Blooming Computer Evolution- Upgrade Woes. Again.

So,

[/rant]
One year ago this month, almost to the day, I bought myself a new Graphics card after my ti4200 was finally unable to hack it.

AGP 8x, gforce 6800 at £190.

Ouch. Ouch already. Do you agree?

So, one year later, my entire systems feeling a bit jerky and I want to push it harder. now, i could just wipe it, and to be honest, that would probrably do it, However- My system feels inefficient. The components inside seem old and like they could do with an upgrade, so its time.

What do I find? If I want to upgrade now, I need to replace my s@#!*y new(ish) 6800 with a PCI-E card. WHY!? AGP has suddenly become obsolete.

Also ned a new soundcard and a new blahblah blah, because PCI is almost faded out now, too.
[end rant]

Bleh.

I held onto my ti4200 for a while and just played older games. Finally got the Radeon 9800XT for megabucks and played more modern games. The best thing is to stay "out of sync" with modern games,then you can buy the old ones for less than £10 and don't need a mega card.

Or just buy Xmas Bonus and Easter Bonus cos they don't need a 3D card!

My ATI9600 still plays a lot of modern stuff at 800x600 (HL2, F.E.A.R), which is fine for me ^_^

I agree with Mr Alien, there's plenty out there for lower spec :) Im playing through DeusEx again for instance :D

I'm not upgrading for games :) I'M just not happy that no mater what, I need to get a PCI-E graphics card now. Or go with onboard. (NO!) :P

I still have my ti4200.

What? :/ What's it been replaced by, then?

God, I'm so behind on hardware trends.

Still got my GF6800 GT here, 256mb, 8x AGP, never looked back at the time as it was the best bang fer yer buck at the time....the next time I do upgrade though, I will have to do a major overhaul as I'd need to replace most of my junk to work with a new PCI-E Mobo I'd have to buy, like you, just not worth it at this time to me, until it becomes more maintstream and cheaper.

Anyhow, if anything modern doesnt run smooth on my GF6800 GT without reason, then it's a badly coded game.

I think i'm just going to wipe it all and reformat with a more efficient layout.

Would getting a Faster HDD help speed things up? I do do alot of drive access. I think im on 5700rpm or so now.

Looks like PCI-E 1x,2x,4x,8x... :/

I see a few boards with a couple of PCI slots around still. :)

Oh, right. I thought PCI-E was for GFX cards only. :/

I told you I was behind. :P

I've had my system now for three and half years and it still blinks with XP. What I do to get a speed boost is to use Norton ghost to go back to an image of the HD and XP when it was first installed. XP has the uncanny ability to slow to a crawl after 5-6 months use(for me anyway).

When I buy a new PC I always immediately start saving for the next one. I have the money for a brand new one but want to get as much out of my current machine as I can before an upgrade is needed.

Eh. What happened to my Name? :O

Amon, good idea. And of course, the longer you save, the better the PC you can get to replace it that'll be obsolete in 3 months :)

" AGP has suddenly become obsolete."

That doesn't mean anything. People always complain
about how computers get 'obsolete' so fast. They don't.
It's just your desire for bigger and better that is making
your machine seem that way.

I can play HL2 or Far Cry at near-full quality with no
problems. (any newer games have to be "reduced" to
their visual quality if I want smooth fps) I payed $2600
Canadian dollars three (3!) years ago for my machine. (I
also use AGP, by the way)

If your machine is obsolete, it's only because you want it to be.

Sorry for being harsh. I am very often a jerk! ;)

instead of upgrading, just save up a couple grand and buy the best thing out there ;) Yeah baby!

Like i said, im not upgrading for games. Personally, i just want a faster responding machine.



As my machine is an AMD XP 2600+, with 768mb of ram and a geforce 6800, That comment must be true. And i won't deny it.

It just *feels* old :)

It's not sudden. PCIE has been in the pipeline for what? 2+ years now? It's just that AGP is quickly nearing the end of it's life cycle. But PCIE sure isn't sudden.

I'm holding off on a PCIE card too. Just spent 350 bux on a 7800GS a couple weeks ago. Put my 6800GT into my SageTV box.

