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Value (Price/Quality) for Computer Upgrades?

Posted by Cliff on from the hardware-hacker-resources dept.

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?"

2 of 60 comments (clear)

  1. Biggest roadblock is probably PCI-X by Andy+Dodd · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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?
  2. Re:forgot to say by Jeff+DeMaagd · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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).

    It is this sort of thing that makes it hard to justify major upgrades. I've never replaced the motherboard without having to replace the memory, CPU, hard drive and video card in order to get an acceptable performing upgrade. Any motherboard upgrade I did without updating those parts meant for me that I was seriously holding back the performance of the upgrade. The grandparent post was basically advocating upgrading the whole computer as if it were an inexpensive exercise, the switch to PCI-E is starting to demand replacing the entire computer, which is easily triple the cost of just replacing the video card. If you bought a 3000+ computer a year ago, it should still be a fine computer, only a video card upgrade should be necessary, performance-wise, to play the latest games.

    I really don't understand why the graphics makers were so quick to dump AGP, they didn't drop PCI this quickly that I remember.