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Things got quite a bit more complicated since I put together my last computer, especially in a graphic card department. Dual cards seem to get more of a norm and there are two standards – SLI and Crossfire.

My computer is also my home entertainment center - it is hooked up to my sound system for music, projector for movie watching and last but not least gaming.

My goal for GPU is: a) it should last for at least 2 years of gaming without updates b) work with my projector for watching movies c) be easy to update in a year to bring system to top notch without buying top-of-the-line card

So far my top runner is  BFG’s GeForce 7900 GTX (http://www.bfgtech.com/7900GTX_512_PCIX.html)

On

 Asus® M2N-SLi Deluxe, Socket AM2, NVIDIA® nForce® 570 SLi MCP Chipset w/ PCI Express x16 (ATX)  (http://www.asus.com/products4.aspx?l1=3&l2=101&l3=0&model=1160&modelmenu=1)

My concerns are – will I get better performance out of 2 ‘economy’ cards? What is whole deal about 800Watt power supplies; do I really need anything more than 400W to drive 2GPUs, CPU, 2 raid SATA HDs and CD/DVD burner and DVD reader?

Any suggestions, ideas, opinions?

If you can afford it I would just recommend getting the 7900GTX as opposed to two economy cards. Yeah the SLI'd cards may outperform the single one a bit, but then you're officially done upgrading unless you feel like throwing out two cards. That, and slightly better performance may not be worth whatever technical and driver issues remain with SLI. The bugfix list for SLI in each of NVidia's recent driver updates is a mile long.

Also, a 500W PSU is way more than enough to handle a good processor, lots of RAM, 2-3 hard drives, 2 optical drives, and 2 cards.

Try this: http://extreme.outervision.com/psucalculator.jsp

Doesn't look like money's too big a concern, but there's a good chance that your CPU isn't so outdated that you have to upgrade it as well. Looking at the motherboard, chances are your current CPU won't work with it, since its a newer AM2 type. If you have an AMD cpu already, its probably a socket 939 cpu. You can probably get a similar, if not identical motherboard board for AMD 939 chips. Just a thought.

Oh, and depending on other periferals, like fans, additional USB ports, wether your 'cd' kit is dvd-rw or dvd/cd rw etc, the power needs creep up. I have lots of ram, a good processor, 2 drives, 1 optical drive and one card, and that very site mentioned below asks for 400 watts for my rig.

Also note that the power requirements that website gives you are based on load and peak power consumption unless you set it otherwise. If at default settings your rig asks for 400 watts, it means that at absolute peak power use (meaning 100% processor load, full on ram use, all drives in heavy use, graphics cards straining, fans cranking) it'll need 400 watts.

Oh yeah, having the right voltages on all the rails is deadly important too. I got a nice antec case with an 500W Antec TruePower 2.0 PSU, which is a damn fine PSU.

I currently have AMD 64 3000 Radeon 9800 Pro, it over 2 years old now and showing its age as far as games go.  It will go as a hands-down to my S.O. as a much needed upgrade for aging and overclocked till it chokes P3 800. This way I have to put together computer, minus peripherals and HDs from scratch.

I realize that AM2 socket will require new CPU, I plan to get AMD Athlon64 X2 - 4400+ (Socket AM2) once AMD drops prices to stay competetive after being pwned by Core Duo E6xxx. Should be in a month or so.



Currently I have Antec case with 300W supply and it works just fine, new one is newer version of the same old case with 400W Antec TruePower 2.0 PSU in it. I think PSU should be fine unless new CPU/GPUs require A LOT more juice than older stuff.

The only thing I'm concerned is cooling - I don't think stock coolers are up to a challange with now 1 extra core and potentially extra GPU generating heat.

You'll get better performance out of one high-end card. One 7900GTX will blow two 7600GTs into the weeds. You also still have the option of adding a second GTX, though that'll depend on your monitor and its resolution.

