thinking about doing some upgrades

A

ad356

New Member
right now my system consists of:
AMD athlon X2 4200+
antec lanboy aluminum case
windows vista ultimate
2 gb pc 5300+ ddr2, 2 single sticks- dual channel
-3 western digital hard drives.
1 80 gb, IDE 7200 RPM, windows install drive
2 250 gb SATA 7200 rpm, storage and install files drives
antec true power trio 430W power supply
NVIDA 7900 GS
2 120MM large case fans

im thinking about updating my graphics card to a direct x 10 card. can i do that without needing to upgrade my power supply. im thinking it should be adaquate as long as i dont go crossfire or SLI. what would be a decent graphics card, direct x 10 that would work with my current setup? i thinking of going with either one of the higher end ATI cards or maybe a mid nvidia, like a 9800 gtx card. would my 430W name brand ANTEC supply be able to handle that? i consider ANTEC one of the best brands of power supplies. they are not an off brand.
 
ok, here is what I say you udgrade: RAM. You want 800 MHz(PC6400). I should say, if you can afford the 9800gtx, then ditch that card, get the 4870. Its better then the 9800. And you will need a better PSU, like a 500, min. Go for 600W. I know that your antec is probably good, but its just your wattage.
 
i think im going to go with a 9800 GT, they arent that expensive and have a decent bang for the buck, and i will be able to reuse my antec 430W supply. what is the video card that deliver similar perfromance in an ATI product? are they any cheaper?
 
ok, here is what I say you udgrade: RAM. You want 800 MHz(PC6400)
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PC 6400 RAM is very good but it's not worth the extra money if you already have 5300. I would just go for 2 more GB of 5300. 4GB in dual channel is going to give a much larger increase in performance. I checked a memory benchmark once, I remember reading the diff between 2GB 5300 and 2GB 6400 is maybe an average 1 fps increase in games.
 
kookooshortman55 said:
PC 6400 RAM is very good but it's not worth the extra money if you already have 5300. I would just go for 2 more GB of 5300. 4GB in dual channel is going to give a much larger increase in performance. I checked a memory benchmark once, I remember reading the diff between 2GB 5300 and 2GB 6400 is maybe an average 1 fps increase in games.
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thats what i was going to say but i didnt want to start an argument. slightly better latency ram is barely going to be noticeable. i would agree that adding another 2 gb might help, but i still think that 2 gb is still a decent amount of ram. pretty soon were all going to have to go with x64 operating systems. were going to reach the limit of what 32 bit can handle. i kind of wonder how gaming is going to be on a 64 bit os?
 
Haha yeah arguments tend to spring up everywhere around here :P

Well I went from 3GB to 4GB and I actually noticed a huge increase in performance. I was only able to use an additional 500MB, but it let me run the RAM in dual channel. File transfers (copying files etc.) went about 5x faster. Don't know if it's a direct result of the RAM but there was an increase in performance. You would be fine with 2GB RAM but you will definitely notice an increase in performance if you went with 4.
 
In terms of PSU and GPU, you should be good with the PSU you have. Typically, the CPU gets a dedicated rail, so in this case the 12V1, leaving 2 more 16A rails. I'm not sure exactly how much power the auxiliary components use, but assuming it's around 16A, that still gives you 192W, which is enough to power to power a GTX 260 (which peaks around 180). That might be a bit generous though.
 
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