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xNemessisx

New Member
Joined
Aug 6, 2004
I am currently running a system with a radeon 9800 pro, 1 gig of 2100 ram and an amd 2000. What would give me the biggest bang for the buck? A new amd 3000 or a gig od faster ram to replace what is in there now?

Mainly I want to play Doom 3 faster, but this is not exclusively for that and I am not going to a Geforce card just for one game

Thanks
 
How much $$$ do you have to spend? What mobo do you have?

If you have the money I'd buy a Kv8 mobo and Athlon 64 XP 3000+. Thats the best 64bit for the money right now, but the mobo and RAM upgrade will also be REQUIRED so the price wont be that cheap

That RAM is slow as mollasses too so even if you arent going to go 64-bit then it should be sold to get some new stuff. If you are into overclocking and dont wanna spend much or have to switch mobos I'd get a 2600+ Mobile. I hear they go to 2.5ghz without too much effort as long as the rest of your system doesnt hold you back (your current RAM will :) )

Unless you really like to spend money, I'd stick with that 9800Pro because it is a great card. If you want to be able to get a few more frames out of it then buy a VGA Silencer rev 3 (they are $14 right now!) and flash the card to a 9800XT. THe new VGA Silencer Rev 4 will be coming out soon but its going to cost $30+ initially.
 
What motherboard do you have? If you have one based on an Nforce/Nforce2 or even KT333/KT400 board I think you should try overclocking and see if you are happy with the performance.

The biggest bottleneck (other than perhaps your mobo which is still a mystery to me) in that rig is the ram. PC2100 just doesn't cut it these days, either overclock it or get new ram if your system supports it. I think the 2000 can be a decent chip with some ocing, but your memory bandwith is really bad.
 
my motherboard is an ABit NF7-s rev2.

So the ram is the way to go it seems? I think I will replace it with the fastest ram it will accept and go for an athlon 3000. Hopefully this will make increase performance significantly
 
Definately, the NF7-S is a very good board and using PC2100 is choking the performance.

I would also overclock the 2000+, or just adjust the multiplier so it can actually run the FSB at which the memory is running. Sure you could always run the memory faster than the bus, but I have always felt you get better performance running the ram and cpu at the same bus speed (at least on AMD systems).
 
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