7800 GT OC mated with Sempron 3200+

I'm thinking this will be way unbalanced and all but that I could swap the card out to better hardware at anytime. Does anyone have a setup similar to this, i.e. budget processor with crazy gfx card? How does it perform? It looks like a local store will have the 7800 GT OC's on sale for $80 off this weekend ... all I need is a better power supply!

semperon 3200+ isn't that slow. Will walk all over your other system with the ATI 9600 I think it was.

Hehe ... I hope so. I'm a bit skeptical but if the Sempron is pretty fast (which it seems to be with Blitz anyway) than I should get a pretty kick butt gaming computer out of it. I might have to make it my main machine! The 7800 GT OC's are on sale for only $319 ... I was going to get an X700 Pro but ... it seems that the difference in performance is somewhat astronomical ... and with with the 7800's on sale it'd be silly to buy the older card ... or any other card really. It apparently looks to be nearly 2X as fast as a 6800 GT and Gamespot was able to overclock the BFG version to 499 MHz and 1.2 MHz for Memory which also blew away the 7800 GTX.

if you're at all worried about the disparity between your CPU and gfx card, you might be interested to know that your Sempron will overclock very nicely (get a Zalman cooler though, if you are still on stock cooling).

3D/game use rarely has drawbacks if you have "too" poweful 3D-card vs. CPU. On the other hand, fast CPU + slow 3D-card will cause very uncomfortable "gaming experience". And it's easy to move the card to your next PC, but moving CPUs is close to impossible because MoBos might be incompatible and there's the hassle with thermal paste etc.

So: BUY the überfast 3D-card even if you have something like a celeron, you'll be glad that you did. And at that price, can you buy one for me too? :)

I'd like two please.

I'd like a GTX 512MiB that didn't take up 2 slots, but I'm not going to get one ;)

TBH, I'd gladly swap my GTX for an Xbox 360 and go back to my 5900XT.

I just upgraded to a 7800GT and very nice it is. Had some hassle with the pcie motherboard, i didnt know they used new power connectors.

Do you have to buy them separately?

OK, got the 7800 GT OC and a 500W power supply for $340 combined. Can't wait to see what it can do!

cool :) you should look for some games to try that make good use of it. Splinter Cell 3, and Far Cry both have pixel shader 3 HDR support which is pretty cool. other than that I can't think of much that would tax your card.

So far I have gotten almost every game to run at 1024x768 pretty much maxed out minus the highest res textures with AA on.

Thats with a budget 6600GT and your cars is supposed to be up to 3X faster at higher resolutuions. My monitor doesn't go past 1280x1024 at higher than 75hz refresh though. But you should be able to play most of the latest games at 1600x1200 without much trouble

I'm going to also check out that Lost Coast level of Half-Life 2. Mostly I'll be happy to have two machines on my LAN capable of playing the latest PC games (though the Radeon 9600XT is getting a bit long in the tooth). Should be some fun multiplayer matchups ... of course the new machine with the new card will probably blow away this one but then again ... that person has to sit on the floor ;) Splinter Cell 3 probably would be great ... I can probably get a decent deal on that now ... oh and with Xbox 360 pads that's got to be good. I'd imagine it'd be every bit as good or better than an Xbox 360 port of the same game.

*mumbles*

I spent a bomb on a 6800 one year ago, only for the price to drop to LESS than half, when the 7800 was released.

What else sucks- I can't upgrade to the 7800 because it wont fit AGP.

*shrug*

Systems showing signs of Hard drive failure again- I always forget the beggars can get hot and die because of that.

Then, i'll be grabbing a system similar to the one you mentioned, or perhaps better. Certainly isnt much wrong with the Sempron 3200.

Take a look at the Intel Celeron when compared to the XP2600. a 2.8 celeron falls BELOW the performance of the XP2600 @ 1.8. IIRC, the sempron isnt that much slower than the full on Athlon, probrably the equivalent of a couple hundred MHZ. The difference seems to be the Cache although i dont have a datasheet in front of me at the moment.

I will take a look on the database at work tomorow. Some fantastic stuff on there :)

Call of Duty 2 looks stunning on 7800gt.

What resolution have you got it on, and how many fps is it producing?

