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Value (Price/Quality) for Computer Upgrades?
Sierpinski asks: "I am currently researching a new video card, and seeing that PCI-Express has pretty much taken the industry by storm, I have not been able to find a relatively recent (late-model so to speak) AGP card. If I get a PCI-Express card, I'll need to upgrade my board. If I upgrade my board, I doubt my CPU (slot 462) will still be usable. As much as price is a factor, compatibility is as well. I've run into problems in the past where X memory wouldn't work in Y boards, etc. Does anyone have a spec list of the main components (board, CPU, memory, video card) that are recent (ie 6800GT PCI-Express), and work well together?"
Unless you want to add ram, or add another HDD the whole concept of PC upgrades is useless. Assuming that the technology hasn't moved on (pic-express was the example you gave but there is a new roadblock every year), you end up spending half the cost of your original pc, and end up with a whole lot of worthless components.
Wait a couple of months till you have saved enough pennies. Get those pennies together and buy a whole new computer. Use the old one to download with bitt torrent, a server or as a fiddly linux box. Upgrades are pointless. Don't bother.
Here:
ATI X1300 and X1600
Nvidia 6800
Just wait a few more weeks and they will be on the market.
Also: Fuck you, you motherfucking pile of lazy fucking shit for brains. Fucker. And what the fuck does "work well together" fucking mean? You mean how fucking nice does your fucking OS fucking play with it? That's called a motherfucking HCL. Dumbass. Every fucking OS has one. Fucking Google it. Bitch. Other than that, if the fucking pieces fit together without a fucking hammer, they ought to fucking work fine. Or you can get your fucking money back. Bitch.
It is only because there is currently a shift going on from AGP to PCI-Express that he can't just buy the latest vid card and be happy.
Upgrades you can do simply. Adding more HD space. Adding optional extras like a dedicated soundcard or adding a burner. These are expansions though not really upgrade as the original hardware will not change.
Memory is trickier. If you got a free slot adding more is easy enough but I rarely found it economical to ditch the old memory and add new strips. ALWAYS get a new computer with all the memory in as few slots as possible. Memory upgrades make a big difference but are costly when you first go to throw memory away.
CPU upgrade, well no. NEVER. Ever. Unless your really really thight and bought the cheapest CPU possible and can now get the most powerfull of the same make for a cheap price it just ain't worth it. Overclock the succer, save up and when it does a Itanium buy a whole new setup. Primary reason? You will often find that the most powerfull processor in your old hardware will be limited by the rest of the computer.
As for wether you should move to PCI-Express. The same problem existed when we moved from regular PCI to AGP. I would just bite the bullet and get a new machine. Give the old one away or use it as a server (get to know linux?).
Buying a top of the line new vid card with agp hardware is I think not worth it. Either just save up or learn to be happy with your current hardware. I always find that compromised upgrades tend to be more expensive because you need to do them far more often.
Getting a spanking new machine could last you 2-3 years. That new agp vid card at most a year.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
If you do find a good AGP card, and decide to keep your current MB, RAM, and CPU for a little while longer... then your new AGP graphics card will only be good until you get rid of your current equipment, because your next MB will likely have PCI-express.
Might as well stick with what you have now for as long as you can... and then upgrade your MB, CPU, RAM, and graphics card all at the same time when you can afford it. Then at least your new graphics card could theoretically last you through a few motherboard upgrades.
Here's where the 'sweet spots' in terms of performance/price are, in my opinion; choose depending on your budget. (Of course, if your goal is to waste money, there's plenty of components available at or near $1000 prices, as well, but they don't provide much more than a 20% or so performance increase over the $200-300 options.)
Processor:
Athlon 64 3200+ ($160)
A 2GHz Athlon 64 with 512K cache. As is widely known, these beat the pants off of Pentium 4s.
Athlon 64 X2 3800+ ($320)
Two 2GHz Athlon 64s with 512K cache (dual core).
Motherboard:
Abit KN8 SLI ($110)
SLI doesn't carry much of a price premium any more these days, so it can't hurt to have the extra upgrade capability. Other brands like DFI, Asus, MSI, EPoX, are fine as well.
Memory:
2x 512MB Crucial PC-3200 ($95)
2x 1GB Crucial PC-3200 ($170)
Two is so you can run them in dual channel mode. Other good brands include Corsair, Kingston, Mushkin, OCZ.
Video card:
GeForce 6600GT 128MB ($125)
8 pixel pipelines at 500MHz = 4 Gigasomethings
GeForce 6800GS 256MB ($190)
12 pipelines at 425MHz = 5.1 Gigasomethings. This also has double the memory and memory bandwidth of a 6600GT, so it'll handle higher resolutions and antialiasing levels much better.
GeForce 7800GT 256MB ($270)
20 pipelines at 400MHz = 8 Gigasomethings. This is almost exactly double a 6600GT in many respects (double the pixel pushing power, memory, and memory bandwidth).
