Hello, I just registered because I'm building a new PC and not sure what route to go.
I currently have a dual core AMD opteron 165 with 2 gig of ram and an ATI 5750 video card that I upgraded from a older card about a year ago.
Now my PC is starting to up act up hardware wise, It's very old, over 7 years old if I remember correctly. It randomly shuts down on me, and just doesn't respond quickly any more even after a fresh format and reinstall of windows.
My original plan was to upgrade my motherboard, CPU, and RAM, along with getting a new PSU, while leaving the graphics card I put in about a year ago. I'm not a big gamer, but I did play diablo II many years ago, and I'm excited about diablo III, I'd like to be able to play it on full graphics settings.
I was originally thinking of going with 4 or 8 gigs of ram, with an AMD phenom II 965 black CPU, with new motherboard and PSU.
Now however, I see these APU units from AMD, with a slightly less powerful CPU, but a claimed 65XX GPU integrated, which sounds much better than my current ATI 5750. When I look at the price, $127 for a 965 phenom II black CPU, or $147 for an A8 3850 APU with a new graphics processor that seems better than mine, well, I'm confused now as to what I should do.
When I looked at some reviews of the A8 APU, I see that there is mention that it's based on the 5000HD series of radeon cards, yet it's claimed to be a 65XX. Is this 65XX just a designation for the APU units, and it's graphical performance is actually equal to a 5000 series card?
Here's a quote from one of the reviews I read:
"The Radeon HD 6550D is similar to the Radeon HD 5670 in the sense that it features five SIMD engines, 400 SPUs (Stream Processing Units), 20 TAUs (Texture Address Units) and 8 ROPs (Raster Operation Units). However while the core configuration is the same, the actual performance of the Radeon HD 6550D will be much lower because of two key changes.
The most obvious difference is the chip's clock frequency, which has been reduced 23% from 775MHz on the HD 5670 to just 600MHz for the HD 6550D. Even more troubling is the memory bandwidth limitation. Whereas the HD 5670 generally has a dedicated 1GB of GDDR5 allowing for a throughput of 64GB/s, the HD 6550D must share system resources."
So am I better off right now with my 5750, and i should just upgrade my mobo, RAM, and get a phenom II 965, maybe get a new GPU down the road a few months, or is the APU a better choice? At first the promise of 65XX series graphics sounds better than my 5750, but now looking into it more, maybe it' just marketing hype. making me think 6000 is better than 5000 when that may not actually be true. Also, what if I went with the APU and used my 5750 as well? Apparently this can be done, though I'm not sure if my 5750 is compatible with running in conjunction with the APU.
Thanks for any help on the issue.
I currently have a dual core AMD opteron 165 with 2 gig of ram and an ATI 5750 video card that I upgraded from a older card about a year ago.
Now my PC is starting to up act up hardware wise, It's very old, over 7 years old if I remember correctly. It randomly shuts down on me, and just doesn't respond quickly any more even after a fresh format and reinstall of windows.
My original plan was to upgrade my motherboard, CPU, and RAM, along with getting a new PSU, while leaving the graphics card I put in about a year ago. I'm not a big gamer, but I did play diablo II many years ago, and I'm excited about diablo III, I'd like to be able to play it on full graphics settings.
I was originally thinking of going with 4 or 8 gigs of ram, with an AMD phenom II 965 black CPU, with new motherboard and PSU.
Now however, I see these APU units from AMD, with a slightly less powerful CPU, but a claimed 65XX GPU integrated, which sounds much better than my current ATI 5750. When I look at the price, $127 for a 965 phenom II black CPU, or $147 for an A8 3850 APU with a new graphics processor that seems better than mine, well, I'm confused now as to what I should do.
When I looked at some reviews of the A8 APU, I see that there is mention that it's based on the 5000HD series of radeon cards, yet it's claimed to be a 65XX. Is this 65XX just a designation for the APU units, and it's graphical performance is actually equal to a 5000 series card?
Here's a quote from one of the reviews I read:
"The Radeon HD 6550D is similar to the Radeon HD 5670 in the sense that it features five SIMD engines, 400 SPUs (Stream Processing Units), 20 TAUs (Texture Address Units) and 8 ROPs (Raster Operation Units). However while the core configuration is the same, the actual performance of the Radeon HD 6550D will be much lower because of two key changes.
The most obvious difference is the chip's clock frequency, which has been reduced 23% from 775MHz on the HD 5670 to just 600MHz for the HD 6550D. Even more troubling is the memory bandwidth limitation. Whereas the HD 5670 generally has a dedicated 1GB of GDDR5 allowing for a throughput of 64GB/s, the HD 6550D must share system resources."
So am I better off right now with my 5750, and i should just upgrade my mobo, RAM, and get a phenom II 965, maybe get a new GPU down the road a few months, or is the APU a better choice? At first the promise of 65XX series graphics sounds better than my 5750, but now looking into it more, maybe it' just marketing hype. making me think 6000 is better than 5000 when that may not actually be true. Also, what if I went with the APU and used my 5750 as well? Apparently this can be done, though I'm not sure if my 5750 is compatible with running in conjunction with the APU.
Thanks for any help on the issue.
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