I'm presently building (waiting for the AMD price cuts) a machine VERY similar to what you're looking at. The only difference is I'm going with the nForce 590 and using MSI 7900GTX(s). Only one at the present, but might need another. That will depend how well games play at 1920x1200.

Dual 7900GTXs consume a LOT of power. You will need a horse of a PSU to run these, especially with a dual core CPU. The main thing to look at is having the vid cards on separate 12v rails capable of supplying at least 12amps continuous.  If the PCIe connectors are on the same rail you could see power issues with dual GTX's. I have a 700watt FSP Epsilon. Probably a bit of overkill, but either the 600 or 700 watt Epsilons will power anything out now easily, are very quiet, and run at about 85% efficiency.

If you want a complete overview of PSUs and what goes on inside them, I'd check out this website: http://www.psuinquisitor.com/

Lot of good information there.

I thought you could buy PSUs that support SLI which have dual 12V rails.  Of course, if that's what you guys are talking about then move along to the next reply.

I upgraded recently and got a 7600gt and asus sli board. I'm quite happy with them. One thing to keep in mind when trying to make your upgrade future proof is dx10. It looks like that's gonna be a significant enough change to make things rough on older current cards atm, so you might want to hold off spending big money on a card until they show up.

I'm sure they do nowadays. I'd still side with Shrike in advocating one powerful card vs two semi-powerful card, if only because a later upgrade is simply buying a second card of the same, at which time the pricing is liable to have gone down. Furthermore, I really do have to wonder how long the market will bear the 'requirement' for computer geeks to install two cards. My limited perception of the computer market is that it starts out complicated, then eventually streamlines itself into simplicity over time, till the next 'cute' thing, like dual SLI cards, rears its ugly head.

All that said, what I'd really like to know is what games out there are so captivating that folks are wanting to upgrade their rigs to these crazy levels. I'm doing just fine playing Prey, Titan Quest and SiN with my 'old' rig, a AMD 64 3500 with an ATI 850 Pro (AGP). Although sure, I'd get some performance boost out of the latest and greatest, I still don't see spending the 2 or so grand to upgrade to new motherboard/cpu/gpu to be on the bleeding edge.

One thing you have to be careful about is if you want to go the "delayed" SLI route you want to try and get a card that won't be out of production within the timeframe you are thinking about adding the second card. For example, I got a 7800 GT end of last year thinking I might get a second one eventually but the manufacturer of my card (eVGA) no longer makes one. Oops. Yes I can get another vendor's card and it should work...in theory. And this wasn't just a recent thing, basically once the 7900 GT came out most of the vendors stopped making 7800 GTs.

You might. Most of the NVIDIA SLI certified power supplies are 500 Watt+ but even that's a bit misleading since the power requirements can change as new cards come out. I.e. if you get something on the lower end it might only put out enough current for say a pair of 7900 GT-class cards and not a pair of 7950 GTX monstrosities (NVIDIA splits them out (http://www.slizone.com/object/slizone2_build.html#certified_powersupplies) on their SLI certified eq page which is nice).

If you are going to go the high end route you might as well get one with three or even four 12V rails rather than just two. There's a limit on the max current on a single 12V line in the ATX spec (though some PS manufacturers exceed that).

If you're going the "big guns" route, you'll probably want 3 to 4 12v rails. The problem is most PSUs have the PCIe power connectors on the same rail. This won't get it done with a dual core CPU and 512mb video cards. They simply draw too much power for PSUs with dual rails. You'd probably be fine with 7900GTs, but not the latest GTXs. Same thing with the top end ATI cards. It's a known issue. You can power the second card from a molex-PCIe adapter from a HD line, but you better have about 16+ amps on that rail. It's not a simple issue and I would again recomend checking out PSUinquisitor and the johnnyguru site in particular.

I wouldn't advocate an SLI setup and plan on upgrading "later" with another card. The only reason I'm going this route is I'll either know I'll need the second card right away or I won't (in which case I'll have a lot more mobo than I need). I simply don't know what performace I'll see with a new 23" monitor. 1920x1200 is a beast to drive by all reports and I may need two cards. I might not. I won't know until the thing is up and running. I prefer simpler machines, but I'm upgrading into unknown territory for me, and I want to cover my bases.

