Upgrade Questions

Looking into upgradingmy computer but keeping the original RAM to keep the
price down. I'm gonna get:

Asus K8N-E Deluxe Socket-754 nForce3
AMD Athlon 64bit 2800+ (Newcastle)
Sapphire Radeon 9600XT Ultimate

1) I'll be using 512Mb of PC2700 RAM. Is this going to be a bottle neck? I
intent to be using this system winth Win XP MCE and games such as Half Life
2 when its out.

2) How well will the graphics card keep up with all the latest first-person
games?

3) Does this motherboard allow for a significant future upgrade of
processor? Does anyone know what the max clock speed in can handle is?

TIA

"elziko" wrote in message
. ..

" 1) I'll be using 512Mb of PC2700 RAM. Is this going to be a bottle neck?
"

Yes, it will be a bottleneck. You'll need PC3200 to get proper performance
from an Athlon64.


" 2) How well will the graphics card keep up with all the latest
first-person games? "

Not that well. Far Cry, Doom3, and future games based on their engines will
show you that the 9600XT is becoming a low-end card. HL2 looks like having
a more forgiving engine, so a 9600XT should run it pretty well. However,
when you're done with that game, you may struggle with any other new FPS.

You can compare the gaming performance of a number of cards in the following
two articles:

http://graphics.tomshardware.com/graphic/20041004/
http://www.digit-life.com/articles2/over2k4/index.html


" 3) Does this motherboard allow for a significant future upgrade of
processor? Does anyone know what the max clock speed in can handle is? "

The 3700+ looks like being the last skt754 CPU. AMD's roadmap will run on
skt939 for the near future. If you're looking for maximum upgradeability,
you should wait for the recently-released skt939 3000+, 3200+ and 3400+ to
arrive on UK shores. You can then weigh-up the choices between the sockets.

On Tue, 19 Oct 2004 12:18:19 +0100, "elziko"
wrote:

Looking into upgradingmy computer but keeping the original RAM to keep the
price down. I'm gonna get:

Asus K8N-E Deluxe Socket-754 nForce3
AMD Athlon 64bit 2800+ (Newcastle)
Sapphire Radeon 9600XT Ultimate

1) I'll be using 512Mb of PC2700 RAM. Is this going to be a bottle neck? I
intent to be using this system winth Win XP MCE and games such as Half Life
2 when its out.

2) How well will the graphics card keep up with all the latest first-person
games?

3) Does this motherboard allow for a significant future upgrade of
processor? Does anyone know what the max clock speed in can handle is?

TIA


IMHO, trying to cut costs by reusing 512MB of PC2700 is not
a good idea. Sell the memory if possible and get 1GB of
PC3200. Your video card is going to be a bottleneck but
after it, the memory will be effecting framerates too.

Since there is only a 19% difference in speed between PC2700 and PC3200 RAM you are not likely to notice a diffence in performance with the different memory, especially if the CPU has 1 MB L2 cache. Memory speed is not as important as CPU speed, the amount of memory, the amount of L2 cache, or hard drive speed.

elziko wrote:

Looking into upgradingmy computer but keeping the original RAM to keep the
price down. I'm gonna get:

Asus K8N-E Deluxe Socket-754 nForce3
AMD Athlon 64bit 2800+ (Newcastle)
Sapphire Radeon 9600XT Ultimate

1) I'll be using 512Mb of PC2700 RAM. Is this going to be a bottle neck?

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Mike Walsh
West Palm Beach, Florida, U.S.A.