4yr old dual mon desktop, what to upgrade next?

davenewt

Hi folks. Have just been scanning the forum and getting jealous of everyone's massive PC gaming rig builds so figured you could all do with a nice change of pace

I have a 4yr old PC at home which I use for graphics/design work - adobe apps, that kind of thing. It's a dual monitor setup (though not with the greatest gfx card as you'll see!). Not that I need 3D performance or anything but I don't think the card's really designed for running 2 screens (not that it has a choice )

Currently there's a 17" 4:3 old LCD (where all the toolbars etc. of my apps reside), and a newer, larger widescreen as the main monitor. Ideally I'd like to upgrade the 17" smaller monitor to a second matching widescreen and upgrade the gfx card in the PC - performance on the main monitor is OK but on the second is a bit crap for speed and the colour reproduction is shocking compared to the newer panel.

SO without further ado, time to pull the black sheet off the table you've all been staring at in the middle of the room, to reveal...

• Asus K8N-E Deluxe nForce3 (Socket 754) Motherboard
• AMD Athlon 64 3400 (Socket 754) - Retail (CP-071-AM) x 1
• Sapphire ATI Radeon 9800SE 128MB DDR TV-Out/DVI (AGP) - Lite Retail

(cue polite silence and coughing in the audience) Like I said it was 4yrs ago... c'mon!

Other salient points - I currently have 4GB ram in it, run XP pro, and it takes a good few minutes to boot, which is annoying... even with regular ccleaner checks, installed fonts to a minimum, keeping on top of startup items, and so on.

Questions therefore:

1) If I want to run a second widescreen monitor, what new gfx card would be the best option? A new dedicated multi-head card (pricey?), or simply a cheap-enough second gfx card to let the current card power the second monitor on its own? (messier option?)

2) To upgrade the gfx card do I need to upgrade the motherboard (thinking bog standard PCI may not cut it anymore?)

3) Can I get away with upping the cpu (on the cheap) for a decent speed boost? Are socket754 cpus still out there?!... or should I get a new motherboard and quad-core CPU, for example, to do me for the next few years?

4) If upgrading the motherboard, how about running a RAID? - I believe the current motherboard could do it but I haven't tried. Something I've been thinking I could do to protect all my files from any random catastrophic failure. At the moment I back everything up to an external WD 500gb unit, but again I'd prefer a more reliable "plug in and forget" solution. Would RAID be the way to go and if so do all mobo's support it? (i.e. hardware, not software RAID)

5) Should I be thinking 64bit Windows 7 and a hefty mobo with room for plenty more RAM to support the bloated OS and all those adobe apps?

Appreciate any tips!

Cheers,
Dave.

Antar Bolaeisk

Well if you could live with the graphics card for a while longer I would definitely recommend upgrading your motherboard which is unfortunately, as I'm sure you know, a costly exercise.

Not sure whether your CPU will be compatible with any of the current AMD motherboards but you might get lucky as AMD seem to be better for sticking with certain standards unlike inels approach of using a new one every second month. Hoenestly though your CPU will be a bottleneck in the system if you do upgrade your GPU.

If you are getting a new CPU my recomendation would be to avoid i7 for the moment as it's very expenive and the performance gains just aren't worth it in my opinion.

You will need PCI-e for any of the latest graphics cards and more than likely a new PSU as well.

For running two widescreen monitors you will only need one card as they generally come with two DVI connectors for the higher end models. Of course, if you plan to be gaming across the two monitors you're going to need a beefy card such as the ATI4890 or GTX280 neither of which come cheap.

With regards to RAID I'm not sure but the built in RAID thingy on my Gigabyte Motherboard has been working flawlessly for the last few years (basically I know very little about the intricacies of RAID, just the basics)

Defnitely go for a 64-bit OS, there's little to no reason not to and if you do encounter a program that refuses to run you could always dual boot.

Basically I think you'll need a new build but maybe someone else here will have better advice.

davenewt

Antar Bolaeisk wrote: »

Basically I think you'll need a new build

Mr.S wrote: »

To be honnest, its gotten to a stage in your PC, that if you upgrade anymore, the hardware is going to start bottleknecking and you wont be getting your moneys worth.

Also, if your running a 32bit XP, your only using about 3.2GB of ram, it doesn't recognise more then that.

My advice would be to build a pc from scratch

Cheers both, I was afraid that was the answer I'd get. Will have to do some research now!

Thx again.
D.

Slutmonkey57b

I am in the same boat as you with a socket 754/AGP setup.

The good news is you can get a reasonable setup damn cheap at the moment.

davenewt

Haha, I'm looking at the wrong websites. So far I'm thinking GA-EX58-UD4P mobo (205 ukp) with Intel core i7-920 (220 ukp)... 6GB DDR3 ram, modest gfx card as I don't need it for gaming, say the Radeon HD4670... maybe an LG W2261V-PF monitor to match my other LG 22" panel...

The good news is I already have a 430W PSU... but the bad news = no PCI-e connectors, AFAIK. Can you get adaptors (assume you can)?

Thanks arstechnica!

Oh, maybe I should get another hard drive or two while I'm at it.

Help!

Solitaire

I'm being childish again but here's a graphics solution for four monitors for cheap



Throw in some RAM and a HDD if neccessary and that's the new build (recycle as much as you can )

More realistically, with no sign of ATIStream on the horizon I'd tend toward nVidia graphics so long as you are using the latest (and GPGPU-enabled) Adobe CS4, as the performance boost from CUDA in heavy-duty image work is very handy