Should I upgrade or wait?

[Tracert]

Hey all,

as you can see by my sig, I am at a bit of an impasse, do I spend money now to upgrade the whole Processor and Mother Board (as mine can't support much higher processor speed then what I have now). Of course I would like to stay in the $250.00 budget limit if I can. Frame Rate wise I am doing fine with my current video card... I am just board with my old system and have the bug to upgrade.

Or shoud I just wait until 64 bit with PCI-X gets cheaper.

What would you all do?

 

[acesea]

I hope I don't answer your question with another question but here it goes since i am kind of in the same place as situation as u..
first off being that i imagine your upgrade is in regards to another amd system, pci-x performance advantages at first are said to be debatable due to the lack of significant differentiation of agp 4x to 8x. similarly i think that applies to 64bit coding, it depends if the necessary drivers for your hardware will be available first and foremost, secondly if you will be using apps which will benefit from 64bit.
As for me, i am debating on whether i should jump ship now to the 875 chipset and get a p4c or p4e and oc it with a 1:1 ratio with one of the new gpus.. or if its worth waiting to see the new how the new intel boards will do with the lga for the prescotts and pci-x. problem with this though is that these boards only will support ddr2, which to me makes absolutely no sense right now, hence i think its just a waste of time waiting. am i wrong? ddr2 not offering any performance for its price is pointless when ddr is still going so strong.
what do others think? anyone waiting to see whats around the corner to upgrade? or is today's stuff pretty hot?

 

[r1pt1d3]

I just upgraded and consider it my last upgrade of the year other than 1 more raptor/x800 xt I do plan on upgrading whenever a new "stable" pci-x board/ddr2 board is out and prices for them are close to what prices are now i.e. 290-350 for a gig of good ram and typical board prices.
I upgraded to a a64 3200+ aopen ak89 max although I was both lucky and unlucky I recieved a cg stepping which is good but its bad for me cuz of the ak89 max i recieved had an older bios (1.05) that doesnt see the cg stepping cpu's. So i have to wait til monday to get a a64 2800 to flash it and put in my 3200.

Anyways enough ranting I think you best bet would be to either upgrade now or wait until pci-x/ddr2 comes out and get the a64 with a nforce3 250gb mobo cheaper than you could now.

If your looking to upgrade now a a64 2800 might be something you could consider.

In the end its up to you and plz upgrade that vid card its the bottleneck of your system

 

[Tracert]

So what your telling me is to upgrade now... unless I wait then I should wait.

good help

OK. What about just slapping another cheap MB in my system and then geting an XP 3200 or something like that to get a little boost. Is that worth it or will it make no real difference over my current 1800?

 

[faldore]

recommendation

For $250 your upgrade looks like:

Mobo: $100
CPU: $150

This assumes you have RAM for it. If not, you should wait till you have a little more to spend, your 1800 will do fine till HL2 comes out. (oh wait, FarCry...) lol Or you can squeeze out another $50-$100 from your budget for RAM.

So here's my recommendation.

CPU: Athlon XP 3200 400
Mobo: MSI K7N2 Delta

I say this system because it is almost as fast as the A64 and a fraction of the cost. It's also overclockable if you are into that sort of thing. The MSI K7N2 has favorable reviews from multiple sources.

As to whether to buy now or wait, I say buy now. No point in waiting, unless you're all about HL2, then there's no point in buying now.

Good luck! *goes back to shopping for his dream system*

Eric