As far as games that need this sort of horespower, well, Oblivion would be the obvious choice. It'll bring even the beefiest SLI rig to its knees as it is. CoV post-I7 is a real bear to run as well. I simply don't know what to expect with it at 1920x1200 (and it does have some issues with SLI). I'll probably resubscrice to EQ2 just to see that damned thing finally run at a decent framerate with more than 4 toons on screen. Sacred 2 is about a year or so out and it looks like it'll have some very ugly system reqs. Other than that, my old AXP3000/FX6800 is still pretty capable. The writing is on the wall for it, though, and it is time to upgrade and what I want to do now and in the near future seems to require a pretty complex and powerful box. My decision to go to a 23" LCD display is the clincher for an SLI rig. 1920x1200 simply requires a lot of video horsepower. If you're running a 20" monitor, then I think you'll find a single high-end card much preferable.

I haven't seen a compelling argument for dual gpu quite yet. You can get more bang for the buck with a (still overpriced imo) high end gpu. Now...if money's no object, go for dual high end gpus, but $1200 for just the video subsystem seems a bit nutty to me (and I have a 61" monitor, heh). I bet it still wouldn't run EQ2 at max settings, including shadows. I love me some shadows.

Make sure you get a quality name-brand psu! If you're building the scary dual-rig...dual-psu!

I have problems with throwing $1000+ just into graphic card, I don't see it as money well spent. I almost always buy everything 1-2 steps down from top of the line, computers, cars, clothing, electronics and vacations. Let someone else pay double for 10% improvement.

Maybe of interest, AnandTech recently laid out their vid card rundown: http://www.anandtech.com/guides/showdoc.aspx?i=2794&p=2

I just realized that card that I picked does not have VGA output. Since I'm very happy with my current monitor and don't plan buying new one just to jump formats I will have to find perfomance video card with VGA out. Any suggestions?

It should come with a DVI -> VGA/DB-15 adapter, check the package contents. Otherwise you can spend a few dollars and get something like this:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16814999201

Get an adapter for it. There's no performance hit with the conversion. They're what? 10-15 bucks, if they didn't come included with your card.

Thanks! I thought it would be a lot more complicated considering different protocols/timing. Can anyone explain how come adapter works?

The DVI spec includes provisions for outputting analog signals in additional to the digital ones. It's the 4 pins off to the side of the connector that look sort of like:

* *
---
* *

It's not a requirement (there's like a bazillion DVI connector versions, well okay maybe more like 6) but all PC video cards that have DVI outputs include it.

Sigh, this thread just reminds me that, except for one of my HDDs, a stick of ram, and my video card, my system is nearly 4 years old....not that it neccessarily runs poorly (though I've always had heat problems, and I cannot for the life of me figure That out).

Anyway, are there such a thing as Mobos which sport both PCIe and AGP slots? I'm going to have to do an overhaul sooner or later. I figure I can carry over the sound card, HDDs, optical drives...I'd like to be able to re-use my video card also, so I wouldn't have to upgrade to PCIe immediately, while being able to do so easily further down the line. Having to replace the Mobo to do a video card upgrade would stink.

The short answer is yes, but no. The long answer is that while you may be able to find some motherboard out there that still has support for both AGP and PCIe, I wouldn't recommend them. For one, they probably have antiquated chipsets, like Nvidia nForce 3. Anyone who's suffered an nvidia 3 chipset will tell you how utterly unpredictable and buggy they are. Secondly, the design compromises that they had to do to stuff both AGP and PCIe onto a single board will likely mean that some video cards won't even fit.

What to do about it? You can purchase a PCIe card that's relatively inexpensive and on-par with your current AGP card while you save some dosh to get a fancier one later on. I know, as a solution, it sucks, since of course you will not see the big performance boost from getting one of the newer PCIe cards -and- you're having to spend 100 bucks on a video card simply 'keeping up', but that's what the industry is doing at the moment. Not much anyone can do about it.

