Well, the 64 bit processing age is upon us, so I guess it’s finally time to take the plunge. I’ve been holding off in the hopes of jumping to dual core, but when the fair mistress Opportunity knocks on the door, I seem to be too weak to turn her away.
As it happens, Zach and I have been presented with an opportunity to upgrade so we decided to go for it. Now, my current system isn’t really THAT out of date. The following is the heart of my current system:
Athlon XP 3000+ (Barton core)
MSI K7N2 Delta NForce2 Ultra board
512mb Dual Channel 3200 DDR Ram
MSI GeForce FX 5900XT
This baby runs Half Life 2 like a champ at 1280×1024 with 2x AA. The only thing I’ve ever really thrown at it that it had a hard time with was Doom 3 so…
We’ve both decided to go with the following set up (keep in mind that some of the parts were chosen due to financial limitations):
AMD Athlon 64 3000+ Venice Core Socket 939 CPU
Chaintech VNF4/Ultra nForce4 Ultra board
1gb dual channel 3200 DDR Ram
Leadtek A400LE Geforce 6800LE
We picked the CPU based on price mostly. The next step up for the Athlon 64 was a significant price jump. The board was chosen based on the chipset and features included (and also because it was one of the cheapest nForce4 Ultra boards we could find). The Ram was the next natural step up but the video card was where we had the hardest time deciding.
We’re only paying $135 for our GeForce 6800LE cards through Newegg.com. The significance of this is that the GeForce 6600GT’s are currently selling for $145 and up. Now, why is the 6800LE so cheap? Well, it’s because the performance has been limited by the drivers so that it runs at pace with the 6600GT’s. What does this mean? It means that you can purchase a Geforce 6800 for dang cheap. The trick here is that with a quick driver tweak, you can open the locked pixle pipelines and turn the clock up and like magic, you now have a Geforce 6800 that performs like a 6800 instead of like a 6600.
If you doubt the possibility of this, just do a Google search and you’ll see that this has been tested and tested again. It works! The guys at DoomedPC have a nice little write up about how to do it here.
Anyway, we should get the part by next Wed or so and we’ll share our experiences once we try it out. Keep checkin back for updates from our ‘upgrade land’ adventures. We should have some pics and war stories posted by the end of next week.
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