When I can play everything at 1920x1200 I'll be happy.

Not that I've actually got a widescreen monitor yet, but I can dream ;)

OMG ... this thing RULES!

This is the first time I've gotten a top of the line card since the Voodoo 2 & 3 and I'm blown away. I was skeptical that the Sempron would hold it back ... and in some instances I can tell that the computer is (maybe the RAM mostly, got to upgrade that) but man this thing is smokin'!

Doom 3 really looks a lot better with the high res textures, 4X AA, 16X AF, and 1024 X 768 res. I only have a 15 inch monitor so I think it's restricting things a bit on the res side.

I can see what a lot of people were talking about with the game being all black though ... finally. It depends a lot on the monitor ... but my other machine was plenty light to enjoy Doom 3. This new machine was soooo dark ... I needed the gamma up to 1.2 or 1.3 in the config file just to get close to my other machine.

Finally, now I have two great machines for testing my big project ;)

Oh ... the other thing ... the card weighs like 5 lbs .... well probably not that much but it's a heavy SOB ... couldn't believe it.

I don't know but my neighbour just got a Athlon64 1gb of DDR2 ram and a 7800GT last week and can play Doom3 at 2048x1536 32bit no AA at FPS in the high 50's.

Just did a Fraps test on Oust (Our Torque Project, formerly King of the Mountain).

http://www.garagegames.com/blogs/5605/8914

Running the game @ 1024 X 768 X 32, 4X AA, 16X AF

Nvidia 7800GT OC 256 MB / Sempron 3200+ / 256 MB System RAM

75 - 85 FPS

ATI 9600 XT 128 MB / Athlon 64 2800+ / 512 MB System RAM

20 - 25 (sometimes) FPS, With AA and AF turned off it runs a fairly constant 30 FPS ... mostly 10 fps faster than with them on.

The only time the Athlon 64 processor seems much faster is running typical computer stuff ... The Sempron though seems to be faster at gaming. Of course the video card made the difference in Oust ... with the ATI Xpress 200 integrated chipset it ran and about 5 - 10 FPS. However, with my shooter ... the Sempron was faster even with the integrated chipset.

Anyway, that about says it all. The Sempron's not bad!

Got to get some Doom 3 benchmarks ;)

Really need more RAM for Doom ... didn't realize the min req. is 384 ... with only 256 my system is caching a lot.

wow!!! yeah, 512 is a minimum for games really, so thats going to really kill your performance.

If you can I'd recommend 1GB of ram, I noticed that helped a lot on my system too.

Patriot do good cheap ram if your on a budget.

I'm not sure how many FPS my 6600GT got in Oust I'll have to go see. I set fraps to capture at 25FPS and it slowed the game down to that when I made the video.


Oust would be a lot better if there was some culling or occlusion going on as currently it doesn't even have frustrum culling in our B3D loader. Looking forward to having that so we can add some more details.

Socket A or 754 sempron Jeremy?

754's generally preform better (800mhz fsb)
but Socket A's Arent all bad either.

I have a 3100 754 sempron and a 3200 A64 with the same 6800gt card they are generally within a few frames of each other.
I guess all that will change with a 64 bit OS, but a 3200 probbaly wont be up to the Task anyways.

Yeah ya need more Ram, but Rams pretty cheap these days...(Old man moment)...I remember paying 240$ for a 128k upgrade for my 8088...lol

Zmatrix

I get between 82 and 154FPS in oust single player depending where in the level I am.

With my card AGP memory set to 128 doubled the speed of my vid card. but I'm not sure that works with the new pci-e cards.

Also worth getting the latest drivers if you havent already. and I think that OPCODE which we used for collisions is quite a ram hog. I know that the 7800GT is a lot faster than the 6600GT so there are definately some bottlenecks somewhere on yours Jeremy.

That could be the processor ... or the 4X AA and 16X AF (not sure if you have those set).

It was in multiplayer with the Tower level. I was testing them against each other to see who'd have the greatest advantage ... I figure the guy who has to sit on the floor has enough of a disadvanage physically to warrant the faster machine ;)

ah ok, I don't normaly have AA on and leave the AF on auto. with those settings at 1024x768 I get about 10FPS less than yours..