(Woot, and picked up a dell 30 inch lcd today too... which is totally off the topic, but it's definitely an upgrade to my 19" CRT I've been using.)

what fsb can your motherboard go up to? you can pick up a athlon 3200 for next to no money on ebay. that with a top end agp graphics card a fast hard drive and you have no need for pci express for a good while yet!

ive got a 3200 and a 9800pro and 1gb of ram and i can run any game to a good standard and i run a dual monitor setup on cineima 4d and do a bit of music on it, all very quite and no problems. apart from my power supply packing up a week ago.

im not going to upgrade for a while because ive got a very expensive pci maudio sound card with 8 ins and 8 outs that i use quite alot.

Pete

you'll find regular pci slots on boards for quite a while yet. I wouldn't worry about that.

I think it's been available in products for 2 years. I know I got mine about a year and a half ago (in October) - and I remember at the time being amazed at how long it took Intel to ship a working PCI-E motherboard.

Just buy a new PC upgrading is costly.

If i'm honest, I won't see a performance boost out of a processor upgrade, I dont use what ive got, but what I would like is a general speedup in response times.

Thats why im thinking, instead of throwing a strop like i did above, I should just buy two new, faster hard drives? :)

SATA RAID is your friend.

It is only for graphics cards, you should still get PCI slots on boards for all other cards unless *I'm* way off base here or you were joking.

Hmm, is RAID any slower than normal drive operation due to having to write twice, if so, I DON'T WANT IT cos I backup regularly anyway.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pci-e

And from what i've picked up at work, Pci-E will phase PCI and PCI-X out.

Oh and SATA=NOT MY FRIEND :P

RAID is either equal to or faster than a single hard drive - it's never slower.

Raid 0 - striped writing: half of your data goes to one
drive, half to another. This gives much faster access
time than a single drive. (I'm not sure, but is it double speed?)

Raid 1 - mirrored writing: two drives write the exact
same data simultaneously, so if one drive fails, you've
still got its mirror.

And then there's Raid 0+1, which is just insane. That's
4 hard drives. Imaging the power supply you'd need!
Imagine the noise!

Skim over the wikipedia article for more info.

Never EVER upgrade! It's easy, just hold on to your machine as long as you can. Save all the money you would be spending on hardware that'll be outdated in 3 hours time.

Then when you're desperate BUY A WHOLE NEW MACHINE!

I have been following the Oblivion game for quite a lot of time, and needless to say, I will be playing it once it hits the shelves around the 20th this month. My PC at home, laptop and any other PC I have isn't anywhere near powerful enough to play Oblivion in high details, so I have two choices.

1) Upgrade my workstation at home. Mainboard, CPU, Graphics card. You can see where the price on this is going. Well over $600
2) Buy an Xbox360 for $400.

I went with #2.

I do the ocassional interim upgrade on my machine, the odd part here or there, but the major upgrades I do every few years. On Saturday I should take delivery of my new parts: dual core cpu, 2gb CAS 2ms RAM, SATA RAID stack, twin 7800 graphics cards (the 7900 was released today of course, but too much money for me to SLI them).

The next significant upgrade will be in 10-14 months time and I already know what it will be, i've only bought a 3.8Ghz processor but the motherboard will take something much faster... I intend to replace it when prices are lower.

Working out a good buying strategy will keep your PC nearer the cutting edge without overspending.

Having said that, a PC is always going to be way more expensive than a console, but you dont get Blitz on a console...

ok I meant RAID 1 which is the only reason I'd want it. Is that slower than writing to one drive as twice the amount of data must be written. It can't be faster and there must be a small overhead somewhere to writing to both.

No RAID 1 isn't slower. It is a waste of Harddisc space tho'. If you absolutely must have built-in redundancy, get a RAID-5 (or better) setup. I'm just not sure SATA controllers support anything but RAID levels 0 and 1.

.

Nope. In any Raid configuration, the drives are writing
simultaneously. Ie. at the same time. It is not slower.

Any overhead that there might be when divvying out the
data is taken care of by the Raid controller.

I repeat: Raid is not slow!

There's a reason top-end gamers opt for these setups.

what drew said.

Better yet, pretty much everything you have is obsolete now if you want a fairly high-end system.

- PCI-E instead of AGP, so a new video card.
- DDR2 / DDR3 memory instead of the original DDR (not compatible, runs at a different voltage)
- SATA harddrive(s) instead of ATA/E-IDE
- Depending on how current/fast your old system is, you may also need a new powersupply to provide enough juice for your new components



Depending on the RAID configuration that you pick, it can be significantly faster than non-RAID... in some modes you only have to read/write half the data to each individual drive, and that happens simultaneously.... RAID 5 will write at about the same speed as a single drive (since it has to generate the CRC data while writing), but reads a lot faster than from a single drive... The only 'waste' is that you use up one drive for parity info rather than usable data, so using 3 drives gives you the usable diskspace of 2 drives.

