As this is the holidays, I have found myself $200 richer thanks to my friends and family. This comes at an opportune time, as I was thinking of buying some new hardware anyway.

Here's my current comp's specs:

Windows XP Pro SP3
CPU: P4 @ 2.8 ghz
GPU: Radeon X700
Memory: 2x Corsair 514 mb DDR2 4200 533 mgz
Hard Drives: Two seagate barracudas, one 320 gb, one 150.
Motherboard: Intel D925XCV Intel 925X Socket 775
PSU:Antec Earthwatts 500w

During the steam sale, I picked up quite a few games, and hoped to play them over the next few days.

However, things aren't going well. I used play both TF2 and CoH just fine, now they crash, have artifacts, and overall are just unplayable. In killing floor and dawn of war, the player models would not render, and the HUD would turn back. In evil genius, the floors would disappear. TF's scoreboard is garbled. All games have sudden CTD with the screen resolution jacked up, or just cause my comp to reboot.

A while back I posted about random crashes I had to unseat the memory and reseat it to get the computer to boot again. That hasn't happened for a month, but it still bugs me.

Recently I was trying to transfer files, and the computer crashed in the middle. The 150 gb HD I have is unable to write the last 9 gb of it, because it crashes the computer. Any time I try to move large files to either drive (>5 gb), my computer will crash.

The fans I have in the comp I need to oil and clean every month, or they stop.

As you can see, I have a few issues with my computer, and want to solve the majority of them with my newfound cash. So here are the options I think will do:

Option 1: This I hope would update my machine and provide some stability.

*Get a new GFX card: Radeon 4670

*Get new memory: 2x CORSAIR 1GB 240-Pin DDR2 533

*Get another hard drive:WD 500GB 7200 RPM 32MB

Option 2: As my hard drives are failing, maybe provide a place of relative security to leave my stuff. Plus, I was thinking about building a new computer next year (like during summer), and the other stuff I'd be buying in #1 would not transfer over to it.

*Get two of the HD's, place them in a RAID 1.

Any comments/ideas are welcome. Thanks!

I say save up for a full rehaul, that thing is crap.
I literally have better stuff in a drawer.
Or, Get an HD5770.

It did the job, before things started to go pear shaped. If it had been stable like it was a few months ago, I wouldn't have posted.



Go towards the light...

It's very powerful, and for 160$ or below who can argue.

For my system, it would be pointless expense. Everything else would bottleneck it.

Sigh, I was hoping for a girl thread. We haven't had a good girl thread in ages.

Maybe because when we had one, the advice ranged from harmless to vile.

Also, there is an increasing number of married members, decreasing the singles asking for advice.

Sorry to disappoint dude, but you can pretend this is a girl thread and offer me advice for my hypothetical situation.

Ok.

Put it in her butt!

I'm going to guess my hypothetical situation was where to place a suppository?

Thank you for the excellent advice, then!

Spend the money on hookers.

>.>

I was tempted to.

No seriously.

But then when you build a system later, you already have a video card. Also anything more then... anything would bottleneck it. That processor is utter ****.
Fine, buy a 3670 or whatever.

Eh... I don't know if it would bottleneck it too bad. I have a buddy who has a crap system with an awesome video card and it'll run just about anything, but his load times are horrendous.

Remember when Tibby had the poorest computer this side of the internet? I miss that.

The bonus is that I frequently pick up garbage from the school that is far better then what I was using.
I wish I didn't throw it away, it served me well.
Now I have a ****ing quad core and a 1 gig video card.

I agree with Tibby and think its time for a complete overhaul, your computer appears to have several different problems and upgrading it will probably just nickle-and-dime you to death with marginal performance increases.

If you have faith in your PSU and are able to reinstall your OS, you could do something on the cheap like: (Reusing your current case/psu/optical drive)



$215 + tax + shipping

The onboard HD3200 should be slightly better than your current x700 although I wouldnt expect it to handle any modern games. You can always upgrade later. Four memory slots also allow you to to bring your old DDR2 over if it turns out it is still good, although it would all run at the slower speed.

I went ahead and got some hard drives (as more space is never a bad thing), as well as some more memory (as 1 gb is paltry memory anyway).

You guys with the buying of motherboards and the new cards and the oyven!

However, I thank you all for your time.

I hope it was atleast a 1tb drive, otherwise you are wasting money on crap.
The hell does "te has 400 cgcs in fmr1" mean.

You certainly have strong opinions. Opinions that are compatible with what has been said in the tag.