I do not recommend, at this stage, buying a motherboard that's AGP only. If its any consolation, I'm also stuck in the same spot you are.  When I finally do upgrade, I am going to spend good money on a solid reliable motherboard, probably ASUS. I'm going to also buy a second case ( the Antec Lan Boy is my fave for fan capacity and visual clarity). I will probably buy a low end CPU and a low end PCIe card and then spend the rest of my money on RAM for it. Then I will use that box as either a web browser or data storage till I can spend the next chunk of change on a CPU and 'real' video card.

With Windows XP Professional, is 3 gigs of RAM better than 2 gigs?  I mean, I know there's a limit to how much it recognizes, not sure about cost/benefit though.

Yes there is (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16813157081), and the performance is apparently pretty good (http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=2524) as well.

I agree with Engels, though, that unless you have a high end AGP card at the moment you are probably better off just saving up the extra money and upgrading both at the same time.

I recently started daydreaming about upgrading my video card to PCIe... until I realized what all it would require:

1)  The cost of the card itself (duh)

2)  The cost of a new motherboard that supports PCIe

3)  The cost of a new CPU that would go into said motherboard (apparently my socket 478 processor is not supported by ANY motherboards that have PCIe).

So yeah... that's a negative on the upgrade, ghost rider.

Depends on how many applications you like to have open at once. I'm happy with 2 GBs but YMMV. There are games out there that will easily swallow 700 MB+ of RAM so if you have something like running and 1 GB worth of other apps running you are starting to get close to swapping territory since the OS will gobble up 128 MB+ by itself unless you go through and strip it down.

Heh, I am still running a Socket A AMD system....so I really have no other place to go except for 64-bit....which would require a new mobo, cpu, probably video card, and also a new OS.

It makes me want to weep.



Also, damnit...I might have to crack my case open later this week and take a look at the cpu. The heat issues I am dealing with are rediculous. I've always had some trouble with heat....but the room I moved into is now smaller, with less circulation, and hence worse heat problems. I am hoping I can just re-apply some Arctic Silver or something. Also, since I'll have to deal with my bigass ThermalTake Volcano9 heatsink....which way ise the fan usualy supposed to be blowing. It was originally set to blown down onto the heatsink...but someone told me years ago that it should be sucking up, off of the cpu. I recently turned the fan over, and I thought it helped....but..well...

Help?

Heat issues are more about getting the hot air around the cpu -out- of the case more than blowing air on/off the cpu itself. How many side fans do you have running? Is one blowing air in, while the other blowing air out, as it should be? How many hard drives do you have running? Lastly, how are these heat issues manifesting themselves? You have to remember that what may seem like a crazy high temperature to you may actually be an acceptable operating speed for the chip. Also, when you put the new fan/heatsink on, did you remember to apply thermal paste? If you didn't, that's your problem right there.

While we're on the subject of heat and temperatures... what would be considered acceptable temps?

My chassis temp idles at between 30-35C, while my CPU idles at between 50-55C.

Peak temps are only ~5C higher or so.

My case has no side fans. It has 2 intakes on the front, and exhaust out the back and top.

Running 2 HDDs, which the intanks blow right over.

The heat manifests itself by causing my system to reboot itself when the heat rises to the threshold I have set, which is a bit below the chip's max operating temp.

When I originally put the heatsink/fan on, yes I did use paste. When I messed with the fan, I simply detatched it from the heatsink; it hasn't left the slot in about 4 years. I'm thinking about taking the heatsink back off to take a look, and maybe apply new paste.


Kenrick: Those temps are fine. I am seeing much higher temps in my system. I think my PC desk is partially to blame, as the tower has to sit in a little cubby - the heat doesn't really have anywhere to go.

what do you mean by swapping territory?  basically i heard its not worth it to put 3 gigs in, because the performance gain is small.

I think he means virtual memory.

