I'm going to upgrade my computer's hardware, and am wondering what parts are likely to have the biggest effect on performance. I have a CPU that identifies itself as "AMD Athlon(tm) XP 2000+"; although it's certainly an Athlon, it's actually clocked at 1.6Ghz. My graphics card is an AGP Geforce 6200 with 256MB VRAM. I have 1GiB of PC3200 DDR RAM. I have a choice between two mainboard/CPU bundles: one is a 4000 Athlon64 with AGP motherboard, and the other is a 3800 Athlon64 with PCI-E motherboard. The latter requires I also buy a new graphics card. I can afford that -- e.g. a Geforce 7300 is well within my price range -- but I'd rather save the money to spend on something else, if I can. So what I need to know is whether the graphics card I have -- the AGP Geforce 6200 -- is likely to be my system's bottleneck for playing fairly recent games. Here, "fairly recent" means games like SupCom, NWN2, Oblivion or C&C3. Do you know? Or, can you point me towards a good resource from which I could figure it out for myself?

Both your CPU and your graphics card are the bottleneck in your system, propably the CPU that is the bigger bottleneck.

The 7300 is basically a higher clocked 6200 and it is not going to play "fairly recent" games at any decent level. Here is a review I found for the 7300GS, the regular 7300 is lower clocked so performance will suffer in comparison. It is also comparing it to the 6200TC which uses system RAM instead of dedicated onboard memory so yours might actually be faster then the 6200 in the review if it has onboard RAM.

You should also check the socket of your combo options you may need to also get new RAM (I'm guessing they are AM2 so will need DDR2, AMD dropped the 939 socket).

The 3800 and 4000 would definately be an upgrade over your 2000+ but I would suggest that you save your money until you can get something a bit better than the 3800 or 4000. The PCI-Express path would also be better because AGP is pretty much dead but a low end processor and mobo probably won't provide much of an upgrade path...

also (unless you're an amd fanboi) if you're gonna change mobo processor and ram you might want to go with an intel platform as these days intel is the performance king pretty much all across the board

Quote: Original post by Nathan Baum
I have a CPU that identifies itself as "AMD Athlon(tm) XP 2000+"; although it's certainly an Athlon, it's actually clocked at 1.6Ghz.

thats just the annoyance of the old amd cpu ratings. they would call it a 2000+, meaning it was supposed to be as fast processing wise as a pentium 4 at 2,000 mhz while thwe amd is at 1.6 ghz... however the old athlon xp's never did this good and were slower than a p4.
however the athlon 64's achieved this quite well. my athlon 64 3200+ overclocked to 2.7 ghz out did my friends 3.6 ghz p4 by a lot.
from looking at your list i'd say its mainly your cpu, after that i'd look at your video. however you fail to mention if your ram is in dual channel and what its timings are set too.

edit: also keep in mind that while the 7300 may be a higher video card generation, it is not really that much faster than a 6600 and only marginally faster than a 6200. you cna get 7800's pretty cheap these days imo, i'd go for that if you are looking for an upgrade for your video card. however whatever you choose be sure to checkout benchmakrs for each card to see how it compares to your current one.

[Edited by - Jarrod1937 on July 22, 2007 1:20:09 PM]

At this point you are standing on the same side of a line as many of us. The side were on is for people that have more or less maxed out the XP generation of hardware. Almost everything has evolved into new types hardware that are incompatible with the old. Almost any worth while upgrade is going to require replacing the CPU, MoBo, Ram, and Graphics cards. In short buying or building an almost completely new system.

MoBos that support a better CPU generally force you into the new generation. Though some boards will let you skirt around one or two of these things but if you Can afford to upgrade properly then its probably best to do so. Buying an APG only board for example means your future options for graphics cards are limited. I don't think you NEED a new GC just yet but I will say your going to want the option to do so. It won't be long before you will be wanting a new one.

Quote: Original post by Jarrod1937

Quote: Original post by Nathan Baum
I have a CPU that identifies itself as "AMD Athlon(tm) XP 2000+"; although it's certainly an Athlon, it's actually clocked at 1.6Ghz.

thats just the annoyance of the old amd cpu ratings. they would call it a 2000+, meaning it was supposed to be as fast processing wise as a pentium 4 at 2,000 mhz while thwe amd is at 1.6 ghz... however the old athlon xp's never did this good and were slower than a p4.

That isn't quite correct the AMD XP performance ratings are relative to the old AMD Thunderbird core, not the Intel P4.

