECC Unbuffered, CAS 2-3-3-6 £72
http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/ProductInfo.asp?WebProductID=71473
XFX Geforce 7900GT 256MB GDDR-3 PCI-E £199
http://www.lowestonweb.com/Products/DisplayInfoMain.asp?e=F22A926...
580W HiperPower Type-R Modular Blue PSU Quiet Dbl Fan aPFC ATX2.2 20/24 Pin £59
http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/ProductInfo.asp?WebProductID=228615
Coolermaster Centurion RC-532 Black+Silver Trim Case w/o PSU £43
http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/ProductInfo.asp?WebProductID=359344
Scan will be one delivery charge normally about £7 (maybe more with the case).
The video card is free delivery, and the cooler will be another delivery charge, or you can go for the retail version from Scan and get the fan included (I would go for the Arctic one though)
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gheckles
Junior Member
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19. April 2006 @ 23:59 |
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you are a star,
I have already ordered some of the parts from SCAN.
Will this setup be able to run FEAR ?
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gheckles
Junior Member
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20. April 2006 @ 00:04 |
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What is the difference between SATA and SATA2 ?
Do they use the same connectors ? and can they run on any motherboard ?
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Senior Member
3 product reviews
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20. April 2006 @ 01:09 |
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That system should run it without any problem.
The SATA 2 drives have the same power connections and data lead connections.
SATA 1 drives will work without any problems on a SATA 2 capable motherboard.
Sometimes SATA 2 drives need tweaking before they work on SATA 1 only boards.
The main difference is the speed at which they transfer data; SATA2 is twice as fast as the original SATA.
You'll be hard pushed to find too many SATA 1 drives for sale new now, and the prices have are no different for either.
You'll end up with a very good system there, which will have plenty of scope for upgrading in the future.
The Asus boards are nice and easy to set up as well.
If you need any help when loading etc... Then just ask.
P.S. the one thing that caught me on the NVIDIA raid driver setup when loading was the need to use both drivers that are listed after pressing F6.
Even though it clearly stated they are both required, I was too much of a hurry to bother reading correctly.
I think that little quirk has caught a few people out.
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gheckles
Junior Member
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20. April 2006 @ 01:20 |
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Does the motherboard you suggested support SATA2 ?
I notice from your setup that you only run one Graphics Card although you could use two, is this purely for cost reasons or simply that you don't need two at the moment to run any games.
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Senior Member
3 product reviews
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20. April 2006 @ 01:37 |
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It does support SATA2, the Raptors are only SATA1 and the Seagates are SATA2.
The Video card was expensive, and still beats most cards on performance even on its own, it about another £130 on top of the 7900 price.
I've just ordered an XFX 7900GT listed in my build list to you, so will probably run a couple of them in SLi eventually, but it isn't being shipped until tomorrow.
It helped that I've already sold the 7800GTX for more than the 7900GT is costing me.
Personally I think that the 7900GTs are the best value for money high performance card about, and if you use the coolbits registry edit you can wind them up to near GT Extreme performance.
This message has been edited since posting. Last time this message was edited on 20. April 2006 @ 01:37
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gheckles
Junior Member
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20. April 2006 @ 01:51 |
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Cool,
I have been reading about overclocking PSU's and GPU's and benchmarking. How do you know when to stop as these components aren't cheap. Do you know of any good overclocking tools and benchmarking utilities, as my kit will be brand new I don't want to damage it..
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Senior Member
3 product reviews
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20. April 2006 @ 03:00 |
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gheckles
Junior Member
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20. April 2006 @ 03:10 |
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Fantastic, thanks again, sorry for all the questions.
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gheckles
Junior Member
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20. April 2006 @ 03:17 |
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A friend of mine has an XFX geforce 6600GT which 1 in 4 times will crash when trying to run a game. It boots to windows every time but every now and again it will start the game then the monitor will go to sleep. Then a blue screen saying there is a problem with NV4_dsp.dll any ideas
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Senior Member
3 product reviews
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20. April 2006 @ 03:28 |
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gheckles
Junior Member
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20. April 2006 @ 04:11 |
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Excellent I will tell him,
Back to our original discussion, before I order the ASUS board, you suggested 1gb memory, I see the board has 4 slots can I add another 2 512s later on. I also noticed when I went to the memory section on Scan all the different numbers I presume they relate to the speed of the chips. Are they all compatible with the Asus board and if so which the best, and is it better to have 1x 1gb chip or 2x512 etc i also notice they all vary in price. This is quite confusing.
