4850

[DAve]

Jo's now got a new Asus 4850 in her machine (complete with new motherboard and Antec P900 case. It's looking pretty shiny at the moment, but it's got me coming out in a severe case of upgrade envy. Especially as I helped her build it.

The new 4870 cards look prety sweet, and it would be a fair bit better than the 6800LE that's in the machine at the moment. I just can't bear being 4 generations behind. 4! That does involve getting a new mobo. Specs so far are:

# Gigabyte GA-P31-DS3L £50
~# core 2 duo (E8400) £114
~# core 2 quad (Q6600 G0 SLACR) £125
# 4850 £130
# 4870 £190
~# GPU cooler (Zalman VF900-CU) £20
# DDR2 Ram 4 gig £50

I can use the rest of the system, I might have to upgrade the PSU but I've forgotten what I put in the last time. Should be OK, provided I don't clock the nuts off the Quad.

So, range is £364-£435. Ouch. I might have to wait till the end of the month for this one. :(

Anybody want to make suggestions? I'm not too bothered about the components, but I do like the new ATI cards. I'm not massively in to overclocking at the moment, and do like a quiet PC (which is why I'm leaning towards the duo instead of the quad). I'm not too bothered about which mobo I get either.

[DAve]

Damnit, the NVidia 260 (http://www.overclockers.co.uk/productlist.php?&groupid=701&catid=56&subid=1176&sortby=priceAsc) cards are now looking surprisingly affordable at just over £200.

[To0]

no, don't get that quad, it is (compareably) slower than the E8400 at 90% of most tasks. Go for the newer quads if you need quad or steer clear and get a fast dual. No idea where you think you are going to get 4gb ddr2 for £50, try £80 to be on the safe side. no to the mobo, get a newer chipset, my mobo is a gigbyte with nvidia 630i and costs the same but will pump that one in every regard, also has inbuilt HDMI if you decide to shift to a new pute you can happily use it as a blu ray player.
4870 = yes

Avoid the zalman cooler, I think you have a big enough case for this (http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HS-048-TR&groupid=701&catid=57&subcat=821&name=Thermalright%20IFX-14%20CPU%20Cooler%20(Socket%20AM2/LGA775) or this (http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HS-027-TR&groupid=701&catid=57&subcat=821&name=Thermalright%20Ultra-120A%20CPU%20Cooler%20(Socket%20AM2/LGA775))

you should know that there is no difference in noise from a quad and duo 99% of the time. Things have come a LONG way since the P4 prescot days.

Yes you will want a new PSU, might I reccomend a new 82%+ (http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=CA-036-EN&groupid=701&catid=123&subcat=1086&name=Enermax%20Pro%2082+%20625W%20EPR625AWT%20ATX2 .3%20Silent%20PSU) from enermax?

I think quad + 4870 will be 500W min, that's 500 real W not fake, no brand, split the power across the 12v lines so doesn't work anyway power.

All in I think you are looking at the cool end of £500.

Just totaled up the build at ocuk and indeed it comes in at £500 inc PSU, my mobo, duo, 4gb G.skill (cas 4 @ same price as Geil et al cas 5!), Scythe Zipang cooler and Noctua northbridge cooler (a must for this mobo IMHO.

[DAve]

thanks for that.

The memory was just a quick scan of the scan.co.uk website. I'll have to search around for 1333 speed memory, which is significantly more expensive than I had thought. Same with the PSU, I'll have to check carefully if it's going to make the grade.

THere's a comparison of the 4870 and the 260 on web (http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/radeon-hd-4870,review-31046.html) for everyone else. Looks like the 4870 will win out for me, the frame rates are really similar, as are the prices. The noise of the 4870 is far, far less.

speaking of, £50 for a CPU cooler? WTF? I've really not upgraded recently, have I?

[Fyndir]

DAve's last update was to a 1GHZ processor, which cost him £800 and was cutting edge.

[To0]

I'm not convinced that getting 1333 is worth the additional cost. cas 4 800 is for most applications more than enough. granted if you were to go for an extreme edition I'd argue that you might as well burn all your money and gor for some top flight DDR3 but for the rest of us the 1-2% performance hit is acceptable.

[DAve]

DAve's last update was to a 1GHZ processor, which cost him £800 and was cutting edge.

I had a friend that built a dual processor celeron (2*330MHz) and overclocked it to 1.1GHz. That was back in the late 1990's (and I was still in high-shcool) when it was actually illegal to export machines over 1GHz out of the country because it was deemed a supercomputer.

That was back when overclocking was done by men with jumpers. Not the atricle of clothing, the fiddly little metal switch on the motherboard. We cut ourselves and bled for the cause. Not this easy big red button labeled "overclock" that's on pretty much everything nowadays. ;)

Ah, those were't days.

[YcMing]

I had a friend that built a dual processor celeron (2*330MHz) and overclocked it to 1.1GHz. That was back in the late 1990's (and I was still in high-shcool) when it was actually illegal to export machines over 1GHz out of the country because it was deemed a supercomputer.

That was back when overclocking was done by men with jumpers. Not the atricle of clothing, the fiddly little metal switch on the motherboard. We cut ourselves and bled for the cause. Not this easy big red button labeled "overclock" that's on pretty much everything nowadays. ;)

Ah, those were't days.

HARDCORE¬¬¬!!

Respect

Ming

[To0]

I find that suspect DAve, the very first celeron, was available in 1998 in April, chances of a UK retail channel having one before you finished high school in the summer of '98 (you were born in 1980 right?) are pretty slim. Anyhoo, I remember by Celeron (model A with the L2 cache) clocking from 333 to 550, beating P3s @ 450, I still have the chip! Getting it to 1.1 would have required a special MOBO for most folk as the FSB was limited to 66/100 and if your were lucky 133 and multiples of .5 from 3 to about 6, until late '99 when retail 1ghz chips were available and multipliers went all the way to 12 or even 13. Your friend must have had contacts on the inside...

And that was actually after the days of jumper overclocking as I think ASUS has had already started letting you set FSB and multiplier in the bios, granted most were still jumpers but essentially the Pentium was the beginning of the end for jumpers. It was definately still the era of bleeding, I remember that every case up to my antec was considered a virgin till I'd drawn blood on it. And indeed I was shocked to find that on my current MOBO there is indeed an "overclock" setting that is about 2-3% slower than than I can get when playing with all the features. How times change... let the 16core, quad GPU times roll!

Additional reading confirms that the first SMP celeron was not available till '99.