Athlon XP T-bred 2400+ cooling

[RJARRRPCGP]

Should I just jump to liquid cooling? I'm right now having major heat problems with my current setup. I wish I can get the load temperature no higher than 55C degrees!!! (Including when running good ol' Prime95).

 

[Clements]

IMO, since your CPU is not your bottleneck, downclock your processor to something cooler like 2.2GHz (although T-Breds are rated at 90-95 degrees C), and get a new decent DX9 compliant graphics card for about $100 (the price of a decent water cooling system or thereabouts) would double/triple your FPS in PC games, allow you to use higher resolutions/filtering in all games, and have DX9 compliancy which is a requirement for any new PC game or emulators. Just my opinion.

 

[-Shadow-]

IMO, since your CPU is not your bottleneck, downclock your processor to something cooler like 2.2GHz (although T-Breds are rated at 90-95 degrees C), and get a new decent DX9 compliant graphics card for about $100 (the price of a decent water cooling system or thereabouts) would double/triple your FPS in PC games, allow you to use higher resolutions/filtering in all games, and have DX9 compliancy which is a requirement for any new PC game or emulators. Just my opinion.

Agreed , plus , you should not worry about 55° , thats still in the acceptable area .

A good water cooling costs about 200$ ( Basic LK set from Aqua-computer + a modified plate on the back , which can hold the power supply and the radiator [ also a new one instead the one of the set ]in place )

If you buy a low-cost water cooling ( aquarius ) , you won't get that much under 55° as you maybe expect . It just won't pay off for you buying water cooling , you get more performance if you put the 200$ into a Radeon 9800Pro , instead of a water cooling ! That's my opinion on this case...

 

[RJARRRPCGP]

Agreed , plus , you should not worry about 55° , thats still in the acceptable area .

A good water cooling costs about 200$ ( Basic LK set from Aqua-computer + a modified plate on the back , which can hold the power supply and the radiator [ also a new one instead the one of the set ]in place )

If you buy a low-cost water cooling ( aquarius ) , you won't get that much under 55° as you maybe expect . It just won't pay off for you buying water cooling , you get more performance if you put the 200$ into a Radeon 9800Pro , instead of a water cooling ! That's my opinion on this case...

55 C degrees is fine for me. I'm in fact right now having a problem of it going beyond 55 C degrees and thus then my PC crashes.

BTW, I dunno if a newer Radeon will work properly with my motherboard.

 

[-Shadow-]

55 C degrees is fine for me. I'm in fact right now having a problem of it going beyond 55 C degrees and thus then my PC crashes.

BTW, I dunno if a newer Radeon will work properly with my motherboard.

Ah , now thats a problem ! You could do as clements says and underclock it , and buy a graphics card . Whats the problem to put it in ? Doesn't it fit because of a capacitor or what ?

It should normally work , i looked it up... I got a Rad. 9800Pro , and a mobo of similar age , an A7N8X , so i think it could really work on your Asus A7V8X !

 

[ScottJC]

If you're going to buy a new graphics card you must buy new ram (yes i've said this before) but you'd be amazed how much of a performance boost you could get just by ram alone in newer games.

IMO having a new graphics card is totally and utterly pointless without the new ram to back it up because you'd find two things, picture the words "Your games" as the newest hottest titles like doom 3. (and don't tell me you Don't want to play new games!)

1) Your games would take an ungodly amount of time to load
2) Your games would stutter and use the pagefile an ungodly amount of time as well.

Take UT2004 for example, before, i could never put everything on full without serious hard drive usage and loading times, now I can and my hard drive barely does anything at all past the loading screen.

For emulators you are fine, but eventually you're going to need to boost your ram to get any satisfaction from your pc, and at todays prices why not?

I mean, lets face it, why buy a graphics card that costs a few hundred if you can't enjoy all the latest stuff properly.

Don't ignore this advice, you do need at least a gig of ram now, definatly will next year.

 

[-Shadow-]

Don't ignore this advice, you do need at least a gig of ram now, definatly will next year.

That's an important aspect ! You really need at least 1 gig of ram , but the ram won't have that big effect , if the graphics card is too lame for actual games . You should upgrade both components to achieve a good result !

If you don't upgrade Graphics : You get no stuttering in games , and they will load fast , but you won't have DX9 support and games with heavy graphics will either look awful or just run too slow .

If you don't upgrade ram : Your games will stutter and you'll hear the rattling of ( except Samsung and Seagate ) your HDD .

Both components are important , if you miss to upgrade one of them , you won't get a good result !

1 gig of ram are already a must since half a year , ever tried to play Gothic 2 with 512 Mb ram ?

 

[ScottJC]

Why did you think I said it was pointless to upgrade video card without it, sorta implys you need both doesn't it -shadow-?

 

[-Shadow-]

Oh , i didn't read close enough , sorry

 

[RJARRRPCGP]

That's an important aspect ! You really need at least 1 gig of ram , but the ram won't have that big effect , if the graphics card is too lame for actual games . You should upgrade both components to achieve a good result !

