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Well my PC completely died on me last night. I get no response now when trying to turn it on as if it wasn't even plugged in (I did check). I'm assuming that would mean a power supply problem. But rather than just replacing the power supply I figure this is a good time to do some upgrades.

Current system:

Cheap ECS motherboard (forget the exact model)
AMD 2500+ Barton
512 mb PC 2700 & 512 mb PC 3200
Radeon 9600 Pro
80GB & 60GB harddrives
32x CD-Rom
32x4x8 CD Burner
Soundblaster Live

At this point I'm thinking Motherboard, Processor, and possibly fixing the mismatched ram would be the best use of money but it's been a while since I've looked into mobo's and procs to know what is the best bang for the buck.

Any thoughts on how best to spend $300-$400 on upgrades?

Get a decent ASUS or MSI mobo and bump up to a faster AMD proc. Matching the memory would be good idea too with the new mobo. If you have "computer shows" in your area, that's usually a good place to find great prices on mobo/proc combos.

Anyone have an opinion on PCI-e vs. AGP for gaming? It would involve buying a new video card as well but if PCI-e is going to be the future of the next year or two then it's something to consider for a current upgrade.

And is there a difference between socket 939 and 754? It seems they both support the Athlon 64 right?

PCI-e moves more bits than AGP so it will replace AGP (already is, almost all new boards have PCI-e).


Socket 754 doesn't support Athlon X2's or FX's and the price difference is minimal.

You could do it very nicely for a few hundred more:

Motherboard: CHAINTECH VNF4/Ultra Socket 939 NVIDIA nForce4 Ultra - $85
Memory: Corsair 512MB PC3200 (CMX512-3200C2PT) - Two of them for 1GB total: $133
CPU: AMD Athlon 64 3200+ Venice Retail (90nm): $190
Video: eVGA Geforce 6600GT 128MB GDDR3 PCI E: $169

Total $575

This would be a kickass rig for under $600, and you can reuse your other stuff too.

I wouldn't get a new video card with less than 256.  YMMV.

Why?

Whenever you build your new computer - don't forget Das Keyboard (http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=3926.msg98325#msg98325) (Actual product link (http://www.daskeyboard.com/)).

It's the sweet spot. 512MB too much, excepting maybe Doom3. But I've seen the difference between my rig and the eqholic's, I built the same machine but he only wanted a 128MB card, vs my 256MB. He's had to run several games with slightly lower texture options, just more room for them on my card.

Most recently, being able to run Thief 3's uncompressed textures without a performance hit.

I put together a rig with an Athlon 64 3800+, an ASUS mobo, and a GeForce 7800GTX, and it only came out to ~$1200. My mind is blown. This is less than what it cost to build my current rig.

Texture sizes & quanity, they are increasing.  Within a year I wouldn't be surprised to find 128mb cards will be limited to 'medium quality' graphics settings.

The next version of Windows is also going to want a 256MB card to run the interface with all the bells and whistles.  That's 256MB just for the damn operating system.

Of course I imagine the "bells and whistles" will consist of very annoying animations that I will instantly turn off - as I already do with XP.

An x16 PCI Express slot theoretically offers double the bandwidth of AGP x8 but at the moment no card can even take advantage of AGP x8 (i.e. performance difference between AGP x4 and x8 is negligible) so that's really not an important consideration right now. What does matter is that the latest and greatest GPUs are arriving in PCI-e form first and then later migrating to AGP, if at all (e.g. NVIDIA has said that the 7800 GTX is not going to be available in AGP form). If you plan on keeping this system around for a while and upgrading the components sometime in the future it's better to go with PCI-e since you'll have more options compared to AGP.

AMD considers the socket 754 their "budget" platform with the Sempron and lower end Athlon 64s sharing that socket. It's better to go with a Socket 939 motherboard if you want to have more CPU upgrade options in the future (just like PCI-e vs AGP).

Microsoft is recommending only 128 MB to run in "Aero Glass" mode (all the bells and whistles turned on) though some places are saying you'll need 256 MB if you want to run at resolutions of 1600 x 1200 or greater.

Well after spec'ing out a new mobo, cpu, case, video card, and memory it came out to a decent bit more than I wanted to spend. So, for the time being I think I'm just going to replace the power supply and possibly spend money on buying 2 x 1gb dimms to replace my ram.

I don't see the sense in getting less than a socket 939 mobo w/ PCI-e at this point after doing a bit of reading but that just requires too many components right now.

I ordered http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16817153006 which seems like a sufficient short term replacement.