One thing I noticed with this card and some games is that it can actualy run faster at higher resolutions. Not the case in oust, but X3:reunion runs better at 1024x768 than 800x600 and almost as well at 1280x1024 which surprised me as thats a pretty graphics intensive Elite style game.



YOu have to have a lot of patience to play that game though :)

Far as i know, he wants an fx7800, which was never released for VGA. That'd make Socket A out of the question since i don't tink they made any Socket A's with PCI-E Sockets ;) Either way, he got it now :P

Alright now I have 1GB of DDR 400 memory in the new system and I moved the 256 into my other system which had a 512 already so I've got 768 in that one. WOW ... crazy improvment. I can finally run Doom 3 on Ultra Quality with no slow down or pauses whatsoever! Amazing!

So this is what it's like to really play PC games. Two decent spec systems on an LAN ... so much fun. However, it takes a bit of work. In order to play my games LAN style I had to setup a lot of stuff (Gamedrive is a great program that came with the gfx card for this). Took a few hours of doing to get everything working right ... which just makes the gaming experience that much more rewarding. I'm not sure if it's a better experience than Xbox 360 ... but it does seem sweeter because I had to work for it.

Man, on my older system ... I never knew about increasing the AGP aperture ... or switchin to 4X/8X ... Auto etc... I just cranked it up to a 256 MB aperture along with 4X/8X settings and now I can play Battlefield 2 quite well ... it made a huge difference. Before it was really twitchy and I had to use low res textures.

gimme an aquamark rating... I'm curious as to what the 7800gt does on that...

Going to give it a try.

This was AquaMark 3 ... not sure if that's the correct one.

Triangles/Sec. :
18,712,762

Frames/Sec. :
62.16

GFX:
9,747 (got a 9,753 when it ran again but the CPU scored lower)

CPU:
8,581

Total:
62,162

Man, my other system stinks!

Triangles/Sec. :
5,494,473

Frames/Sec. :
18.25

GFX:
2,334

CPU:
4,176

Total:
18,252

The Sempron 3200+ beats the pants of my Athlon 64 2800+ ... 2X the speed! People in the stores kept downplaying the Sempron ... but I could tell even just with Blitz ... and pretty much any other game that it's a lot faster!

hmm, I just tried on mine and got:

Tri/sec:
15,455,127

FPS:
51.44

GFX:
7,455

CPU:
8293

Total:
51,435

(would be interesting to see which benchmark systems really tax newer cards and CPU's)

Wonder what my old computer is like lol.

MAn, you need to get a new monitor. Was checking out benchmarks and at lower res like 1024x768 you don't get such a performance gain with your 7800gt 30%extra at best over my 6600GT.

But if you jump to 1600x1200 its almost 100% faster or 2x.

Here's where I was looking at a review with comparrisons.

http://www.pcstats.com/ArtVNL.cfm?articleid=1890&page=1

Yeah, I do need a new monitor that I can up up at those higher resolutions. None of my monitors go very high. Do I need like a 19" or something ... or can I get a small one that is still capable of running high res?

Hmmm... it seems that the Sempron was even a touch faster than the Athlong 64 3200+ ... I read some tests that said the number cannot be compared across processor types but it seems that a 3200+ in this case is about the same. Even a bit quicker in this test.

I'm really bummed about this 2800+ processor now ... do you think that my graphics card could be slowing it down ... or is the 2800+ really just 1/2 the speed of a 3200+?

yeah a lot depends on how well optimized the engine is for the CPU. athlon64's can be a bit hit and miss. I'm doing a test to see what my system I was using 6 months ago was like lol.

It may be your ram and video card combined in the old computer. Not sure really but it definately shouldn't be that much slower without a bottleneck someplace else.

With ram, your ram is going to run at the speed of the slowest you have installed. So if one of the sticks you have in there is very ancient it may really cripple it.