Unless you happen to be using a RAM disc the only real performance benefit you get for adding lots of RAM is to keep Windows from swapping memory contents to disc (I'll ignore the fact that even if you TURN OFF paging Windows will still do it). That is what kills performance. Reading and writing to disc is much much much slower than reading and writing to RAM.

To give a simplified example, let's say you have 512 MB of RAM and let's say Windows XP by itself is using 128 MB of RAM so you have 384 MB of RAM for other stuff. Now let's load up, say, Firefox which is a ridiculous memory hog and use that for a while. Then we'll launch Word and use that for a bit and then Excel, which strangely seems to be taking a while to load, and then switch back to Firefox...and kerchunk kerchunk kerchunk your disc drive starts thrashing around like it's possessed. That's cause there wasn't enough physical memory for Windows to fit all three apps into RAM at the same time so it "swapped" the memory Firefox was using onto the disc drive when you loaded Excel (which is why it took so long to load) but when you switched back to Firefox it had to read that info off the disc back into RAM.

If you go to Task Manager under Performance you can see how much of the disc swap space it's using by looking at the Page File usage (swapping is also called paging as in writing a "page" of RAM to disc). Now Windows XP will always use some amount page file even if it doesn't really have to (and even if you turn off virtual memory, *sigh*) so it can be hard to tell without some experience if adding more RAM will cut down on your swapping but that's what it means when people talk about improving performance by adding RAM and why you may have heard that going from 2 GB to 3 GB is a small performance gain -- it doesn't actual increase performance unless it cuts down on the swapping, which for most people it wouldn't since they aren't filling up all 2 GBs.

There's a definite upgrade block going on right now. My pc is also getting long in the tooth, I think it's 3-1/2yrs old (XP Barton core 3000+ with a 9800pro 256MB). I'd really like to upgrade, but it'll be a new cpu/mobo/gpu dealie like everyone else who built good pcs when I did. I'm not sure a new AGP card would be worth the upgrade, and my pc will play anything, including Oblivion, just fine (maybe not all bells+whistles, but hey). My biggest advantage is probably my 1280x720 monitor, since resolutions have been pushing ever upwards.

This is the longest I've gone between upgrades, and with a looming house purchase (if I can find one...), this pc might be a real long toother bastard before I get the dough to build a new one...

I figure it will cost me at least $700 or so to do an overhaul on my system. At least I don't have to start worrying about it until Vista comes out.

$100 OS, $100 Mobo, $250 Vid card, $250 CPU....this is a guesstimation.

My bad, I did mean rear and front fans. Are they both blowing air in? Or is one taking and one flushing? By the way, what chip is it and what do you have the turn off temp set at? Intel as you know is rated to run far hotter than AMD.

Yes, both front fans are blowing in.

Chip: AMD AthlonXP 2700+ (yeah, older chip). The white paper on the chip said something like 80c or higher for max operating temp, so I stuck the shut-off temp at like, 75c. I'd have to go back into BIOS and look to be sure.

DRM much? Why would you ever upgrade to Vista?

An AMD getting that hot is just not normal. Do you have a rear fan? In essense, are you getting the air blown in one way, blown out the other? If you do, I have a sneaking suspicion that something's up with your heat sink; perhaps the thermal paste needs to be reapplied. There's an art to this, aparently. You can't goo it on there. It has to be thin enough that it conducts heat straight to the heat sink, yet not too thin that its not making contact on all surfaces.

Still, I can imagine that with modern games your CPU is working full time all the time while playing, so high temperatures aren't that odd. Do you have it overclocked by any chance?

No the Athlon XP (he said he's using Socket A) runs as hot as the equivalent P4. E.g. an Athlon XP 2700+ (running at 2.1 GHz) has a thermal power design of 68W. The 2.6 GHz P4 has a thermal power design of 62W, and the 2.8 P4 is 68W (the older Norwood design, the Prescotts are quite a bit hotter).