But a catastrophical drive failure won't be any problem whatsoever, just plop in a replacement drive and it will automagically rebuild all your precious data... And until you get the replacement drive in, you can still continue to run on the remaining two drives without really noticing any thing. (of course, you won't be protected in case another drive burns up before your replacement comes in)

Already got SATA and I don't use it. I've got an Nforce NF7-s2g board :)

My PSU is 450watt.


I also have Raid but my system seems to spontaneously restart when it's configured, Not sure why!

[edit]



Yup. I saw these coming in thanks to my job, and it's the original reason i got depressed that I wasted £2000 on my system only to be limited in upgrades. Bugger :P

[edit2]



Well, in that case I should hold off for a year for its replacement!!!! :P

But don't these Raid drives need exact clone hardrive specs to work together? If so, it's not going to be such an easy task finding a spare drive after a year or so when specs have all moved on etc.

OK, thanks for the RAID info, I knew they wrote at the same time but didn't know if the CPU needed any control. So the RAID controller takes up the load, fine.

You get best results if they are either
1) identical
2) failing that, a drive of equal or faster speed, with identical drive geometry. (e.g. a single 80GB platter instead of 2 40GB platters. If the physical layout of the drive is too different, there may be too much of a difference in the time it takes the heads to travel from sector -x- to sector -y- between the drives, which means the controller has to wait for all of them to get to the proper location.
3) If you can't get either, get the fastest drive you can find, to limit the chance of delays.

Thank you Xlsior, i've always wondered about mismatched drives in RAID.

Man its sure is a lot cheaper just to buy a new PC that is already upgraded for you, then to sit there upgrading ur PC every X months. xD

It is these days. It wasn't back then. Im picky, I knew the board, the ram, the cooler I wanted etc. :) So if ibought the parts I could build my dream system for about £750, when in the shops something of the same spec number-wise was over £1,000.

Yeah I remember those days Cygnus!! But like you said: Not anymore, parts costs are more then getting it built, and you can find your "dream system" built by tons of companies out there. Look at www.ibuypower.com you can fully customize your PC and it is a lot cheaper then buying the parts yourself UNLESS you can get non-retail discounts (real discounts, lol)


It is SOO much cheaper to just buy a new PC every 2 years lol.

I can get pretty big discounts, but I can't guarantee the parts work :P

I still preffer to buy parts. When you buy a PC you get "2gb RAM", you dont necessarily get RAM with a CAS latency of 2-5-2-2. In fact you're more likely to get budget RAM - anything not marketable to a mass market is skimped on, and so what you get is a budget computer no matter how much money you spend.

I'm far too discerning and select in the parts I install, I put a great deal of thought into my computer hardware and how I want it all to work. I'd rather pay extra and get it right then end up with a system that looks good on paper or misses a feature I want purely because it's not listed on the specification sheet, like having a PSU that only spins up at certain temeperatures.

I know what you're saying Banshee, but if I swapped your RAM for the budget stuff when you weren't looking, how long would it take you to notice - performance-wise? :)

The sum of all the parts is greater than the whole, big10p :)

You speaketh in riddles.

Does that mean you would notice the difference, or not?

I don't think you would and are just a geek control freak. :P

Personally, I lost interest in all the 'techy' stuff years ago. I'm simply interested in the creative side of computers, now. i.e. programming stuff I want to program. :)

ROFL big10p

Yep. And I need to be able to run basic B3D apps on my 6800 without it stuttering every 6 seconds.

BTW, Thanks Evak who showed me there was finally a new drvier update for my nforce chipset....

heh. if you are tryin to make a basic b3d app and it has probs running on your 6800 then you have serious issues. ;-P

Whose gonna buy anything that uber and its a "basic b3d app" ? STOP everyone you have to upgrade your computers before you can play Cygnus tech demo!! ROFL make it stop xD

You think you've got problems - my rig is antique. :P I just use what I've got. Don't see the point in trying to upgrade my way out of a problem. Afterall, not everyone running your stuff is going to have a spiffy spec machine.

Yeah what big10 said.

It's not a riddle Big10p, the point is that you could change the RAM with it's superfast CAS latency and I may not discern a difference all of the time or even at all.

The boost in performance comes from the fact that all of the parts are optimised to a very high extent, everything in the system apart from the old DVD+-RW burner is a choice component with the best possible combination of specifications.

