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Upgrades Technology

Value (Price/Quality) for Computer Upgrades? 60

Posted by Cliff from the hardware-hacker-resources dept.
Sierpinski asks: "I am currently researching a new video card, and seeing that PCI-Express has pretty much taken the industry by storm, I have not been able to find a relatively recent (late-model so to speak) AGP card. If I get a PCI-Express card, I'll need to upgrade my board. If I upgrade my board, I doubt my CPU (slot 462) will still be usable. As much as price is a factor, compatibility is as well. I've run into problems in the past where X memory wouldn't work in Y boards, etc. Does anyone have a spec list of the main components (board, CPU, memory, video card) that are recent (ie 6800GT PCI-Express), and work well together?"
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Value (Price/Quality) for Computer Upgrades? More

Value (Price/Quality) for Computer Upgrades?

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  • Computer upgrades are worthless (Score:4, Insightful)

    by the_unknown_soldier ( 675161 ) on Saturday January 07, 2006 @06:26AM (#14415995)
    Unless you want to add ram, or add another HDD the whole concept of PC upgrades is useless. Assuming that the technology hasn't moved on (pic-express was the example you gave but there is a new roadblock every year), you end up spending half the cost of your original pc, and end up with a whole lot of worthless components.

    Wait a couple of months till you have saved enough pennies. Get those pennies together and buy a whole new computer. Use the old one to download with bitt torrent, a server or as a fiddly linux box. Upgrades are pointless. Don't bother.

    • Upgrades should only be expansions (Score:4, Informative)

      by SmallFurryCreature ( 593017 ) on Saturday January 07, 2006 @06:48AM (#14416041) Journal
      The only exception could be the vid card wich is what the original question started with anyway.

      It is only because there is currently a shift going on from AGP to PCI-Express that he can't just buy the latest vid card and be happy.

      Upgrades you can do simply. Adding more HD space. Adding optional extras like a dedicated soundcard or adding a burner. These are expansions though not really upgrade as the original hardware will not change.

      Memory is trickier. If you got a free slot adding more is easy enough but I rarely found it economical to ditch the old memory and add new strips. ALWAYS get a new computer with all the memory in as few slots as possible. Memory upgrades make a big difference but are costly when you first go to throw memory away.

      CPU upgrade, well no. NEVER. Ever. Unless your really really thight and bought the cheapest CPU possible and can now get the most powerfull of the same make for a cheap price it just ain't worth it. Overclock the succer, save up and when it does a Itanium buy a whole new setup. Primary reason? You will often find that the most powerfull processor in your old hardware will be limited by the rest of the computer.

      As for wether you should move to PCI-Express. The same problem existed when we moved from regular PCI to AGP. I would just bite the bullet and get a new machine. Give the old one away or use it as a server (get to know linux?).

      Buying a top of the line new vid card with agp hardware is I think not worth it. Either just save up or learn to be happy with your current hardware. I always find that compromised upgrades tend to be more expensive because you need to do them far more often.

      Getting a spanking new machine could last you 2-3 years. That new agp vid card at most a year.

      • It is only because there is currently a shift going on from AGP to PCI-Express that he can't just buy the latest vid card and be happy.

        I think he just wants others to help him justify a new computer.

        Or he can't decide which of the 195 cards to buy... [newegg.com]

        (And that is just one vendor)

        Let's face it... If there was truly a need then the decision could be made quite logically... and easily.

        It is when desire is the main motivator (instead of need) that the decision gets "confusing" and "difficult".
      • It is only because there is currently a shift going on from AGP to PCI-Express that he can't just buy the latest vid card and be happy.

        There are always shifts in computer technology. Every computer ever built has become obsolete between the time it rolls off the assembly line and the time it arrives at the customer's doorstep. You'll never make an upgrade without compromise.

        My answer to the original poster is essentially this: If you buy an AGP card now, in two years you'll need an entirely new computer.
      • CPU upgrade, well no. NEVER. Ever. [...] Primary reason? You will often find that the most powerfull processor in your old hardware will be limited by the rest of the computer.

        That really depends on what processor you have, what motherboard you have, how much of a speed increase you can get, and what you use the computer for.

        For example, I recently upgraded the processor in one of my systems. (One I use for playing AVI/etc. onto my TV, and doing some video recording.) I had an old 1GHz Athlon chip in it, an
    • I disagree. Instead of buying a completely new system, I just give the existing one a series of upgrades. Not only is it cheaper, but you can sell those "worthless components" for a decent amount of money. It's surprising how many people buy old components.
      • I disagree. Instead of buying a completely new system, I just give the existing one a series of upgrades. Not only is it cheaper, but you can sell those "worthless components" for a decent amount of money. It's surprising how many people buy old components.

