Low budget gaming

Gurgle

Hi All,

Looking to slightly upgrade my 3 year-old system to improve its attempt at gaming performance. (Added RAM and stuck Windows 7 Pro 64-bit on it a few months ago)

Will probably bring the whole thing up a generation or two next year, so don't want to spend much now.

What I've got:
Athlon 64 X2 4600+ AM2 (2.4GHz)
Winfast PX9500GT 512Mb GDDR3 PCI-E2
6Gb DDR2-667
MSI K9N Neo 2.1

I'm limited in what the motherboard can take, ~100 euro could get me:
1. Athlon 64 X2 6000+ AM2 (3GHz)
- Or -
2. 9800GT 1Gb (or similar, recommendations???)
- Or -
3. 6Gb DDR2-800

Which upgrade would go the furthest / allow me turn the settings up the most ?

Kepti

Gurgle wrote: »

Hi All,

Looking to slightly upgrade my 3 year-old system to improve its attempt at gaming performance. (Added RAM and stuck Windows 7 Pro 64-bit on it a few months ago)

Will probably bring the whole thing up a generation or two next year, so don't want to spend much now.

What I've got:
Athlon 64 X2 4600+ AM2 (2.4GHz)
Winfast PX9500GT 512Mb GDDR3 PCI-E2
6Gb DDR2-667
MSI K9N Neo 2.1

I'm limited in what the motherboard can take, ~100 euro could get me:
1. Athlon 64 X2 6000+ AM2 (3GHz)
- Or -
2. 9800GT 1Gb (or similar, recommendations???)
- Or -
3. 6Gb DDR2-800

Which upgrade would go the furthest / allow me turn the settings up the most ?

You definitely won't notice an improvement with slightly higher clocked RAM.

What resolution do you play at and what games do you play?

I'd recommend you get a graphics card that you could slot into the system you intend to buy next year. I'd go for an ATI card. NVIDIA aren't competitive at all right now. The 4850 is a great choice for 1600x 1050 and below.

edit: If you felt confident, you could always look into overclocking your processor. A quick search shows people bringing it up to 2.7GHZ on stock cooling.

Gurgle

Kepti wrote: »

You definitely won't notice an improvement with slightly higher clocked RAM.

What resolution do you play at and what games do you play?

I'd recommend you get a graphics card that you could slot into the system you intend to buy next year. I'd go for an ATI card. NVIDIA aren't competitive at all right now. The 4850 is a great choice for 1600x 1050 and below.

edit: If you felt confident, you could always look into overclocking your processor. A quick search shows people bringing it up to 2.7GHZ on stock cooling.

I didn't think changing the RAM would make much difference, just threw it in there in case I was missing something.
Games: half-life series, bio-shock (would like to play BS2), WoW, Halo, Doom 3... that type of stuff
Resolution: Monitor's native 1440 x 900 - nothing spectacular.
(Its a 'good' 19" widescreen that I'll probably be using for the next decade)

I had the CPU running at 2.8GHz for a while with the pin-mod for voltage, but got sick of hearing 'Dad, the computer's gone blue'. Cooling is the problem, and I don't see the point in spending as much on cooling as it would cost to just replace the chip.

- edit -
Now this is where it all goes nuts for me, is a 4850 better than e.g. a 5450?
Which is the important digit?

uberpixie

Gurgle wrote: »

- edit -
Now this is where it all goes nuts for me, is a 4850 better than e.g. a 5450?
Which is the important digit?

4850 is faster in games than a 5450.

You cannot judge the speeds of a gfx card looking at the model number alone.

A 4850 was the 3rd fastest model in the ATI 48XX series, the faster two being 4870 and 4890.

In the ATI 5XXX series of cards, the 5450 is the slowest model.
So 5450-> 5650-> 5750->5850 (there are of course more cards in the lineup this is just simply a small example).

All a model number really tells you is the relative position of the card in the current generation.

You cannot directly compare model numbers from the previous gen to the current gen. New gen cards are often a step sideways in performance or in some cases worse performing at a particular price point.

Example a radeon 4870 performs more or less the same as a 5770 in current games with a 4890 being faster than the 5770 in most current games.

NEVER judge a new card on the model number or amount of ram the card has, ALWAYS look at benchmarks online to get a good idea of how a card performs before buying.

Kepti

Gurgle wrote: »

I didn't think changing the RAM would make much difference, just threw it in there in case I was missing something.
Games: half-life series, bio-shock (would like to play BS2), WoW, Halo, Doom 3... that type of stuff
Resolution: Monitor's native 1440 x 900 - nothing spectacular.
(Its a 'good' 19" widescreen that I'll probably be using for the next decade)

I had the CPU running at 2.8GHz for a while with the pin-mod for voltage, but got sick of hearing 'Dad, the computer's gone blue'. Cooling is the problem, and I don't see the point in spending as much on cooling as it would cost to just replace the chip.

- edit -
Now this is where it all goes nuts for me, is a 4850 better than e.g. a 5450?
Which is the important digit?

If you have the time to invest, it could be worth tweaking to overclock until it's stable. Sounds like you overshot a little, pushing it to 2.8.

The naming conventions for graphics cards is ridiculous. It's almost like they're engineered to create confusion. The 4850 is slightly older, but it's a more powerful card. The 5450 is newer but the focus is more on lower power consumption/less heat output/less noise. You can't really go wrong with a 4850 at your resolution.

the_syco

Gurgle wrote: »

Which is the important digit?

What is your budget would be one of them

lmimmfn

whats your PSU?

I would nearly recommend sticking in a 5770 if the psu can handle it but tbh your cpu is really old by todays standards, released mid 2006 but based on the socket 939 released the year before there as a staggering difference in performance in your cpu and core 2 which was released the same month as your current one.( I know i had a 4400 x2 socket 939 and got an E6400, huge difference especially when overclocked ).

Which brings me to conclude that youre probably better off just getting an cheapo second hand 8800gt/9800gt or 4850( i wouldnt spend more that 55-60 euro on either of those cards though ).

Only other alternative i can think of is you can get a cheap second hand core 2+mobo+gfx card for about 200 euro and would probably get 70-80euro selling off your current stuff. Ok so that would be 120euro in total but you would have a better overall system.

Jonny7

Grab a secondhand card for 50 or 60 quid
4850 - will almost max out most games on 1440x res on 'high' settings
4770 - harder to find, only a small bit slower

8800GT - about 10 or 15% slower than above cards but still very good


Then with the leftover change buy an aftermarket cooler and some thermal paste and overclock your PC, read some stuff on it and get it stable, because quite honestly a 2.7ish dual core chip will deal with most games surprisingly well (apart from GTA4 and the likes)

Effluo

lmimmfn wrote: »

whats your PSU?

This is important, but not so much if you get one of these instead
http://www.xfxshop.co.uk/product_detail.asp?id=HD-477A-YDF&cat=preowned

4770, a bargain alert i posted a few weeks ago. It's a very good deal and would suit your needs very well.

Solitaire

Jonny7 wrote: »

Grab a secondhand card for 50 or 60 quid
4850 - will almost max out most games on 1440x res on 'high' settings
4770 - harder to find, only a small bit slower
8800GT - about 10 or 15% slower than above cards but still very good

+1. And the HD4770 consumes at most around half as much electricity as the other two. Which means less cost, heat and fuss