Together they mean an ultra fast computer, individually a super fast RAM chip makes just a minor difference, together with every other optimisation they make a major difference.

The sum of the parts is greater than the whole.

Sorry becky its just not worth the dough to all of that. Its not that major of a difference and its not gonna make the latest battlefield or the latest quake etc run any better. Its a complete waste of time! xD

Q)Why waste your money and your time upgrading your PC when you could just buy it all at half price next year, put together for you, and still play the latest games at top speed?

A)You are just a geek control freak. :P

xD!!

Here's the extent of the problem.

Tracy:

Celeron M, 2.0ghz. 512mb, intel integrated GFX.

Easter bonus runs flawlessly.

My spec

AMD Xp2600, 768mb, gf6800:

Easter Bonus slows down a few times a minute and has generally a lower benchmark than the above laptop.

*something* is wrong. I want to upgrade what's causing it.

I've defragged and to be honest, my system performance is just the same as when i fresh installed a while ago. My wnidows drive is empty, my C: is a seperate drive with only the page file on, etc.

I don't see me needing new RAM since DDR 3700, dual channel enabled, isnt exactly going to be slowing me down. the Hard drive, is the simplest thing i can think of now.

And its cheaper than a new computer, And hopefully it would speed it up to the point where I can get another couple of years out of it?

Yes, I dont like computers that break down so I want to know that proper ESD handling precautions have been taken in it's assembly. I hate these muppet engineers you get even in some quite large firms that insist they know about static but that they are not a very staticky person and have never blown anything. I build my machine with care, and I may give it a zap and suffer a failure a year down the line, but it wont be from arrogance.

My own computer had it's first not-something-Becky-did-coding crash since the last major upgrade (about 2-3 years ago) a few days ago. Reliability is worth paying for.

I've spent £1100 inc VAT for my new bits, i've paid retail prices without discounts. I tried to find a comparison on Alienware as they're computers are highly regarded for games.

Their nearest machine was £300 cheaper, had just 1x80gb hard disk (instead of dual 160gb), and yet the RAID array in my £300 yields a massive improvement in performance and development productivity. I've also got a faster CPU for use in 3dsMax and twice the RAM so I dont have to quit out of my development tools to compile my game.

It's unclear whether the Alienware machine overclocks and underclocks based upon current system loading, and there's no information regarding the cooling system - what I can tell you is the extra £300 I spent would be swallowed when you consider that the Alienware machine was American market prices - which are much cheaper, then i'd have to pay how much for insured delivery?

Don't try to tell me that's saving me money ! lol - that's the first and only manufacturer i've looked at recently for an off the shelf machine I admit, but they're a major brand who specialise in gaming - having looked at what i'd get for my money i'm damn glad I buy parts.

I cant believe some of you guys suggested it was cheaper to buy a whole machine.

This is the first time i've ever had to pay retail prices for an upgrade, but i'd still rather do that than take the lottery of reliability and final specification of an off the shelf system - and to be honest, i'd rather spend a hundred quid and get twice the computer.

Cygnus: Your girlfriends GFX are probably better at doing 2D stuff than your card. Newer GFX cards don't seem to give much of a thought for pure 2D. Maybe you should consider downgrading, instead? :P

Becky I can only say this.. if you buy a new pc every 2 years you end up saving more money then you would by upgrading every X months. You also dont run into any crashes, etc.

IT IS CHEAPER TO BUY A WHOLE MACHINE ROFL.

Becky, you are sooo 1998 xD

But i'm getting WAY more by doing my upgrades this way, computing is my hobby i'm willing to spend money on it, right now if I bought the best Alienware machine available I would not save enough money to buy a DVD box set with compared to what i've just spent, and I would get something around three quarters of the speed. It really is not cheaper. There may be other manufacturers out there who are cheaper - but what parts have they compromised on that Alienware didn't?

Perhaps if I bought the same components that Alienware used then I would save money to buy directly from Alienware? I just wouldn't put together the same combination of parts as them or any other manufacturer because I looked at the specs and thought 'compromise' all the way down.

I see no reason to compromise on my hobby. I will get much enjoyment from my machine, way more than the same money would give if I went to the cinema.

All I am loosing is the ability to call technical support and have an incompetent muppet fix my machine in the more likely event that their potentially misshandled components fail.

Hey Banshee - it's your money; your choice. You go, girl! :P

No point arguing about this kind of thing.

Listen Becky!!