        Heh, I just bought a used Sun Netra t1 105 with 512MB RAM, 440 MHz UltraSparc IIi and 18GB SCSI disk for about 110 Euro. This machine has no plug for a keyboard, much less AGP ;-) Management is done by serial console, and you have full access to BIOS

  • Patience Grasshoppa (Score:4, Informative)

    by Jherek Carnelian ( 831679 ) on Saturday January 07, 2006 @06:28AM (#14416001)
    Here:

    ATI X1300 and X1600 [theinquirer.net]
    Nvidia 6800 [theinquirer.net]

    Just wait a few more weeks and they will be on the market.

  • Another problem (Score:3, Insightful)

    by vistic ( 556838 ) on Saturday January 07, 2006 @06:50AM (#14416045)
    If you do find a good AGP card, and decide to keep your current MB, RAM, and CPU for a little while longer... then your new AGP graphics card will only be good until you get rid of your current equipment, because your next MB will likely have PCI-express.

    Might as well stick with what you have now for as long as you can... and then upgrade your MB, CPU, RAM, and graphics card all at the same time when you can afford it. Then at least your new graphics card could theoretically last you through a few motherboard upgrades.
    • That only makes sense until you realize that most who want to upgrade video in the first place are gamers. As a gamer you upgrade video far more often than cpu/board.
      • > 'Effect' is used as a noun. 'Affect' is used as a verb.

        Mostly. But not always:

        effect (v) to accomplish or produce

        affect (n) the conscious subjective aspect of feeling or emotion
    • Or get a budget AGP video card for $50 USD to get the latest eye candy. I just replaced my GeForce 4 Ti 4200 128MB AGP card with an GeForce 6200 128MB AGP card. I can now play Doom 3/Quake 4/HL2 on high settings at 800x600, and older games (i.e., UT2004) run on high settings at 1024x768. My next system upgrade is probably a year away as I'm waiting for prices to drop on the 64-bit dual cores, but I can enjoy the latest eye candy until then.

  • here you go (Score:5, Informative)

    by Illissius ( 694708 ) on Saturday January 07, 2006 @10:14AM (#14416499)
    Here's where the 'sweet spots' in terms of performance/price are, in my opinion; choose depending on your budget. (Of course, if your goal is to waste money, there's plenty of components available at or near $1000 prices, as well, but they don't provide much more than a 20% or so performance increase over the $200-300 options.)


    Processor:
    Athlon 64 3200+ [newegg.com] ($160)
    A 2GHz Athlon 64 with 512K cache. As is widely known, these beat the pants off of Pentium 4s.

    Athlon 64 X2 3800+ [newegg.com] ($320)
    Two 2GHz Athlon 64s with 512K cache (dual core).



    Motherboard:
    Abit KN8 SLI [newegg.com] ($110)
    SLI doesn't carry much of a price premium any more these days, so it can't hurt to have the extra upgrade capability. Other brands like DFI, Asus, MSI, EPoX, are fine as well.



    Memory:
    2x 512MB Crucial PC-3200 [newegg.com] ($95)
    2x 1GB Crucial PC-3200 [newegg.com] ($170)
    Two is so you can run them in dual channel mode. Other good brands include Corsair, Kingston, Mushkin, OCZ.


    Video card:
    GeForce 6600GT 128MB [newegg.com] ($125)
    8 pixel pipelines at 500MHz = 4 Gigasomethings

    GeForce 6800GS 256MB [newegg.com] ($190)
    12 pipelines at 425MHz = 5.1 Gigasomethings. This also has double the memory and memory bandwidth of a 6600GT, so it'll handle higher resolutions and antialiasing levels much better.

    GeForce 7800GT 256MB [newegg.com] ($270)
    20 pipelines at 400MHz = 8 Gigasomethings. This is almost exactly double a 6600GT in many respects (double the pixel pushing power, memory, and memory bandwidth).


    If you want to find things out for yourself, I recommend browsing around at The Tech Report [techreport.com] and AnandTech [anandtech.com]; I've found these two to consistently have the highest quality reviews and comparisons out there. Their system guides don't completely suck, either. (Neither do Ars Technica's [arstechnica.com], but they don't do hardware reviews).