If you want to find things out for yourself, I recommend browsing around at The Tech Report and AnandTech; I've found these two to consistently have the highest quality reviews and comparisons out there. Their system guides don't completely suck, either. (Neither do Ars Technica's, but they don't do hardware reviews).
Work is punishment for failing to procrastinate effectively.
AMD will be migrating to DDR2 and a new socket in a few months, which means if you want to upgrade after that, you'll have to switch CPU, motherboard, and memory, again (not the video card, though -- PCI-E will hopefully be around for a while yet). And then in late summer / early fall, Intel is coming out with their new architecture, which I expect to solidly beat AMD's Athlon 64s in many respects.
But then, there's always something just around the corner, so I'm not sure whether waiting is such a good idea, either.
Work is punishment for failing to procrastinate effectively.
The part of a machine that gets upgraded/replaced most often these days is the video card, since new generations are released an average of every 6 months, and unlike with most other improvements in PC capabilities (especially CPU), the applications take advantage of the new features and capabilities almost immediately. (Many games nowadays are released with graphics quality options that will make the game unacceptably slow on any current hardware, in order to allow the game to "grow" with new graphics cards that make those quality options not kill performance. One example is Doom 3's highest texture quality, which required a 512M video card - almost none existed at Doom 3's release, and very few exist even now. A few years from now 512 will probably become the norm.)
:)
As a result, even if AMD changes socket types soon, it doesn't matter that much since the CPU is likely the last thing the OP will want to upgrade in the new system he buys. I don't think I've ever upgraded a CPU without getting a new motherboard, and I go MUCH longer between CPU upgrades than video card upgrades.
As to reccomendations - I think the original article poster is probably being paranoid about compatibility problems. As long as you stick with reputable motherboard and memory vendors, such problems are rare. I can only think of one such problem with one model of motherboard and a particular memory configuration, I don't even remember WHICH mobo that was though. (It was an older Athlon XP AGP board though.) Go to NewEgg, browse around, and read the customer reviews.
As to video card, I'd personally stick with NVidia rather than ATI. Even when ATI was well ahead of NV in performance, their drivers were so shoddy (especially in Linux, but their Windows drivers are horrifically inconsistent too) that buying ATI was like putting a V8 into a Yugo - wicked fast until you crash and burn. The one place I still hear compatibility horror stories is with ATI drivers - Game X works with ATI drivers older than version A, while Game Y requires drivers newer than version B which is higher than A. (Hasn't ATI ever heard of regression testing?) As a result I know multiple people who had to switch driver versions on a regular basis depending on which game they were playing. I've NEVER had to revert to older drivers to make anything work with an NVidia board.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
XFX GeForce 6600GT AGP. Got it for 2004's Christmas. It was a PCI-E card but they made a version which was AGP which I really like. It's a nice card, of course now its a year old, but if you look into it, there are PCI-E cards with AGP versions, they just may be a bit harder to dig up.
I would guess planned obsolesence. There's no profit in providing something that works well, now and into the future. There's a lot of profit in providing something that works "good enough" right now then making something else that is only marginally better but requires a big infrastructure change. Ka-Ching! These decisions are more marketing decisions and not engineering decisions, no company wants to put themselves out of business by providing a product that you only need to buy once for a long long time.
It has been a while since I used their advise, but I have always found it appropriate. If you want specs for computers, check out the Ars Technica System Guide
2 00511.ars
http://arstechnica.com/guides/buyer/system-guide-
They have everything you need to know, current and accurate.
machinator omnis sine licentia
I'm very comfortable spec'ing the rest of a system, but I can't seem to keep up with the video market - maybe because I'm not a gamer. The last system I built I bought a $50 Nvidia card in the hopes that it would be better/faster than the cheap on-board video I've used before. I could not get the Nvidia drivers to work right in FC3 or FC4, despite reading howtos and forum postings for hours. Finally, I decided I would just use it in the regular mode that FC4 had built in drivers for. Needless to say, I see no benefit for the moeny I spent, so that will be the last Nvidia-based video I pay extra for, if they open-source their drivers and get in included in major distributions, I will buy more of their product, but not until then. I understand they want to protect their IP, but that doesn't get me an easily installed 3D video card, so I won't send them my money.
The Geforce 6800GS is available in AGP.
The last good AGP cards are the Nvidia 6800 series and some ATI X800 cards. You should be able to find one for around $200 (6800GS or 6800GT) that will run games just fine for another couple of years. If you need more performance though, you're pretty much stuck getting a complete new system.
Now is actually not a bad time to get a new system, especially if you go with an AMD cpu. Every component is at a "mature" point in their lifecycle and that means you're not paying for bleeding edge tech, and you have a smaller chance of getting stuck with something that doesn't quite work right. Athlon 64 cpus are fast and run relatively cool, socket 939 nforce4 motherboards are inexpensive and have a very wide range of features from bare-bones to premium boards with high quality onboard sound, dual gigabit lan, firewire, etc., pci-e video cards are available from under $100 to over $500, and SATA hard drives are fast and cheaper per gigabyte than ever before. DDR memory is readily available and cheap (2 gig of high quality PC3200 can be had for under $150), dual layer DVD burners are under $80, and both CRT and LCD displays are very affordable.