The Athlon XPs also don't have a heat spreader, nor do they have a built-in thermal protection cutoff, nor do they clock themselves down if they get too hot (all features that the P4 has) and the Socket A socket has a crappy heat sink attachment mechanism. In other words the Athlon XPs are harder to keep cool, IMO, than the P4s unless you are taking about the high end Prescotts of which there's no Athlon XP equivalent (have to get an Athlon 64 for that).

You may be thinking of the Athlon 64 which is a cooler design (in the literal sense of the word) than the P4.

Edit: changed XP 2600+ to 2700+ (has same TPD as the 2600+ according to the spec sheet)

Thanks man, that was interesting and very thorough.  I guess I'll be doing 2 gigs.

Um...new bells and whistles....ability to actually use the full amount of my HDDs...DX10...a 64bit OS....To get rid of the headaches involved with using a "borrowed" key that won't let me download SPs...


@ Engels: Yep, got 2 fans blowing in, 1 blowing out back, 1 blowing out top. No, I don't have it overclocked. I'll probably take a look at it tomarrow or Monday.

I've never been a fan (sorry) of top or side fans. I like the front to back action with as little whorling as possible.

Looks like Trippy just explained your heat problem, Strazos. I used to run an AthlonXP and it did run fairly hot with high demand game. I upgraded to a AMD 64 about a year ago and have been safe as houses since. Your fan set up looks good, your cpu fan seems like a good solution; unless you're storing the computer in the oven, I can only think that you're pushing the processor too far with the newer software out there.

I use an Athlon XP at work (my old box, to be precise) and I have three fans going on it. The two front and back ones, and a top fan as well. Its so loud my coworkers hate me for it, but what the fuck else am I going to play Eve on, I ask!? And this conversation reminds me why I had to put in the extra top fan; with the Gforce Ultra 5600 I put in it, the combined heat would have let me roast small game hens inside.

Sky; side and/or top fans are only a compliment to the requisite front and back fans. Only 'necessary' if you're running into situations like Strazos is.

I'd replace the fans with higher airflow models. Like I said, I am skeptical as to the benefits of side/top due to whorling.

What is this whorling of which you speak? As far as top or side fans, I'd only have them sucking air out.

Wait...so it's actually possible that my little ole CPU that could...

"She just can't no more, cap'n!?"

/Scotty

I wasn't aware a CPU would allow me to push it beyond it's limits like that, without overclocking and all. But again, I'm going to pop the heatsink off and see what's doing, maybe apply a fresh layer of Arctic Silver (I sure hope it hasn't gone dry after all this time, even in the sealed tube).

Also, I'm gonna see if I can move the tower out of it's stupid cubby...it may not be an oven, but with the heat emanating off my aluminum Lian-Li case, the heat has nowhere to go really, so it's not too far off from an oven.

Cubbies are teh debil! Adequate venting area around the case is important.

Engels - The goal is to get a solid front to back airstream that blows over anything that gets hot (hard drives, ram, cpu, gpus). A couple fans located in front (a higher one to blow over hds, a lower one for unimpeded airflow) and a couple in back (aided by the PS blowing out, you could also block up one outflow hole because that causes turbulence as well) is what I use. I feel that introducing a side intake fan impedes the front-to-back flow, a side outflow decreaases the airflow as well as introducing turbulence (whorles). A top fan reduces airflow over lower components like the gpu by drawing air upwards.

I was considering using a plastic hose to vent air from my ac unit directly into the pc in the summer :P I also had a plan to build a pc inside a central air duct. But good old fashioned airflow has served me pretty good, I don't o/c (much).

I personally like those boxes that have a side-fan and vent shaft over the CPU so that all hot air generated by the CPU gets vented out exclusively. I've seen a number of 'older' Dells use this and it seems to work very well for them. The new Dells don't have this, which to me is just indicative that Dell's slowly declining in quality. They're still good machines, but it used to be that I'd sooner trust Dell to build a good solid box, since they were known for all sorts of testing. Heck, at work our main data server is -still- a Pentium III 800 mhz machine, still going strong, servicing over 80 people. Now, I'm not so certain about them.