    • forgot to say (Score:3, Informative)

      by Illissius ( 694708 )
      AMD will be migrating to DDR2 and a new socket in a few months, which means if you want to upgrade after that, you'll have to switch CPU, motherboard, and memory, again (not the video card, though -- PCI-E will hopefully be around for a while yet). And then in late summer / early fall, Intel is coming out with their new architecture, which I expect to solidly beat AMD's Athlon 64s in many respects.
      But then, there's always something just around the corner, so I'm not sure whether waiting is such a good idea

      • Biggest roadblock is probably PCI-X (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Andy Dodd ( 701 ) <atd7NO@SPAMcornell.edu> on Saturday January 07, 2006 @10:56AM (#14416645) Homepage
        The part of a machine that gets upgraded/replaced most often these days is the video card, since new generations are released an average of every 6 months, and unlike with most other improvements in PC capabilities (especially CPU), the applications take advantage of the new features and capabilities almost immediately. (Many games nowadays are released with graphics quality options that will make the game unacceptably slow on any current hardware, in order to allow the game to "grow" with new graphics cards that make those quality options not kill performance. One example is Doom 3's highest texture quality, which required a 512M video card - almost none existed at Doom 3's release, and very few exist even now. A few years from now 512 will probably become the norm.)

        As a result, even if AMD changes socket types soon, it doesn't matter that much since the CPU is likely the last thing the OP will want to upgrade in the new system he buys. I don't think I've ever upgraded a CPU without getting a new motherboard, and I go MUCH longer between CPU upgrades than video card upgrades.

        As to reccomendations - I think the original article poster is probably being paranoid about compatibility problems. As long as you stick with reputable motherboard and memory vendors, such problems are rare. I can only think of one such problem with one model of motherboard and a particular memory configuration, I don't even remember WHICH mobo that was though. (It was an older Athlon XP AGP board though.) Go to NewEgg, browse around, and read the customer reviews. :)

        As to video card, I'd personally stick with NVidia rather than ATI. Even when ATI was well ahead of NV in performance, their drivers were so shoddy (especially in Linux, but their Windows drivers are horrifically inconsistent too) that buying ATI was like putting a V8 into a Yugo - wicked fast until you crash and burn. The one place I still hear compatibility horror stories is with ATI drivers - Game X works with ATI drivers older than version A, while Game Y requires drivers newer than version B which is higher than A. (Hasn't ATI ever heard of regression testing?) As a result I know multiple people who had to switch driver versions on a regular basis depending on which game they were playing. I've NEVER had to revert to older drivers to make anything work with an NVidia board.
        • Just to back this up, I have had wicked problems playing World of Warcraft with my ATI Radeon 9700 Pro. It mostly worked, despite near-constant graphical glitches, but every now and then my video card would simply freak out to the point that nothing on the screen was intelligible and I was forced to reboot. I would try every single driver upgrade; some made the problem better, some worse. It seemed fairly random, and only ever affected World of Warcraft.

          I just bought a new machine with a GeForce 6800 Ult
          • Strangely enough, I've seen plenty of problem with nVidia cards (particularly with World of Warcraft), but I've had no problems with ATI cards. I tend to play very mainstream games, though (the sort that probably get thorough testing from both nVidia and ATI).

            Plus, ATI is pretty free about basic card specs so that anybody can make a driver (though they're not so open about the latest 3d features), while nVidia just releases closed-source binary drivers. So, anyone running a non-mainstream OS (or even obsc
            • nVidia seems to support those obscure/non-mainstream OS/distros pretty well. They have drivers designed for solaris(x86), FreeBSD, and the linux one works fine for me on Arch Linux. Just seems you'll have problems with a non x86 computer.

          • I bought one of the 9700 Pros a few years back, and was very disappointed. It turned out that there was a compatibility problem with my motherboard, which meant the power supply wasn't in spec somewhere and led to all sorts of instability.

            To their credit, Crucial honoured their motherboard compatibility guarantee even though it was something like 7-8 months after I bought the card that the incompatibility became widely known. They let me trade the card up to a new 9800 Pro, which has a much better auxilia

        • I've never used ATi cards, but have used nVidia cards for the last five years.

          The only times when I run into problems with the drivers is if I try to use an old card with a new driver. nVidia has documentation listing which driver supports which cards, but it is simply not accurate, and you have to keep trying until you find an even older driver that does work.

          I don't get why they just don't keep support for older cards in the driver, and I see this issue as another reason why an open source driver would be
        • The part of a machine that gets upgraded/replaced most often these days is the video card

          I highly doubt this. The vast majority of machines out there aren't used for intensive gaming, and outside of that and a few graphics/engineering niches there hasn't been much of a reason to upgrade a video card in years.