Power Supply's often go bad from having to convert a poor AC signal into DC.  Might I suggest one of these (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16842102013) as extra insurance?

I just got mine and am happy with it.  It will shut your computer down gracefully incase of extended power failure and has some decent monitoring software.

Uh, hey... I can't find my floppy with the controlling software for my CyberPower.  Any chance you could send the install files to me?  We can discuss transmission methods.

Pfft, I've got one of these (http://www.apcc.com/resource/include/techspec_index.cfm?base_sku=SUA2200). ;)

Got it cheap, it's covering my pc and tv. I can't believe I just waved a battery backup peen!

What's the noise output on something like that?

I'm still running AGP as I have no interest in upgrading my mobo any tiime soon. Upgraded last night from an FX5600 to a 6600GT 128MB, for $210.00 Cdn.

I am a very happy guy. Unfortunately, I discovered that my cheap Dell 17" (got it for $50 when Dell gave my sister 2 of them for no good reason) only does 72Mhz at 1280x960. So I'll be looking at new monitors next...

Have you tested that 6600 with anything 3D intensive yet? Do you play BF2 or EQ2? I was going to get a 256 last night, but decided to wait.

Going to reload HL2 and maybe Doom3 this weekend.

So far, I've played Kotor 2 - smooth with everything cranked except 16x AA. That caused some stutter so I dropped to 8x.

Also cranked up everything in WoW, and I must say its much prettier. Haven't done any framerate tests or anything yet.

The 6600 is alright but it still chokes on stuff and I don't even play any of the new games like Doom3 or EQ2 etc. It chokes in Planetside in big battles and it chokes in Guild Wars PvP if I turn the graphics up from minimum.

Well, I ended up getting a 6600 GT OC (from BFG) over the weekend. For the price/class, this thing is more I could ask for. It runs everything I have on high (HL2/Guild Wars) without problems. EQ2 is still midrange, and BF2 upper mid, but it's much better than what I had.

I'm curious - why do you need it?
I review hardware. A lot of the companies I deal with have these, and I look at the press releases and go "...why?!" Is power that unreliable in the US?
I've experienced one major blackout in the last 5 years (3 hours plus) and I dunno 2-3 small ones (less than 30 minutes) nothing I'd waste money insuring against... I loose more data, by the pc crashing than that.
So I'm curious, why do people buy these?

My power flickers once in a while during an electrical storm, a $30 dollar UPS is a small price to pay to avoid the potential harddrive destruction of an unexpected shutdown during a write.

And that's a real concern backed by statistics? I've never heard of anybody ever losing a harddrive to power failure. I've never worked in a comapny with any sort of surge protection or UPS (and I work in publishing - everything worth anything is digital). I'm not being snarky here, I've just never heard of it being a concern over here, so I'm wondering whether the manufacturers of those devices has kickass marketing or the rest of the world is stuck with shitty grids.

Same here. I've been using cheapo power strips for years myself.

I don't, really. My last UPS died, and someone I knew had this one for sale dirt cheap.

I guess your power is much better than ours, which tends to go out for hours and sometimes days, depending on the weather and season. It's better in my ghetto apartment than my old house, but I'm not trusting my a/v gear to a naked electrical line. I've seen too much gear get taken out in lightning storms.

We use them at work to bridge the time between a power outtage and getting the generator running, for the most part. I'd say we use them partly for surge/brown protection (we haven't had our alloted contracted voltage at the building head....ever...I forget what reason the maintenance guy told me, but I could find out if you're interested...probably 'because the power company can') and partly for emergency outtage.

It must be. Sounds horrible... if a public library need a generator - only places here with a generator are hospitals, national broadcasting and probably a few important government facilities (and research companies with freezers and whatnot, that will cause billions in losses if thawed) - but a library?

But of course our power companies used to be nationalized and still adheres to heavy regulation (while making a profit). Yay capitalism...

Do you have folks like Enron? Remember when a huge swath of northeast america went dark (http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories/s2015.htm) a while ago?

But really, the stuff I'm talking about is normal seasonal damage from downed lines (lightning or snow/ice damage) or direct lightning strikes, mostly. Do we /need/ power backup at the library? No. It's just convenient for the patrons to be able to check out their books even if the power goes out, and the staff doesn't have to do extra paperwork. A luxury, really (the emergency power part, anyway, the surge/brown protection is pretty important).

It's normal in the country outside the city limits to lose power at least once a month in the winter for a few hours. Last winter, my mother didn't have power for four days....had to run a generator just to keep the pipes from freezing.

I am building this machine...

Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe

Asus 6600 GT 128mb graphic cards x2

AMD 64 3500

dvd burner

western digital raptor 36 gigs 10k rpm

had one glich...didn't read on the web site what ram was compatable with the mother board and had to return 2 sticks of 1gig ram from mushkin.  Went with Corsair 1 gig sticks (x2).

Newegg rocks!

Um...36gb HDD?

If I remember correctly, the Raptor is SCSI, but still...

Why not go with the 6800 GT if you are going to spend that kind of money? It's cheaper, has 256 MB standard, offers comparable performance to the 6600 GT in SLI mode (some games it's a little slower, some games it's a little faster) and you don't have to hassle with the driver issues.

It's not.

Edit: fixed typo

Yes.  I lost a hard drive to a power flicker about 2 years ago.  Power was off for all of about a half second, hard drive was toast.  It took a LOT of time and effort to replace stuff and so $30 bucks for a UPS is a reasonable purchase.

No we don't. And we don't really have extreme weather either - the biggest natural disaster to hit Denmark in hundreds of years was the tsunami. And the people it hit were all on vacation in Thailand - so apart from your evil power companies, I see a clear enviromental reason for taking more care where you are.

I live in upstate New York.  A friend of mine lives out on a farm about an hour from here, and has gone thru a truely insane number of modems, surge protectors, telephones, the occasional PC power supply, etc, all from lightning strikes.  He finally got a decent UPS with surge protection for his modem line, and managed to prevent any damage to his computer hardware recently, tho one of the home phones died.

When I lived in a really crappy on-campus apartment during school, the power quality was horrible, so I got a UPS.  It lasted thru school, and thru my later, better apt. when I got married, and finally died after I moved into my house here in the city.  The power quality, even in my old house, is so much better, and more steady, that I just picked up a cheap powerstrip with surge protection as a replacement. 

Alkiera

Oh sure you are smug now but wait until global warming shuts off the Atlantic thermohaline branch (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermohaline_circulation) - then you'll be wishing for some evil American power companies to warm your side of the planet.

Oh sure you are smug now but wait until global warming shuts off the Atlantic thermohaline branch (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermohaline_circulation) - then you'll be wishing for some evil American power companies to warm your side of the planet.

No, I'll hope that I still have some friends in Norway and go live on a mountain.
These guys have so much money, that if they ever run out of oil or free electricity from water, then they could start burning money for heat...

I usually just have "weird shit" happen to my rig when it takes a hit.  I think it got hosed up once due to current flicker/surge but I'm not sure, and I'd rather dish out $30 than wait for a freak lightning strike to turn my machine into a boat anchor.  Everything other than my gaming rig is just on a power strip, though.

I don't know what the weather is like where you live, but in the southeast US the power grid is constantly under assault by lightning in the summer.  Then there are the trees.  I have had a couple hurricanes roll over me already this summer, and otherwise had some stormage once a week or two.

Had a borderline-tornado roll through 2 weeks ago. Lightning split a 50ft tree in half up the street. The wind was so strong that the umbrella going through the table on our backyard deck got knocked over, which flexed and shattered the glass table top. My stepdad felt dumb for just closing the umbrella, and not removing it.

For what it's worth, I'm currently running the Longhorn beta on a laptop with a 64mb Geforce4 Go video card, 512mb system memory, 2.2ghz processor in 1024x768 and it runs slightly faster than WinXP Pro did on the same machine.  Anything could happen between now and release, but for a beta OS, it's performance is surprisingly good.

I thinking about starting to upgrade my system but I can't do everything at once. I'm trying to decide whether to get a new CPU or a new video card first. Currently running:

CPU: AMD Althon 2400 XP
Video Card: Nvidia GeForce Ti 4600

I know if I upgrade the CPU, I'll probably have to upgrade the motherboard as well. Which do you think would be better to upgrade first?

I'm in your exact situation. I want to upgrade badly, but everytime I look at it:

Need a new video card, PCIx probably. -->  Need a new mobo w/ PCIx on it -->  New processor to run in new mobo -->  Might as well throw some new RAM in there so I can keep my old computer somewhere else with an extra hard drive.

$800+ sucks.

No tornados here, but we get some decent winds (and every couple years a windstorm with gusts ~100mph).  Or the occasional giant ice storm.  Or drunk drivers plowing down the power poles.  Or transformers randomly exploding (that one cost me an FBSS back in my EQ days, but my hardware all lived).