I'm with Lord Kuat on this one. I tend to fix things that aren't broken before I buy something new as well. I saw in another thread that he tends to stick to games that his current system can handle instead of constantly replacing & upgrading hardware to play the latest & greatest games while ignoring the fact that there are probably a ton of older or slightly older games that many people overlook. I purchased an iMac earlier this year but it was the first new computer that I've had since 2000/2001 & I'll keep using it until it no longer functions. There are hundreds of older games that I want to play before I'll have the time to try anything new & I'll usually pay $10 or less for them instead of $40-$50. I also have a refurbished Xbox 360 that I got a good deal on. I use it primarily for Netflix streaming but I also buy a used game or 2 on Amazon on occasion. There are an endless amount of older games that I can buy for it. I'll still get to those new games, eventually, but they'll be far more affordable when I do.

Glad someone knows where I'm coming from.

I am all for fixing computers and upgrading them to maximize their potential, but I also like my primary computer to function without issue. Like I would be disappointed if I spent money for ram and new harddrives and then discover the issue is a failing motherboard.

I'm usually in the same boat as Lord Kuat. I'm only just now replacing the major components in my PC from the build I made in 2005ish. Since initial build, the machine has gotten two 10k raptors, a new video card or three, and an upgrade from 2 Ath64_939s to 2 Opteron Dual Core 939s. It's still plenty capable as it stands right now, so I'll be transferring the majority of it into a small unobtrusive case to be used as a Windows Home Server or the like.

I'd say your summer plan is probably a good one.

I still don't know what it means.

I do agree that you need a cpu upgrade, although if the board is compatible (I'm not sure if it is) I'd suggest a drop-in upgrade w/ a more recent (but not overly expensive -- just something mid-range like a E7xxx) LGA775 proc rather than getting a new mb and proc, which would tide you over for another two years or so and then you can legit do a complete overhaul.

It depends on the cost, tho. The CPU'd better be under $100 or you're really better off going w/ triscuit's suggestions (which are pretty solid)

Edit: nvm your board is not compatible with any Core 2 775 procs. Oh well.

And you never will!

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.



Again, why should I upgrade my processor? None of my issues deal with the processor on a functional level, as my complaints are with stability and not being able to do what I always did.

Although I appreciate the time you guys spent on answering, it's not providing me with the solution to my stated problems. Also, a RAM upgrade is in order because I have only a gig, and a graphics card update because my x700 lacks some features of newer cards (for example, pixel shader 3.0 is needed for DoW II). What does a newer processor get me?

Of all the possible parts of equipment to upgrade, a processor upgrade will yield the least, in terms of cost and ability gained from it. I'm perplexed, that out of all things, you guys are suggesting I change what is for all intents and purposes fine.

Why upgrade the processor?
Because a 2.8 P4 is crap.

Mainly because your processor will be incongruent with the rest of your upgrades and (I think this is why most people are mentioning it) in the case of the GPU, will bottleneck performance enough that the marginal performance gained would not be worth the price of the GPU.

Just shut up already. Christ, you update your rig and suddenly you develop a god complex. I still run a 2.66 P4 and this rig runs fine. Shut the **** up.

Lord Kuat: Your CPU is fine. Seeing that RAM has given you problems in the past, I think you should just get a new set of RAM stick, 2 gigs. See how that goes before figuring out what card you need (although I see you need shader 3).

When a P4 was new, 2 gigs of memory wasn't anything exotic.

Hard drive space is never a waste.

So that leaves the GPU. According to this:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/cpu-gpu-upgrade,1928-20.html

Their conclusion:





Your post is effectively completely wrong. Unless you can provide support for your suggestion, I'm going to just say that you, TE, et al have been nicely suckered by marketing, or at least epeen measuring. Keep in mind, I wanted to get a 4670, which was released September 2008 as a mid-low range card.

I apologize for the somewhat acerbic tone, but I do appreciate the response pommy.



"So, I currently have a 2000 Camry. Currently I was thinking about replacing the sound system because one of my speakers are busted"
"BUY A NEW FERRARI!"
"But my Camry does what I need it to do. Why should I..."
"CAMRYS SUCK!!!! GET A FERRARRI WITH GOLD RIMS! OR JUST BUY GOLD RIMS NOW AND THE FERRARI LATER"
"But..."
"I'M NOT COMPENSATING FOR ANYTHING, SHUTUP!"

God complex? My i5 is good and all, but a good P4 is fine if you stick to 2004 and before.
I am saying what I am, because if you go spending all this money on stuff now, that's that much less money you have to spend in the summer.
Save, it's what Massassi recommended I do in 2006, and it got me a hell of a system in the day.

My computer crashes and can't do what it used to do. I don't want an improvement, I just want to get back the functionality I had, plus maybe get some slight upgrades along the way that will improve my current experience. I don't need to save up for a system that does more than I need it to do.