So there is no technological reason to NOT buy a complete system refresh right now. You'll always get something better/faster/cheaper if you can wait, but if you're unsatisfied with what you have NOW and there is no reasonable minor upgrade path that will satisfy your needs, then there is no non-financial reason to not do a total refresh now.
Like others have said, check out the system guides at http://www.anandtech.com/. http://www.hardocp.com/ also has hardware reviews from a gaming perspective. An Athlon 64 3700+ matched to an ASUS A8N Deluxe, with an Nvidia 7800GT and 2x1 gig sticks of PC3200 memory would make the foundation for a very nice multi-purpose computer that would also be a great gaming machine. You should be able to part together a very nice rig for under $1200, using very fast but completely mature components.
Strangely enough, I've seen plenty of problem with nVidia cards (particularly with World of Warcraft), but I've had no problems with ATI cards. I tend to play very mainstream games, though (the sort that probably get thorough testing from both nVidia and ATI).
Plus, ATI is pretty free about basic card specs so that anybody can make a driver (though they're not so open about the latest 3d features), while nVidia just releases closed-source binary drivers. So, anyone running a non-mainstream OS (or even obscure Linux variant) will have a harder time with an nVidia card. Admittedly, if nVidia makes a package for your OS, it probably will work better than the equivalent ATI driver.
I guess it all depends on what games you play and what you want to do with your machine.
Forward, retransmit, or republish anything I say here. Just don't misquote me.
I bought one of the 9700 Pros a few years back, and was very disappointed. It turned out that there was a compatibility problem with my motherboard, which meant the power supply wasn't in spec somewhere and led to all sorts of instability.
To their credit, Crucial honoured their motherboard compatibility guarantee even though it was something like 7-8 months after I bought the card that the incompatibility became widely known. They let me trade the card up to a new 9800 Pro, which has a much better auxiliary power input, for only the difference in price (which was almost nothing). The latter card has had no problems and remains in my PC to this day.
That was the only time I ever bought a near-top-end graphics card with a new PC, since at the time a couple of games I was expecting to want were due out very shortly and expected to need the extra power immediately. Ah, well. I'll be smarter than to believe anyone's anticipated release dates next time...
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
For older boards which might be a PIII or Athlon, just adding cheap ram would give you the most performance boost. For PIII and earlier boards, getting video cards is also cheap enough (AGP 4x or 2x), but look for used stuff there. Any old machine I have I try to max out the RAM. Dont invest more than that.
Drives are a seperate entity. You can add a 300GB SATA disk with a SATA IO card to a PIII type system with no problems, and take that disk into a future machine too. So thats a safe investment. So are DVD drives and anything USB. Its only the motherboard, CPU, RAM and graphic card that are tied together. Of these four, unless you can get used hardware, get only the memory and max it out.
Of course a new Athlon64 motherboard + CPU combo is about $300 canadians, or $350 including the ram. If you have a PIII or less and can fork this much out, better get the upgrade than supporting the old machine.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
Haven't we gone over this enough times already, fellow nerds?! Jeebus! It's like listening to a person working at Best Buy recommending something to a customer. :(
Well, memory and harddrive upgrades are generally the most valuable to me. AMD is about to introduce their new socket, M2, which will also be their first DDR2-based platform. So you can either go for an Intel DDR2-based sytem now, or (much smarter) wait a few months for an AMD DDR2-based system. Then you'll have a very long-lived platform.
Some words about longevity - the two parts of a system I recommend NOT skimping on are the power supply and the memory. Get the best of each you can. 'Best' in terms of power supply does NOT mean the one with the highest wattage rating. I like PC Power & Cooling; I've never had one die on me. Also, check connectors - 20pin vs 24pin. My current PSU has only a 20pin, so if I upgrade, that'll have to get upgraded, as well, most likely.
I just upgraded my old system with some new parts (now a 1.8ghz Athlon XP-M running at 2ghzx with 1gig DDR RAM), so I'm pretty happy. I think a gig of RAM is now a requirement - this is _way_ nicer at 512; I'm surprised by how big a difference it's made. If I was going for a new system, I'd wait for an M2-based system for sure. This is probably the last homebuilt I'll do for the foreseeable future - I'm waiting for the Intel-based Mac Mini as my next computer, assuming Apple doesn't screw it up somehow.
Good thing you didn't buy one of those Macs which aren't upgradable!
I heard if you want a faster CPU, you have to buy a new board, memory, video card/chip, and maybe even hard drives!
Just imagine, if you wanted to upgrade your video card! You'd have to get a new board, memory, video card/chip, and maybe even hard drives.
Oh wait. That's the problem you're having.
My favorite argument about Macs (especially iMac styles) are that they are not upgradable. Upgradability is a myth.