          I'm still using the same video card I've had for 6 years (largely because it has all the tv capture/out features I need and okay 3d performance but is completely fanless and silent).
        • Can't say I've ever had that problem with ATI's drivers on my machine. That sounds to me (because of my experiences and those of all the people I talk to) more like a story that gets passed around more for the shock value, rather than the truth value. Things just improve all around the board with new releases, especially 5.13 - I suspect it's an incompatibility between the ATI card and the bargain bin refurbished factory seconds that a lot of people put into their computers because they can save five dollar
          • ATI has a well deserved reputation for shipping bad drivers and related software (control panel, etc). It is a common theme in old Anandtech.com and Tomshardware.com articles. It had been a problem for ATI since the early windows 3.0 days. The Radeon 9700 was a real shocker: not only was ATI faster then Nvidia, but the drivers didn't suck.
            • Having recently installed the drivers for an ATI card (X700 Pro) I can say they suck. Again.

              The only good news is I received a phonecall tonight informing me the problems went away after some unknown program reported it would delete some files.

              The unknown program is part of the Catalyst stuff (based on research I've done.).

              ATI needs to get their act together on their drivers. They can be exceedling difficult to install, even for experienced users; and their quality is questionable at best.
        • Haven't we gone over this enough times already, fellow nerds?! Jeebus! It's like listening to a person working at Best Buy recommending something to a customer. :(

      • Re:forgot to say (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Jeff DeMaagd ( 2015 )
        AMD will be migrating to DDR2 and a new socket in a few months, which means if you want to upgrade after that, you'll have to switch CPU, motherboard, and memory, again (not the video card, though -- PCI-E will hopefully be around for a while yet).

        It is this sort of thing that makes it hard to justify major upgrades. I've never replaced the motherboard without having to replace the memory, CPU, hard drive and video card in order to get an acceptable performing upgrade. Any motherboard upgrade I did witho
        • I really don't understand why the graphics makers were so quick to dump AGP, they didn't drop PCI this quickly that I remember.

          In the last 15 years, graphics cards have moved through ISA, EISA, VESA, PCI, AGP, and PCIe. AGP actually lasted a comparatively long time. Memory has changed just as often, and generation-old memory usually costs three or four times as much as new. A new CPU slot seems to come out every six months; there are a half dozen CPU slots in widespread use right now.

          Hell, even power sup
          • It's not right to say that AGP lasted a long time because, if you remember, there were backward-incompatible changes in the specification as the clock multiplier increased from 1x,2x up to 4x and then 8x, with the voltage decreasing from 5V to 3V to 1.5V. You can't run a recent AGP card in an older AGP slot, and this meant for a lot of people that upgrading their CPU not only meant upgrading their motherboard as well (and very likely the memory too) but also forced them to upgrade their video card at the sa
          • What no love for the MCA bus?
        • I really don't understand why the graphics makers were so quick to dump AGP, they didn't drop PCI this quickly that I remember.

          AGP is a hack specific to graphics cards, whereas PCI and PCI-E are general expansion buses. You can only have one AGP card in a machine, but several PCI-E cards. It's good to see AGP go.

    • Jeez, that reads like a NewEgg commercial. The only company I've ever been forced to do a chargeback on because they wouldn't stand behind their product. The VISA rep said it was the most bizarre response they have received from any merchant, and reversed the charges.
      • I have to link somewhere, and from what I can tell, NewEgg is by far the most popular in those parts. Their site is pretty easy to use, too, which is a plus.
        Not that I've ever ordered from them myself, living on a different continent as I do.
  • XFX GeForce 6600GT AGP. Got it for 2004's Christmas. It was a PCI-E card but they made a version which was AGP which I really like. It's a nice card, of course now its a year old, but if you look into it, there are PCI-E cards with AGP versions, they just may be a bit harder to dig up.
    • I have the same card. No problems. I bought it because it has dual DVI outputs. Eventually I'll get another Dell 2005FPW so I can make use of that functionality ;-)

      When I had time for it, I played HL2 at 1680x1050 with no problems.

  • Ars Technica (Score:2, Informative)

    by Ropati ( 111673 )
    It has been a while since I used their advise, but I have always found it appropriate. If you want specs for computers, check out the Ars Technica System Guide

    http://arstechnica.com/guides/buyer/system-guide-2 00511.ars [arstechnica.com]

    They have everything you need to know, current and accurate.

