Time to upgrade?

Associate
Joined
23 Oct 2002
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Some where, out there
I'm currently running a 2.4 northwood, Abit IC7 (875 chipset), 2gb PC 3200 kingston CAS 3, a Radeon 9800 pro, and a 160gb SATA hard drive. It's currently watercooled, so it's nice and quiet, but it's starting to show it's age, and I'm looking at upgrades. I don;t need anything too 'bleeding edge', as I mostly use my PC for online gaming, web browsing, and a bit of office work.

What sort of performance increase could I expect from going to an AMD dual core 3800, Nforce 4 SLI board, and an X800XL graphics card? Looking at the comparisons on Toms hardware, the CPU would be between 20 and 50% faster, and the graphics card about 50%+ faster. Are these realistic figures?

Also, how noisy are the stock AMD heatsink and fans, as I don't want to go back to having bleeding ears....
 
Man of Honour
Joined
27 Sep 2004
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25,821
Location
Glasgow
Probably fairly realistic since it isn't solely down to sheer mhz anymore with the improvements in technology. I'd probably not be expecting anything quite so noticable in use as 50%, maybe a bit less but still quite an improvement.

I don't find the heatsink and fan on my A64 noisy but coming from watercooling it is likely to be noticable so maybe look at a Zalman cooler or similar.
 
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