I'd definately get a larget monitor. I think you said you currently have a 15". I havent seen a 15" monitor since 1997

just tried my old puter: athlon1200, 64mb Geforce3


Tri/sec:
3,570,286

FPS:
10.71

GFX:
1,296

CPU:
3,092

Total:
10,714

I get about 500% speed increase over my old puter if you compare average FPS. Not bad :)

Wow, that's a big difference. Obviously, I'm doing something wrong. Your Athlon 1.2 GHZ is almost as fast as my Athlon 64 2800+ ... which is running at 1.8GHz stock. When I bought this motherboard I left all the settings on 'Auto' for the RAM etc... I have DDR 400 3200 RAM so that's the fastest there is right? In the Bios the fastest I can set the RAM is 200 MHz it looks like. I'll go try.

Ack ... I had to reset the CMOS ... it didn't like me messing with the RAM. Had to leave it on Auto. I think I'll go pick up a new CPU and GFX card for this machine too. The Athlon 64+ was the cheapest I could get and I was in a bind back then. Now I can get the 3200+ processor for $190 ... maybe cheaper online if I want ... and I could find a good AGP card like that 6600 GT for around the same or maybe less ( you got yours really cheap didn't you). Those things are still pretty expensive in the stores around here.

Grrr... the reviews of the 2800+ say it's very fast. Now I can't quite figure out what to do with it. Hmmm ... maybe I need a better power supply?

I went to guru3d here to get mine, prices change regularly. Sometimes the AGP ones can be bought for as low as $109. I got mine for about $145 including tax and shipping

BTW don't get anything less than a 6600GT. The vanilla 6600 is about 50% slower.

Ram you have to take it easy when adjusting, and best to see if you can get the optimal timing data from the manufacturer website.

200 should be correct for 400mhz ram. However some older athon64's don't like certain configs of ram and are unstable at more than 333mhz. Thats the case on mine. But I can get it to run at CAS 2.5 (best ram is CAS2).

If your power supply is less than 350w you might be having trouble. Not sure how old your system is, it is possible if you have been upgrading from an old system.

Might also be that your Motherboard bios needs to be updated to a newer version to better support your CPU.

OK, it was actually the CAS of 2 ... that stopped it from running. I have only a 300W power supply too in this machine. I'll just have to keep playing with it. It certainly seems like this processor should be somewhere in the ball park of the other one though. Either that or the Graphics Card is just holding it way back somehow.

Grrr... in this review a Sempron 2800+ scores a lot higher! They have a Sempron 2800+ with a Radeon 9600 Pro and it scores over 25,000 overall ... with the CPU getting over 6,000!

http://www.sharkyextreme.com/hardware/cpu/article.php/3261_3387251__9

A better power supply will yield you better results. It's often not a case of not enough power, it could just be that the quality of the supplied power is not the best. All the capacitors in the world can't correct a dodgy supply.

I don't know ... I could try it. Right now I'm pretty ticked. My CPU is performing at only 2/3's of it's potential ... it's just irksome!

Should I mess with the voltage settings?

If you've got enough spare cash to buy a replacement CPU, then yes, go ahead and overclock and up the voltage.

Be aware though, power consumption (and heat production) increases as the square of the increase in voltage.

Heh, its probrably your memory or something else that i dont think anyone mentioned

CACHE size.

if windows doesnt set the cache size right your cpu might not be used to its full potential. I use CustomizerXP to up the CPU Cache setting to the proper level that my CPU has. Not sure how it affected my system since i dont push it that hard or really care for modern games. Worth a try though?

Also, you might have a crap motherboard- if you posted above, i didnt read it :P but that *really* makes a difference.

It's an Abit NF8, nVidia nForce 3 motherboard. Man, if I have to get a new motherboard for this processor to work right ... grrr....

Here's a link to it:

http://www.abit-usa.com/products/mb/products.php?categories=1&model=235

It's probably your ram. I'm not sure what ram you have but it sounded like you bought new ram for your new puter and swapped have at least 2 maybe 3 sticks of different types and speeds of ram in your old computer?

the old socket athlons only work properly in certain slot configurations and if they aren't paired you will lose system performance and possibly dual channel won't work as well as you would like.

If you have 2 matching sticks try those together first see if that makes a difference.

Hmm... Well I have one 512 in there paired with a 256. I suppose I could take out the 256 and see if it gets faster. However, all of the games I've played have run the same or better with the additional 256. I'll have to give it a try though just to see if that's holding the CPU back.