Doing it that way is actually blowing the air the wrong direction in an ATX-style case. You want to be blowing room temperature air through the side vent duct over the CPU heatsink. If you have a top vent and fan, that's where you suck the hot air out of. The problem with the ATX case design is that the air coming through the front of the case (assuming it has openings) typically gets heated up passing over the hard drives before travelling to the CPU section. There's already a rear fan that will suck out the heated air that's passed over the CPU so using the side vent and fan to suck more air out will help somewhat but it doesn't solve the problem of the hard drive heated air going over the CPU heatsink.

Heck, I just reverse the direction of the fans. The fan on the front by the hard drives blows air out, the one on the back by the CPU blows air in.

As to the fans installed direcly over or with a duct straight to the CPU on Dells, I can't swear to it, but I do not think they are blowing air up and out, but down and in. Regardless, isolating the entire CPU through the duct is clever, wether its getting fresh air from outside or sucking the hot air generated by the chip out. Its as close as you're going to get to having a full blown outdoor fan blowing on the CPU with the case removed.

That can be tricky though cause the power supply is exhausting hot air back there and the heated air from your video card potentially has further to travel (thereby heating up other components) before being exhausted.

Yes the ducting is a good idea and Intel tried to force it upon manufacturers with its BTX case spec since they were having so many issues cooling their high end Prescotts. Unfortunately for them virtually all the case manufacturers refused to make BTX cases except for some specialized applications (e.g. the Shuttle "P" chassis borrows some of the BTX ducting ideas).

Yea. My shuttle has some crazy ducting going on.

I wanted to emphasize this, just in case.  Keep the paste as thin as possible while covering all of the contact to the heat sink.  Too much and it acts as an insulator.  I have seen machines run tens of degrees cooler by making sure this was done properly.

I know the conversation's sort of shifted in the direction of cooling, but I've done a little research on the question of graphic card upgrade.  (Nothing like a MMORPG I'm playing (CoX) playing like crap (http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=7516.msg207800#msg207800) for me to seriously consider an upgrade.)

Right now there is a bit of a hurdle for those of us who still have an AGP motherboard.  If we want a really good graphics card, we can't just upgrade the card, we need to upgrade the motherboard as well.  This is because the vast majority of good graphics cards these days use PCI-X slots.  I heard there are some adapters that convert an AGP port into a PCI-X port.  I wonder if they'd be worth the cost... probably not. 

The best all-around performance you can get for an AGP motherboard is the Radeon X850 XT Platinum (http://www.pricegrabber.com/p__ATI_Radeon_X850_XT_Platinum_Edition_Video_Card,__7227962/search=Radeon+X850+Platinum).  It currently performs competitively with any other card out there.  The problem is that when it comes time to upgrade to PCi-X (and that time is now) this card will be useless.  This makes it a poor investment.

It looks like what I'd really need for a graphics card upgrade is around $800-$1000.  That's for a setup like this:

Dual Core CPU and a PCI-X motherboard that supports it.  There's some cheap Dual Core CPUs out, such as A Pentium-D with 2.6 Ghz cores for $130 (http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/05/10/dual_41_ghz_cores/index.html).  Tack on another $80-$120 for the motherboard.  Last I heard, the standard 128 pin PC2700/PC3200 ram works on these motherboards fine, so no need to upgrade that immediately.

With PCI-X motherboard secure, it's time to upgrade the graphics card.  Knowing how awesomely my SLI setup worked back in the 3DFX Voodoo2 days, I'm jumping back on that bandwagon.  Cheapest way to do it is the GeForce 7950 GX2 for about $600. (http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/06/05/geforce_7950_gx2/index.html).  It's basically a SLI setup built into one card.  It's cheaper than the alternative, two $450 cards and a $100 bridge between them.   I hear that NVIDIA driver support currently hasn't entirely caught up to fully exploit SLI, but once it does I fully expect to see SLI setups outperforming single cards for half a decade.  That makes it a good investment in my book.

