Will The HD3850 Work For Me?

[snakebite025]

Here are my current specs: 3.06 Celeron D socket 478, 2GB DDR, 60 GB HDD, GeForce 6200 AGP. Pitiful, I know, but I'm on a budget here. I was just wondering if the HD3850 would give me a substantial upgrade in performance in gaming, such as BF2, Half Life 2, etc, and which brand i should buy (Sapphire, HIS, etc). Thanks!

P.S- I'm new to the forums and semi new to building custom computers, so cut me some slack

 

[farlex85]

It will certainly be a huge upgrade over the 6200, however your cpu is going to be bottlenecking it a pretty good bit. How much I can't say, but enough you may wanna think of investing in a new mb and cpu if you can swing it, you'll get a lot more out of the vc that way. The reason I say do that now instead of later is you'll likely get pci-e x16 when you do so agp will be less of a long term thing at that point.

 

[snakebite025]

Thanks for the advice man. This is a noob question, but what exactly is bottlenecking?

 

[farlex85]

Basically it means that the 3850 will not be able to run at full speed b/c the cpu will be unable to keep up. Bottlenecking refers to when some component of the machine is moving much faster than another critical part, and the other part keeps the entire machine from moving as fast as it could otherwise. Think of it lots of information that has to move through the neck of a bottle, it gets crunched and can't move as fast.

 

[dark2099]

Basically it means that the 3850 will not be able to run at full speed b/c the cpu will be unable to keep up. Bottlenecking refers to when some component of the machine is moving much faster than another critical part, and the other part keeps the entire machine from moving as fast as it could otherwise.

The card will run at full speed, but since your processor probably will not be able to keep up with the card, it will seem that the card isn't running at its full potential.

 

[snakebite025]

So dark, in my situation, would you stick with my current setup and get the VC for the money's sake, or upgrade totally, and if you chose the latter, what would you upgrade to in terms of mb and cpu for a good price? Sorry, lots of commas in that sentence lol.

 

[calvary1980]

you need a full upgrade and it depends on how much money your going to spend.

- Christine

 

[farlex85]

The card will run at full speed, but since your processor probably will not be able to keep up with the card, it will seem that the card isn't running at its full potential.

Right, which is what I meant. Sorry my language wasn't clear enough I guess.

@snakebite, what is your budget and location.

 

[snakebite025]

Lets say my budget would be under $300.

 

[farlex85]

Lets say my budget would be under $300.

US? And what power supply do you have?

 

[snakebite025]

Around $300, sorry for the double post. Yes, US

 

[snakebite025]

$400? I already have a case and a power supply.

 

[dark2099]

I would say based on your budget, any upgrades for now should be kept fairly simple since Intel and AMD probably will be releasing new processors around the end of this year (more certain about Intel than AMD) so if you save up you could get what technically are old technology but for better prices than you could now, and would still perform well.

 

[snakebite025]

Could you be specific Dark2099 on what upgrades?

 

[BUCK NASTY]

This is a noob question, but what exactly is bottlenecking?

DEFINITION - A bottleneck, in a communications context, is a point in the enterprise where the flow of data is impaired or stopped entirely. Effectively, there isn't enough data handling capacity to handle the current volume of traffic. A bottleneck can occur in the user network or storage fabric or within graphics processors where there is excessive contention for internal system resources, such as CPU processing power, memory, or I/O (input/output). As a result, data flow slows down to the speed of the slowest point in the data path. This slow down affects application performance, especially for databases and other heavy transactional applications such as graphics, and can even cause some applications to crash.

Your Celeron D may not have the bandwidth to handle the 3850. I was a die-hard AGP fan and thought my system(Athlon64 3000+/X1950 Pro) still rocked until I built my new system. What an incredible difference in the performance. You can switch to PCI-E fairly cheaply with $125-150.00 for Mobo/Cpu/Mem combo's. You should definitely consider the upgrade.

 

[snakebite025]

Thanks for the advice Buck Nasty, but what mobo and cpu specifically would you reccomend?

 

[farlex85]

Motherboard

Processor

Video Card

Memory

All that together is $288 before rebates. That celeron will also bottleneck your 3850, but not nearly as bad as the one you have now. And if you can stretch your budget a bit more, you can get a better processor and motherboard to try to alliviate all the bottleneck. What power supply do you have, b/c that is critical to making this work.

 

[dark2099]

Could you be specific Dark2099 on what upgrades?

I would say get the HD 3850 and a better CPU, Pentium 4 Prescott would be nice, check ebay to find one.

 

[snakebite025]

Farlex that was a huge help, thanks man. And as for the power supply, I believe mine is sitting at 400 watts. I dont know anything about it above that, i installed it a while back.

 

[farlex85]

Farlex that was a huge help, thanks man. And as for the power supply, I believe mine is sitting at 400 watts. I dont know anything about it above that, i installed it a while back.

No problem, if you can look on the side of it, the brand should be posted. Also, there will be a chart. Try to look at the chart and see how many Amps are in the 12v rail. A decent 400w should cover it, but these new cards take a lot of juice. If it's a psu that came w/ a case or something, the quality may be lacking, and you might be asking for trouble if you upgrade w/ it. Here's a good one if you do need to upgrade it.

 

[snakebite025]

I'm gonna call it a night, Farlex I will check on the other stats of my power supply tomorrow. Thanks for the help so far everybody!

P.S- The whole reason I'm upgrading my PC is for Diablo III, and I dont even know what the requirements are on it yet.

 

[calvary1980]

it wont be much.

- Christine

 

[farlex85]

I'm gonna call it a night, Farlex I will check on the other stats of my power supply tomorrow. Thanks for the help so far everybody!

P.S- The whole reason I'm upgrading my PC is for Diablo III, and I dont even know what the requirements are on it yet.

Shouldn't be too steep, blizzard keeps things smooth, but you will probably need to upgrade. That won't be for a while though so if you wanna stave off upgrading until then like dark said current components will be cheaper and new stuff will be around if you have more money.

 

[DaMulta]

http://forums.techpowerup.com/showthread.php?t=62462

Well my friends 1800XT finally died on Wednesday of last week. I was going to give him my 2900XT yesterday, only to find out that he had ordered a PALiT 8800GT 1GB that had came in on Friday. So we installed it in his machine yesterday afternoon.

His system
939 single core 3200 2Ghz
4 x 512 DDR400 2-2-2-5
MATX Motherboard
Live Creative card
Normal SATA drive 80Gig

Old Video card 1800XT 512

Now we installed VDO overclocking tool on his machine, and moved the core to 750Mhz with the fan at 100%. The results with this card being installed on his system was shocking. Need For Seed Pro Street went from not really playable on any setting, to playable on the highest settings at 1280x1024. Crysis went from playable at low on 800x600 to playable on high WITH 8xAA at 1280x1024. I'm not lying about this, it shocked me as well. COD4 frame rates shot right up and he had no more slow downs on it with everything on high on his monitors max 1280 resolution.

This just proves it so much to me. If you are a gamer and you have a PCI-E slot with 2 Gigs of ram there is no need to run out and buy a new CPU. All you really need to do is run out and buy a new powerful video card for fantastic results on a old machine.

 

[Wile E]

http://forums.techpowerup.com/showthread.php?t=62462

He has a S478 Celeron and AGP. I think it's time to do a full upgrade in this situation. lol.