Quote: Original post by nts
The 7300 is basically a higher clocked 6200 and it is not going to play "fairly recent" games at any decent level. Here is a review I found for the 7300GS, the regular 7300 is lower clocked so performance will suffer in comparison. It is also comparing it to the 6200TC which uses system RAM instead of dedicated onboard memory so yours might actually be faster then the 6200 in the review if it has onboard RAM.

Ah. That's useful to know. I really wish companies could be honest about what they're selling.

Quote:
You should also check the socket of your combo options you may need to also get new RAM (I'm guessing they are AM2 so will need DDR2, AMD dropped the 939 socket).

Hmm. They're AM2, but the specs for both say DDR. The 3800 specs explicitly states 184-pin DDR.

Quote:
The 3800 and 4000 would definately be an upgrade over your 2000+ but I would suggest that you save your money until you can get something a bit better than the 3800 or 4000.

That could take some time. In simple terms, I'm poor, and affording bleeding edge hardware means saving up for a couple of years. Right now, I could afford a much better CPU, but not if I want a mobo to go with it. [smile]

Quote: Original post by ranakor
also (unless you're an amd fanboi) if you're gonna change mobo processor and ram you might want to go with an intel platform as these days intel is the performance king pretty much all across the board

It looks like high-end Intel CPUs out-perform high-end AMD CPUs, but I appear to get more FLOPs for my money from AMD. For what I can afford, AMD seems to be the best choice.

Quote: Original post by Goober King
MoBos that support a better CPU generally force you into the new generation. Though some boards will let you skirt around one or two of these things but if you Can afford to upgrade properly then its probably best to do so. Buying an AGP only board for example means your future options for graphics cards are limited. I don't think you NEED a new GC just yet but I will say your going to want the option to do so. It won't be long before you will be wanting a new one.

The thing here is I have to either buy PCI-E and a new graphics card now, or PCI-E and a new graphics card later (unless I wait long enough that I need PCI-F). The situation may be different in the states, but PCI-E still seems to be fairly new over here: new enough that it would probably be cheaper to upgrade later.

Right now, I don't think there's any point upgrading to PCI-E just to be future proof, although I'd be happy to do it if it also got me a short-term performance increase which I considered worth the additional expense.

I could, for example, narrowly afford the Athlon64 3800+ with a Geforce 8500 PCI-E, but I wouldn't want it yet unless my 6200 would be a significant bottleneck on an Athlon64 4000+ system. The 4000+ should be something like twice the speed of the 2000+, but if the 6200 limits me to a 5% increase in game performance whilst the 8500 gives me a 50% increase, say, I'd consider that a good reason to upgrade now.

[Edited by - Nathan Baum on July 22, 2007 3:29:14 PM]

Well if you plan on playing Oblivion at a decent framerate ~30fps you really have no choice and need to get at least a 7900GTX,8600 or 8800 or higher level card videocard to play that game.

You can check it out here for yourself here. A 7300 card just isn't gonna cut.
Oblivion is one of the new games like Stalker that actually makes use of your videocard so for that game cpu speed doesn't matter much.

"By testing the GeForce 7900 GS and 7900 GTX SLI cards with CPUs ranging from the Athlon 64 X2 3600+ all the way up to the Core 2 Extreme, we should get a better idea of which CPU’s perform best with a high-end graphics setup, as well as a more conventional mainstream graphics config. That’s the goal at least.

Quote: Original post by daviangel
Well if you plan on playing Oblivion at a decent framerate ~30fps you really have no choice and need to get at least a 7900GTX,8600 or 8800 or higher level card videocard to play that game.

You can check it out here for yourself here. A 7300 card just isn't gonna cut.
Oblivion is one of the new games like Stalker that actually makes use of your videocard so for that game cpu speed doesn't matter much.

"By testing the GeForce 7900 GS and 7900 GTX SLI cards with CPUs ranging from the Athlon 64 X2 3600+ all the way up to the Core 2 Extreme, we should get a better idea of which CPU’s perform best with a high-end graphics setup, as well as a more conventional mainstream graphics config. That’s the goal at least.

Well, the 8800 is way out of my price range.

Tom's Hardware's GPU comparison doesn't know the 8500 exists, but judging by the reviews, it looks like the 7600, which I can get at the same price, would have better gaming performance. Again I wish that Nvidia would be honest in their naming scheme.

What's your price range?