If you don't upgrade Graphics : You get no stuttering in games , and they will load fast , but you won't have DX9 support and games with heavy graphics will either look awful or just run too slow .

If you don't upgrade ram : Your games will stutter and you'll hear the rattling of ( except Samsung and Seagate ) your HDD .

Both components are important , if you miss to upgrade one of them , you won't get a good result !

1 gig of ram are already a must since half a year , ever tried to play Gothic 2 with 512 Mb ram ?

I'm sorry, I can't get 1 GB of RAM, because 512 MB was already expensive.

Also, I'm not worried about the video card not fitting, I'm worried about my motherboard not liking the video card then thus refusing to POST.
I have been seeing horror stories about Radeon 9800 and later video cards not working with motherboards.

 

[-Shadow-]

I have been seeing horror stories about Radeon 9800 and later video cards not working with motherboards.

You've heard lots of horror stories , didn't you ? But if you buy the radeon at the local PC store ( directly from store ) you can return it directly if it doesn't work

You should give it a try , because you'll be stuck on that radeon 9000 .

 

[ScottJC]

ram expensive? are you kidding, a radeon9800 is 4 times the price for me, lol.

Go ahead and buy a new graphics card then, you won't have any fun in doom 3 thats for sure

Ram should be the first thing you upgrade in your PC and thats not a joke.

Ram is sometimes the cheapest component next to the power supply.

Do not underestimate the value ram has, put 128mb of ram in your PC and take the old one out, and tell me you see no difference, similarly I'd notice a massive difference if i took my new 512mb out.

You can ignore my ram advice but its the best advice you can get right now, remember, ram > graphics, graphics cannot function well without ram, your PC cannot function well without ram, Ram is in the top 4 most important components of your PC, CPU(Inc heatsink+fan), motherboard, power supply and ram. it doesn't need the rest to function truthfully.

Notice everyone so far who have posted in this thread apart from you all have 1024mb of ram, why? I wonder.

I've heard horror stories about ghosts too but I didn't listen, funnily enough my radeon 9600 still works and I haven't seen any.

...But what do I know? I've only been building my own PC for like 3 years? and I'm only attending Higher National Certificate course in computing, I must not have a clue what I'm on about obvisously.

 

[-Shadow-]

-Here- is the ram i use , a radeon is a little bit under 2 times more expensive than 512mb ram , not 4 times I couldn't find any ram that is much cheaper than this one . 90$ is the cheapest ram i found but the quality is not that good...

I didn't search thoroughly , so there could be cheaper ram bars around...

You should save money to buy additional 512mb ram + a graphics card at the same time

Notice everyone so far who have posted in this thread apart from you all have 1024mb of ram, why? I wonder.

Mysterious... :whistling

 

[ScottJC]

Depends if you're talking about the good radeon 9800 pro's, they can be upwards of £200-250 in british money anyway.

 

[-Shadow-]

Ouf ! Thats way too much i think !
In germany and generally in europe you can get a radeon 9800 Pro for 220 euros ( i bought this one -here- ) thats about 150 pounds ( at least the currency converter says so ) the most expensive was about 250 euros , should be 200 pounds .

Btw , RJA lives in america , the prices there are just a little bit higher than in germany ( i've searched a bit )

 

[Clements]

Yep, I've seen a Saphire Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB for a touch under £150, with no box mind. Just don't expect low prices from rip-off merchants which include Dell and PC-World, and seek smaller companies. The £200-odd Galaxy Glacier 6800 from the same store looked much more apertising tho' for the extra £50!

 

[RJARRRPCGP]

ram expensive? are you kidding, a radeon9800 is 4 times the price for me, lol.

Go ahead and buy a new graphics card then, you won't have any fun in doom 3 thats for sure

Ram should be the first thing you upgrade in your PC and thats not a joke.

Ram is sometimes the cheapest component next to the power supply.

Do not underestimate the value ram has, put 128mb of ram in your PC and take the old one out, and tell me you see no difference, similarly I'd notice a massive difference if i took my new 512mb out.

Maybe for Windows XP, but with Windows 2000, 512 MB is more than enough!!! Because Microsoft made Windows XP somewhat bloated .

BTW, even with 256 MB of RAM, my system was still fast.

 

[cooliscool]

http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=20-220-004&depa=1

I bought some of that. Best RAM you can buy for the price, hands down.

 

[-Shadow-]

Maybe for Windows XP, but with Windows 2000, 512 MB is more than enough!!! Because Microsoft made Windows XP somewhat bloated .

BTW, even with 256 MB of RAM, my system was still fast.

I give you an advice : get yourself Gothic 2 , doom 3 , wiggles or Dawn of War and try to play them , that are the most RAM-stressing games i know . I still had win 98 and 512Mb when i first touched Gothic 2 , it ran very bad .

Ok , if you think you don't need the ram , you can ignore our advices...

 

[cooliscool]

Yeah, really. If you want the most effective performance boost get some RAM.