Yup it's a problem. If you can't afford to swap out the CPU and motherboard and video card all at once you can get a motherboard that has an AGP slot, which might limit your future video card upgrade options, or you can wait for a motherboard that uses the ULi M1695 chipset (http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=2471) that supports both AGP and PCI-e video card slots with no AGP performance compromise.

I don't think modern video cards are capable of saturating the AGP bus so theoretically you can get an AGP MB and be happy for a few years yet.  However, modern video crad manufacturers are not going to sell thier high end cards with an AGP option (early obsolecence) so if you want any upgrade path at all you need to get a PCIwhatever MB.

Yea but soon afterwards we will be back to the climate where we used to be because of the global warming, and then it's you guys who has to pay us or canada for some ice  :-D

Ice.  How quaint.

No thanks, we have freon and can cool this bitch down in no time flat.

(http://jasonnardi.com/icec/blogs/media/IMG_7873.jpg)

Urich has really let himself go.

And here's a (sort of) shipping board with the above chipset, the ASRock 939Dual-SATA2 (http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=2524&p=1) which www.newegg.com is selling for $72.00 (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16813157081&ATT=Motherboards+AMD&CMP=OTC-d3alt1me) (out of stock till 9/14).

Yeah, I managed to get one before they went out of stock... UPS has it in their local package distrobution place, waiting to be delivered.  Unfortunately, my trial copy of WinXP Pro x64 is still not here yet, so it's not like I can really try it out yet, anyway.  The board supposedly has some problems cold-booting, or something... but I almost never shut down my machine completely, so I don't think it'll really be an issue for me.

Alkiera

Heh.  The consumer attitude in a nutshell.

Babycakes, by Neil Gaiman

Alright, games are running slow and I can't afford 700 bucks right now, so I'm going with a 6600GT AGP card, the question is, what's a good one to get?

Got my system set up running WinXP Pro x64, and dual booting to my previous OS, Win2000.

Decided to do some benchmarking after a friend mentioned possible performance differences between 64 and 32 bit operating system.

I installed fraps and CoH under both OS's (okay, so I exported the registry entries for CoH, and imported into both, and copied the shortcuts.)
Logged into the game as my scrapper, went to Striga Isle, and starting fraps benchmarking mode.  Then I leapt all over the zone, mostly keeping to the large council base near the volcano, and the forest just in front of it, where I had a lot of dropped frames before the upgrade.  Benchmarks in both cases were at least 3 minutes long.

Fraps gave me an average FPS number for the 3 minutes of wild leaping about:
WinXP Pro x64:    41.67 frames/sec
Win 2000 Pro:     46.9 frames/sec

This would seem to indicate that the 32->64 bit emulation layer in x64 is not quite up to snuff, loses me 5 fps, or about 13% performance.  In both cases, the game was much smoother than it had been before.  I'm guessing have more, faster RAM, and a far superior CPU is the difference.  And as a bonus, even under load it makes less heat than my old CPU did at idle.

Alkiera

PS: For the record... Video card is a PowerColor Radeon 9600 Pro 128MB, 8xAGP.  Older processor was a 1.4 Ghz Athlon(Thunderbird) on an FIC AD11 with 768MB of DDR SDRAM.   New machine is a Athlon64 (Venice) 3200+,

Exactly.  Throughput >>> CPU

For what they cost, I wouldn't bother with a high end name. I'm using an eVGA 6600GT and I'm very happy with it.

I don't feel any pressure to run a 64-bit OS without any apps that are going to take advantage of the bitness.  Perf stats are not something I am interested in, either, due to the timing.  I think that I might have an excuse to upgrade when Vista arrives, at which point I am looking at upgrading each major part anyway.  Sucky, but I have gotten more confortable being behind the leading edge and I would like to think that I will have plenty of options if I can just keep my current machine operational.  It would be a plus if I could use my existing power supply, but if not I plan to cut the case and just add a PSU for the mobo, letting the existing one power various devices such as tape, DVD and CD-RW.  I can make fantasy plans because this will be some time from now.

The real question is X700 Pro AGP or 6600GT AGP, since I can get the X700 from work for like 160.

The X700 Pro isn't as good as the 6600GT unless you happen to be an UT2004 addict:

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2297&p=2

That difference is probably more attributable to the ATI driver or slight differences in the paths you took than it is to the emulation layer. Benchmarks with NVIDIA cards and drivers show a much smaller difference -- often on the order of a fraction of one percent.

You may be right.  I ran 3DMark 2003, and got the same value for the 3DMark under both OS's.... 4089.  Perhaps I should recrod a demofile in CoH and use that for the trial, that way it'll be certain to be the same, or nearly enough, for both trials.

Alkiera