A visual aid might help.



You're giving what the business consultant described. I just need the equivalent of a damn tire on a swing.

Not everyone needs to have a high end system. As Mentat noted, my requirements are very low.

I run stuff much newer than on a P4 with no problems whatsoever. :downs:

It's much easier to get a new tire and rope then keep duct-taping the thing back together.

I was basically refererring to just the GPU w/ regards to the bottlenecking, although with the other components what I was thinking was along the lines of "if you're going to spend $200 on components then spending a total of $200 on processor + other upgrades will bring you much more marginal performance than spending a total of $200 on upgrades without a processor".

Re: that Tom's article: that article basically says what I was trying to say; the paragraph you quoted says:

The thing is, a 2.6Ghz Core 2 (which is what was prevalent at the time of the article's writing in 2008) is multitudes faster than a 2.6Ghz Pentium 4. A Pentium 4 at 2.6Ghz is without a doubt "lower" than the 2.6-3Ghz range (for Core 2s) they specify and will definitely cause you to "lose considerable performance". I doubt anyone has done formal benchmarks of a modern video card using a P4 vs. a Core 2 at the same clock speed, but I can point you to some anecdotal evidence:

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/267578-33-4670-bottleneck

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/263039-28-will-pentium-00ghz-bottleneck-4850

http://www.overclockers.com/forums/showthread.php?t=615860

[Edit: I actually found an article that more or less examines CPU bottlenecking w/ the level of processor you have:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/agp-platform-analysis,1509.html

It's not directly applicable as they're testing cards way older and weaker than the 4670 you're looking at but it's the same idea (if anything, newer cards would show more extreme results)





Moreover, TF2 (and other Source games) in particular is very CPU-intensive as opposed to GPU-intensive when compared to other games.

This is not to say that upgrading your GPU (or other components) won't bring an improvement -- it will, but my point here (don't know about Tibby's and other's) was/is that if you're looking to get the highest money spent to performance improvement ratio, I'm of the opinion that your processor should be included in the upgrade. It would suck if you were to spend $70 on a video card and get $30's worth of performance (I did this years ago by buying a Radeon 9700 and pairing it with my Pentium III 800Mhz).

In other words, let's say you could spend $80 on just a GPU upgrade or $180 on a CPU + GPU upgrade. If you do the former, you might get, say, 80 "units" of performance improvement, which gives you a cost-to-improvement ratio of 1 dollar per unit. But if you do the latter, you might get 320 units of increased performance, which gives you a cost-to-improvement ratio of 1 dollar per ~1.8 units -- almost twice as good. (I am completely making up these numbers here and don't know exactly how much the difference will be -- I'm just using numbers to make it easier to understand what I'm saying).

Lord Kuat,

FYI - Today's Newegg Shell Shocker is an XFX 4670 1GB for $57 + tax, Free Shipping.

http://www.newegg.com/Special/ShellShocker.aspx

Thanks a lot man! Anyway, I was wrong in my reading of the article. However, one question I have is that don't programs have to be written to take advantage of multiple cores? In other words, say for like HL2, will it actually address both cores? As I just know crap all about the subject, I'm just going by what I read from various forums.



Fair enough, although I wonder if AGP vs PCI express would change that relationship in any way. (I use PCIex16)



Heh, them's numbers I can understand! I see where you are coming from now.



Thanks for the heads up.

No, applications do not have to be written to take advantage of multiple cores.

You'll always get some performance benefit simply because the operating system has more hardware to throw at a problem. Right now, assuming you have a fairly normal Windows configuration, you'll have something in the area of 750 threads spread over 40 processes. Much of the overhead from the operating system will be removed from your performance-intensive applications.

Games are uniquely able to take advantage of multiple cores due to driver optimizations, especially at the DirectX 10 and 11 level.

Wow, way to be dicks Kuat, Darkjedibob. I think Tibby was trying to say you're putting a wing on a geo metro, but haha let's kick the attention whore. He wasn't even trying to insult you people. You got offended because someone told you to upgrade your P4 like that's astonishing.

Thanks for the knowledge as always.




No, his first suggestion was that I put wings on a geo. He suggested to get a HD5770 card for my current system. Although I recognize the rational (as it would be hardware that would theoretically go to my new system), it was also poor in that by the time I actually build the new system (some time summer next year), the card that I would have bought would be cheaper/I'd have other alternatives.

Then going around saying something is crap without any basis on it is not going to be looked highly on when the crap does what I need it to do! The only reason I'm abrasive with him is because the tone of arrogance.