AlienWare is a ripoff!! xD

If you like to waste er I mean spend your money on computer building etc then go for it. It is still cheaper to get it built for you. OF COURSE, if you buy it at the right place (not alienware ROFL)

Go to www.ibuypower.com and you can get a PC just like an alienware one for 50% less ROFL.

Becks, you're stuck in the 90s for sure. Back then, it WAS cheaper to upgrade, nowadays, its cheaper to buy a new machine.

Oh, regarding those RAID drives: if an identical drive isn't available, at least stick with one from the same manufacturer (with same geometry). One "catch" is that the formatted capacity of drives varies slightly between manufacturers.
A Seagate 80GB drive may have a formatted capacity that's 10Mb bigger or smaller than an 80GB western digital drive.

When mixing brands, you risk that your new disk is too small to become part of the array. (Or you end up with a couple of extra MB that will sit unused -- that's fine, but you rarely know for sure which it will be up front. :-?

Im careful with my ESD, however, I pick up static like no mans business! Never used to be that way...

Anyway, I think i suffered my first failure the other day. I opened the system to tweak the jumpers on my soundcard to enable ..well, i suppose its "phantom" power. That went fine but when i closed it back up, i didnt notice immediately, but the DVD drive had stopped functioning!

After finally realising and opening up again, i found the bottom of the DvD drive to be so hot as to it actually being too hot to handle. Short somewhere inside i imagine, That or yet another PSU failure!

@Matt, I specced up a computer from ibuypower with comparable components to what I have purchased. The only difference being the base audible noise of the machine would be higher than the parts i've chosen and it would use up more electricity in use. I would need to do research to see if it could underclock/overclock on demand as my own one can/will (I take delivery of the bits I ordered tommorow). So in all a marginally inferior machine.

Bearing in mind that the ibuypower machine is also American market prices and therefore much cheaper, it worked out £250 cheaper. Better than Alienware because I was able to specify not having a screen and some other components that on Alienware I had to pay for, but by the time i've paid delivery and taxes i'd still be looking at a loss compared to what i've just purchased.

I am yet to see any evidence of it being possible to purchase a high end system cheaper than the traditional upgrade route.

It might work for middle of the road and entry level equipment, but if you're like me and you realise that a major part of my life is spent infront of a computer and i'd rather that percentage of my life wasnt wasted on a busy pointer, i'd invest the extra £250 less delivery and taxes difference and get the best.

/me sighs.

I am thinking that there IS a possibility you are right becks, but I dont think the benefits of building your own PC are as great as they once were.

I also think that it is possibile to get an assembled machine cheaper in the UK from a UK-Based company like iBuyPower. Maybe you could check a popular UK-based PC magazine?

But this is your hobby, and I'm sure you love building PC's, where I can't stand building PC's lol. I've lost wayyy too much time building them in the past and will never build one again. Trouble shooting hardware is not fun, I'll just leave it at that.

That's exactly what it boils down too, computing is my hobby and I want the best. It's a major part of my life and i've only got a finite number of days on this Earth... I dont want to spend a noteable portion of those waiting on the computer. I want the computer waiting on me.

Like I said, there's no point arguing about this. Just do whatever floats-your-boat. :)

Just ordered my new components to upgrade to the dual core / PCI-e cutting edge.

I need my PC to be as fast and reliable as possible for my work. If I have a deadline for 3D render, a faster machine can shave days of my project development and hence I can pop it into the render farm ahead of schedule.

Due to the fact I am always horrendously stressed on the last few days, a faster machine may just help my health as well. Or stop me from calmly picking up a sledghammer and bashing the freaking silicon terrorist to freaking hell and back.

* counts to ten slowly, and relax *

If you got the latest nVidia drivers I'd blame them, I've had little "pauses" in my games regardless of which one I'm playing every now and then, and that's only begun occuring in the last 2 official driver releases....well, it beats the horrible 3-8sec "freeze-ups" I had in the past with earlier drivers on my 6800 GT.

No, I don't have the latest Nvidia drivers, I forget the version, but they were supposedly the first *good* release Nvidia did for a while. Perhaps I should update because i get *horrible* "freeze-ups" when playing graphics intensive games...

I updated the chipset drivers :)

My ATI crashes every ~30 mins or so when playing 3D games (Warcraft 3). When the 'VPU recover' option is enabled it just means a 3-second freeze -> black -> all OK again, without enabling that it will reboot the computer instead.

(Using an older set of drivers, the latest have attrocious gamma correction controls that won't allow multiple profiles)