Back from fantasy land, however: Full time college students don't buy $1000 worth of computer equipment.  Full time workers do, provided they're not up to their necks in other debt.  For that matter, looking at a $1000 cost for PC gaming builds a strong case for console gaming.  Might as well stick with my AMD 3000 XP+ and Radeon 9800 Pro setup (similar to the original poster) for awhile more.   But, the above is my "coming into an unexpected windfall" plan.

Pfft, this is why you take out school loans that total above and beyond tuition and fees.  :evil:

As an aside, there's no way I personally am ever going to be spending $600 just on the video system for my PC.

Precisely my thinking.  PC game designers who expect their users to spend $650 to play the less than three games that need that kind of firepower strike me as unreasonable.  City of Heroes/Villains probably wouldnt' need such a thing, except it's a clunky sobbich.  I wonder if my issues with frame rate in it have to do with my hardware or some kind of ATI hate.

I've played CoH before, on max settings, with my 9800Pro 256 just fine. I'm thinking if I can get my heat problems under control I can squeeze at least another year out of my system before going over to a 64-bit setup.

Recently?  Like, Post-City of Villains release recently?  At that point they had retooled CoH/CoV's engine hard.  It used to run very smoothly, now I'm experiencing a massive drop in framerate.  I've the same video hardware you do, except 128 MB on the card instead of 256.

CoV ramped up its graphics quite a bit; my gf had to buy a new puter for it. Then aparently Issue 7 introduced physics card code that otherwise gets handled by your CPU (if you don't have a physics graphics card, which noone does), so that's another performance hit.

I am one of those people that got the ATI 850 Pro as a last hold out in AGP land, and it runs CoH well, but not fabulously well by any stretch.

All in all I think it was a bad move by Cryptic to alienate players by making the graphics that much more demanding, especially since, in my opinion, the graphics quality has suffered from it. That hazed out city background make the game look dumbed down and crowded.

PCI Express = PCIe
PCI Extended = PCI-X

No the best non-workstation class AGP video card you can get is the 7800GS (http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.aspx?i=2616&p=1). And neither the X850XT (which doesn't support SM 3.0) nor the 7800GS perform "competitively" with any other card out there as you can see from the benchmarks (and those benchmarks were done last year, there's a new generation of even faster cards out now). 

You'll need to recalculate that this week when the Conroe's hit the streets and the AMD price drops take effect.

Only certain very rare chipsets like the SIS 649 (which isn't made anymore AFAIK) support both DDR and DDR2 RAM. And even if you found one that did current Intel CPUs run their memory buses faster than the 400 MHz used for PC3200 so you would either have to seriously overclock your RAM to match what the Intel CPU would like or underclock the memory bus gimping memory performance.

Edit: I take that back. The Intel 915 chipset family can use either DDR or DDR2 (bus speed issues still apply). However the 915 doesn't support the Pentium D.

I stand corrected.

A PCIe version is being reviewed in that article.  I'd need to see a comparitive AGP benchmark.  Considering the 7800GS is half the price, I suspect it isn't as fast as the X8500 XT PE, but I could be wrong.  Regardless, we're discussing AGP cards here, which I think we're in agreement one wouldn't be buying unless they're cool with blowing money on a dead end anyway.

My bad, try this one (http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/02/13/nvidias_geforce_7800gs_becomes_a_better_buy/index.html) instead. Note that both cards came overclocked compared to the reference 7800GS (460 MHz and 400 MHz vs the default 375 MHz).

Uh, you can turn off bloom, depth of field, antialiasing, antiisotropic whatthehellever, physics particles, and the dip-in-molten-plexiglass effect they put in with I7. (they've even made a global graphics slider so you can turn everything down at once) Supposedly this results in the same graphics and graphical load as launch.

I occasionally play on a junky laptop with a junky Radeon Mobility and aside from the graphical memory straining when I run up to 50 heroes at once it's smooth.

--GF