  • I'm very comfortable spec'ing the rest of a system, but I can't seem to keep up with the video market - maybe because I'm not a gamer. The last system I built I bought a $50 Nvidia card in the hopes that it would be better/faster than the cheap on-board video I've used before. I could not get the Nvidia drivers to work right in FC3 or FC4, despite reading howtos and forum postings for hours. Finally, I decided I would just use it in the regular mode that FC4 had built in drivers for. Needless to say, I see
    • You had problems because you bought the $50 price point. Those cards are usually based on years-old designs, are not tested with the latest drivers and games, and may not be any better than the onboard graphics solution. You would have had a lot better luck at the $100 to $150 point which typically uses current or just-previous designs, complete with up to date driver support that is tested to work with current games. Doing a little research and reading the hardware requirements for a game is well worth
      • You would have had a lot better luck at the $100 to $150 point which typically uses current or just-previous designs, complete with up to date driver support that is tested to work with current games.

        He was talking about linux, mr. sooper genious.
        • The point is still valid, even for non-gamers. The fact is that driver development focuses on newer hardware, and the $50 price point is "low end" regardless of whether you're a gamer or not.

          As for Linux, what's so unusual about getting a decent video card for linux? Many distributions offer accelerated drivers that take advantage of newer video chips, and buying a better video card can also get you an overall better image even in regular 2D and text useage. My 6800GT looks pretty good in Linux, gives me
          • No, you mentioned gaming because you didn't bother to read the guy's post.

            You like to write, you don't like to read.

            I'm not even sure how to respond to your "newer hardware has better drivers" confusion. First, that's usually just wrong. Second, he was complaining that no version of fedora core has any support for any version of any nVidia card. Buying a more expensive nVidia card doesn't change that situation in any way.
            • Mr insult man,

              Nvidia is an EXAMPLE. If you had the reading comprehension of a snail, you'd see the point I was making is that it's important to do the research BEFORE buying. Duh. The thread parent specifically mentioned that he knew nothing about video cards, he bought a $50 "upgrade", and then it wouldn't do what he wanted it to do.

              Well no shit. Buying random crap and putting it into your computer, then blaming the manufacturer because you didn't read the specs and match it to the hardware compatabili
      • You missed the point. I'm not a gamer. I just wanted a card that would make mozilla on X run faster than the on board video options. Obviously, I wasted my money because I didn't get any better performance with the Nvidia card because I couldn't get the colosed source driver to load on my system. I blame Nvidia and the lesson I learned is to never buy hardware on the promise that a closed source Linux driver will actually work. Since I'm not using it for high performance games, I don't consider $50 to be c

  • Never fear! (Score:2, Informative)

    by Neillparatzo ( 530968 )
    AGP isn't dead yet!

    The Geforce 6800GS is available in AGP [evga.com].

  • The last good AGP cards are the Nvidia 6800 series and some ATI X800 cards. You should be able to find one for around $200 (6800GS or 6800GT) that will run games just fine for another couple of years. If you need more performance though, you're pretty much stuck getting a complete new system.

    Now is actually not a bad time to get a new system, especially if you go with an AMD cpu. Every component is at a "mature" point in their lifecycle and that means you're not paying for bleeding edge tech, and you hav
  • For older boards which might be a PIII or Athlon, just adding cheap ram would give you the most performance boost. For PIII and earlier boards, getting video cards is also cheap enough (AGP 4x or 2x), but look for used stuff there. Any old machine I have I try to max out the RAM. Dont invest more than that.

    Drives are a seperate entity. You can add a 300GB SATA disk with a SATA IO card to a PIII type system with no problems, and take that disk into a future machine too. So thats a safe investment. So are DVD
  • Well, memory and harddrive upgrades are generally the most valuable to me. AMD is about to introduce their new socket, M2, which will also be their first DDR2-based platform. So you can either go for an Intel DDR2-based sytem now, or (much smarter) wait a few months for an AMD DDR2-based system. Then you'll have a very long-lived platform.

    Some words about longevity - the two parts of a system I recommend NOT skimping on are the power supply and the memory. Get the best of each you can. 'Best' in terms of po

  • Macs (Score:2)

    by CMiYC ( 6473 )
    Good thing you didn't buy one of those Macs which aren't upgradable!

    I heard if you want a faster CPU, you have to buy a new board, memory, video card/chip, and maybe even hard drives!

    Just imagine, if you wanted to upgrade your video card! You'd have to get a new board, memory, video card/chip, and maybe even hard drives.

    Oh wait. That's the problem you're having.

    My favorite argument about Macs (especially iMac styles) are that they are not upgradable. Upgradability is a myth.

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