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upgrading time! (Read 605 times)
Aug 22nd, 2003 at 4:58am

Daz   Offline
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in the morning im making
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hey guys wondering if anyone can give me any advice as to the following spec i am currently about to buy

asus A7V8X-X socket A motherboard
Athlon XP3200+
512Mb DDR (PC3200) 400
128MB XFX TI4200 8X AGP Turbo
36GB IBM SCSI Drive - Ultra 320

is it worth £522 for this? also if you could suggest alternatives or alterations to this......much apreciated

daz
 
AMD athlon XP2800+ @2.34ghz&&Epox 8RDA3G 400 fsb, 8x AGP&&1024MB DDR400 PC3200&&XFX 256MB FX5950 Ultra (oc 525/1.04)&&40 gig maxtor 7200rpm&&80 gig seagate baracuda 7200rpm&&
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Reply #1 - Aug 22nd, 2003 at 6:35am

Ivan   Offline
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err what does the pound against the euro?

Dump the SCSI HD if you don't have a controller for it as the mobo doesn't have one. you can get almost twice the size for the same money if buying a IDE HD

Are you planning to upgrade it in the future? if so, buy a single 512MB DDR strip. if not, buy 2 256MB DDR strips.
 
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Reply #2 - Aug 23rd, 2003 at 9:51am

Daz   Offline
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cheers ivan i will plan to upgrade that in future so i will stick to 512......i dont realy need anything more than 40 gig anyways so i want the fastest one out
 
AMD athlon XP2800+ @2.34ghz&&Epox 8RDA3G 400 fsb, 8x AGP&&1024MB DDR400 PC3200&&XFX 256MB FX5950 Ultra (oc 525/1.04)&&40 gig maxtor 7200rpm&&80 gig seagate baracuda 7200rpm&&
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Reply #3 - Aug 23rd, 2003 at 11:53am

Ivan   Offline
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No, I'm NOT Russian, I
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Your onboard ATA-133 is almost equal in speed to the SCSI adaptor...

It's not the protocol, it's the drive hardware itself that makes the speed, and IDE still delivers a good (if not better) performance for a lot less money.

And most important: you need a PCI-64 slot (twice as long, often other way around because of the voltage position gap) to get the maximum speed (320MBps) out of those cards, and as the normal consumer motherboards don't have those, you will only get problems with it not fitting (last half of the connector sticks out at the end) and less speed (160MBps, which is awfully close to the rated 133MBps of the onboard IDE)

The trick with the DDR modules is this one: if you have 2 modules of the same type (capacity, per-chip capacity, CAS latency) in the special marked slots, it will give 5-10% more performance in memory-intensive applications (Gaming etc.)
But if you are planning to upgrade the memory amount just stick to one, and buy an IDENTICAL one (capacity, CAS and per-chip capacity) when you upgrade
 
Russian planes: IL-76 (all standard length ones),  Tu-154 and Il-62, Tu-134 and An-24RV&&&&AI flightplans and repaints can be found here
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Reply #4 - Aug 23rd, 2003 at 8:55pm

Daz   Offline
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cheers ivan much appreciated after looking at what u say IDE does sound more tempting now and will only cost fraction of the price.. thanks again
 
AMD athlon XP2800+ @2.34ghz&&Epox 8RDA3G 400 fsb, 8x AGP&&1024MB DDR400 PC3200&&XFX 256MB FX5950 Ultra (oc 525/1.04)&&40 gig maxtor 7200rpm&&80 gig seagate baracuda 7200rpm&&
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Reply #5 - Aug 24th, 2003 at 2:52am

Chi_San   Offline
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SCSI is more effective when you have an array of drives, as in, a RAID array with 4 drives in it. Smiley One SCSI drive alone will be much slower than an IDE drive of similar capacity. If you get several small SCSI drives and put them in a RAID array, you'll have one loud, hot, fast data storage media. If you have one ATA 100 or ATA 133 IDE drive, you will have quiet, cooler, fast data storage media. Wink
 
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Reply #6 - Aug 24th, 2003 at 7:17pm

4_Series_Scania   Offline
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Quote:
hey guys wondering if anyone can give me any advice as to the following spec i am currently about to buy

asus A7V8X-X socket A motherboard
Athlon XP3200+
512Mb DDR (PC3200) 400
128MB XFX TI4200 8X AGP Turbo
36GB IBM SCSI Drive - Ultra 320

is it worth £522 for this? also if you could suggest alternatives or alterations to this......much apreciated

daz


I'd be considering the FX5200, FX5600 or ,possibly, if you hunt around, an "old" Ati 9700 - All of these cards can at worst, match and at best, trounce the ti4200. They all have hardware support for Direct X9, something worth considering if you want hardware acceleration support (and reasonable performance) from future releases.......

Beware the 128MB ti4200, most are considerably slower than the 64MB variant. Wink
 
Posting drivel here since Jan 31st, 2002. - That long!
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Reply #7 - Aug 27th, 2003 at 7:48am

Daz   Offline
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yeah but the ti4200 turbo can be tweaked on par with standard ti4600 Smiley plus i get a joypad and 2 full games with it for £89.51 source www.cclcomputers.co.uk which is the best value card i have seen in a long long time

quote from xfx Beyond 3d review Quote:
One of the major selling points for XFX on this board is its overclocking potential - the very reasons for which they have put this on a GeForce4 Ti4600 like board and included all the cooling is to encourage users to overclock the board. XFX say they managed speeds of 310MHz for the core and 660MHz for the memory


Quote:
Our GeForce FX 5600 Ultra Preview highlighted the fact that under normal rendering settings the 5600 Ultra, in most cases, is not able to outperform the Ti4200 with its reference specifications


i overclocked my g4ti4200 64mb with stock cooling and i saw a big gain in performance..the gf4 can still hold its own and for £89 i think its the best value
 
AMD athlon XP2800+ @2.34ghz&&Epox 8RDA3G 400 fsb, 8x AGP&&1024MB DDR400 PC3200&&XFX 256MB FX5950 Ultra (oc 525/1.04)&&40 gig maxtor 7200rpm&&80 gig seagate baracuda 7200rpm&&
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Reply #8 - Aug 27th, 2003 at 12:50pm

AndyG   Offline
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I'd definitely back the comments about the graphics card, and can recommend the FX5200 128mb ram from experience.  Also go for as much ram as you can afford, it seems to be relatively cheap again at the moment; I'm running an Athlon 2600+, FX5200 and 1 gb of ram, and it pretty much deals with whatever I throw at it, including more addon scenery than I care to think about.  With some tweaked settings I'm getting 40 fps in CFS3 now!
 
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