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AfterDawn Addict
4 product reviews
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20. April 2006 @ 04:24 |
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Quote:
ASUS A8N-SLI/PREMIUM NF4 SLI, S939 £105
http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/ProductInfo.asp?WebProductID=225008
AMD Opteron 64 146 Socket939 , Venus Core, 2.0GHz , 1MB Cache, OEM £118
http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/ProductInfo.asp?WebProductID=311094
Arctic Cooling Freezer 64 Pro (SKT 754/939/940) CPU Cooler £19
http://www.tekheads.co.uk/s/product?product=605126
580W HiperPower Type-R Modular Blue PSU Quiet Dbl Fan aPFC ATX2.2 20/24 Pin £59
http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/ProductInfo.asp?WebProductID=228615
You mention a budget, so a 7900GT is going to be a bit extreme, and I certainly wouldn't recommend SLi. It's better to have a slightly lower GPU and more RAM than anything else.
Thus I'd recommend:
http://www.savastore.com/productinfo/product.aspx?catalog_name=Sa...
http://www.savastore.com/productinfo/product.aspx?catalog_name=Sa...
Get one, or better TWO of these.
There's no issue using IDE hard disks these days, if you want to use them, that's fine, all motherboards support 4 IDE channels pretty much, since optical (CD/DVD) drives still use it.
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Senior Member
3 product reviews
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20. April 2006 @ 08:11 |
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The guy wants a good gaming rig, what I have suggested will give him a close to top rig, with room for upgrading and plenty of overclocking potential, and it is right on the budget he quoted.
Sticking an ATI card on the NVIDIA chipset board is not the best performance match to start with.
The card is at its limit from the start, so the only improvement would be to totally replace that card and get another one or two better cards. If you look at the prices the 7900GT is only another £60 over the X850, but the performance will blow the X850 out the water.
In bench tests a single 7900GT beats even the X1800XT in 3DMark and FEAR @ 1024x768, and the 1800 obviously can not be run in crossfire on that board.
Adding more system RAM is not going to improve the GPU performance, it is only ever going to handle a certain number of FPS.
SLi has the main advantage of giving extra graphics performance in gaming, and all you have to do is add at a later date the same card again, at what is likely to be an even cheaper price than the original was bought.
As for Corsair value memory, if you are going to buy that, then you may as well just buy any old memory.
It?s the value end of the market, as such it does not perform as well as the XMS range, the latency will be higher for a start and if you overclock it, you will have to drop the timings down even more before it starts showing errors.
The XMS memory has been developed for better performance especially in gaming. (You get what you pay for).
Getting 1 stick of memory and only using 1 in a board that is designed to run dual channel is wasting the chance for performance and creating a bigger chance of instability on the system, you are creating an unnecessary bottleneck with only 1 RAM module.
If you get 2 individual sticks of cheap memory and slot them in, then you still add the problem of the memory modules not being identical and then not handling the data exactly the same.
Again you get instability and lesser performance.
XMS TwinX is tested as a pair to get the 2 modules as close a match as possible.
Ideally you could do with 2GB of RAM, but I wouldn?t compromise the quality of the system by putting in value RAM just to get the 2GB figure.
If you can afford 2GB to start with then that would be the way to go, but your looking at another £60 approx, otherwise you can stick with 1GB and upgrade later.
As I?ve said before I know someone using that board with 1GB of TwinX but with the 4400 x2 and 2 x 6800 GTs in Sli and they are play FEAR with the settings at max.
The 7900GT will out perform the 2 x 6800 GTs and the CPU advantage is only seen when running extra applications in the back ground, which having to close down is a small price to pay for the savings on the CPU.
As for the HDD?s, you would be fine with IDE drives to start with, but at least you have the ability to change them when you can afford it.
There are performance gains in SATA over IDE and also the advantage of smaller cables and better airflow inside the case.
HDD?s are basically the slowest part of the system, so any increase in speed there is seen easier over increases in speed in other areas such as CPU.
This message has been edited since posting. Last time this message was edited on 20. April 2006 @ 08:14
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AfterDawn Addict
4 product reviews
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20. April 2006 @ 08:33 |
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Quote:
I am probably looking to spend between £500 - £600
So no stupid SLi configs.
Quote:
Adding more system RAM is not going to improve the GPU performance, it is only ever going to handle a certain number of fps.
It is if he runs out, which WILL happen, sooner or later. 1GB sees me in virtual memory zone for FEAR, permanently.
You're steering this guy down the wrong track, advising SLi (I don't call 5% more performance for double the cost value for money). What's more there's next to no issue with an ATi card in an Nforce chipset, you just dont get conflicts like that. The ATI chipset isn't very good anyway.
The 7900GT is just too much for someone in that area to spend. The X850XT isn't that far off performance wise, unlike you say, and it's far cheaper, £90 where I've looked.
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3 product reviews
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20. April 2006 @ 12:18 |
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Where exactly have you looked for this card, and why didn't you give him that link instead of your posted link which shows the card at £140.35 inc vat + delivery. Total is
£145.99 so we're only looking at £54 exactly for the upgrade to the 7900GT.
Your Link:
http://www.savastore.com/productinfo/product.aspx?catalog_name=Sa...
Maybe you need to check your prices again, or post the link to the £90 card you've seen.
I think we've already determined on another thread that you're not setup to run FEAR anyway as you were having problems, you obviously have setup problems on your system, as there are stacks of people playing FEAR with 1GB of memory.
You need to look at your setup and tweak the system for gaming not general use.
As said, I know someone playing FEAR with 1GB RAM and they have no problems, the difference is they know how to and have spent the time, to set their PC up correctly.
There are plenty of people out there on both sides saying that they can or can not play FEAR with 1GB of RAM, so it's obviously more system related not just memory size related.
I have already posted a stack of links to tweaking sites etc... and mentioned that time should be spent reading what is required to set the system up correctly. i.e.
http://www.tweakguides.com/FEAR_1.html
Here?s one quote from a gamer RE: FEAR
Quote:
I didn't notice any stuttering whatsoever in FEAR at max settings (except Soft Shadows) throughout the entire game at 1gb. But as you can see my Windows XP install is tweaked for gaming only using around 100mb after boot and with only 11 processes running. See how much commit charge/processes you have right after you boot.
Also the "Peak commit charge after running through Fear" graph shows the game is using less than 500mb for itself.
There is no 'stupid SLi config' listed in my build spec, what there was however, was the option to use it later with the card I had recommended, your suggestion was already at a dead end as far as upgrading options (that?s the difference).
As for the 5% gain in the card, well I can?t find a comparison between the X850XT and the 7900GT, but here is a comparison between the X1800XL and the 7900GT xxx both running FEAR, which clearly shows the advantage of the 7900GT over the ATIs X1800, I am presuming the X1800XL is a higher spec card than the X850XT, as every comparison I can see shows it beating the X850XTPE and the card you listed on savastore is only the standard XT not the PE version.
http://www.bjorn3d.com/read.php?cID=891&pageID=2101
The card listed here is the xxx, but as I?ve already said, the standard 7900GT can be overclocked to around the speeds of the xxx using the Ntune utility which has had the Coolbits registry hack applied to it.
As seen here:
http://www.boxgods.com/dept/hardware/index.php?Action=Article&ID=...
I never said that there were conflicts with the ATI cards on the Nvidia boards; I said it wasn?t the best performance match.
Nvidia chipsets are designed to work with Sli compliant graphics cards, as Nvidia produce these cards, then obviously the performance is going to be maximized by using Nvidia based GPUs.
If you?re saying that there are next to no issues with ATI and Nvidia, does that mean that there are some issues that you know about?
Regardless of differences in opinion you and me may have, there really is no point arguing about what card or memory gheckles gets, as I'm sure if his takes our advise then adds his own conclusions from a bit of homework, he'll end up with the system he wants to get, not what we want him to get.
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AfterDawn Addict
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21. April 2006 @ 03:32 |
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Sure, but not everyone wishes to OC their card, as I'm sure even you realise the stability problems that can result. Whether or not other people can play FEAR fine at 1GB is irrelevant. Not everyone wishes to spend ages fiddling and adjusting to get their commit charge as low as possible.
Quote:
If you?re saying that there are next to no issues with ATI and Nvidia, does that mean that there are some issues that you know about?
No there arne't any I know about, but that doesn't mean to say I know every case scenario about, does it?
The £90 wasn't the price of the card, it was how much less the X850XT costs than the 7900GT.
I'm not trying to force any specific choice upn him, but I feel it's our duty to steer him in the right direction for his needs and not have him waste money (you more than hinted at SLi - Quote:
You should also look at either Crossfire or SLi as an upgrade path.
Personally I would recommend SLi
)
The 7900GT XXX in the benchmarks you listed outs the X1800XL by around 50%, so the X850XT by about 60%. However, you notice that X850XT was about £140. I can only find a 7900GT XXXequivalent card for about £250-£255. That's not far off double the cost, and on his 500-600 budget has consumed nearly half of that. Plus of course a 7900GT is quite possibly overpowered for most people's needs. Unless you have the capability/need for 1600x1200 or higher, the 850 will do fine.
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