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Help needed to decide to keep it or sell it

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This thread is a sequel to this

http://forums.techpowerup.com/showthread.php?t=50549

I got back a new Gigabyte K8N-SLI from RMA. I was using earlier with a X2 3800 (Toledo) + 2GB A-Data ram. But it was broken and had problems with Gigabyte in replacing it. I went and bought a ECS + AM2 4800 combo and its working fine as my Media PC. So will not touch this.

My dilemma is to sell the Gigabyte + cpu + ram and use the money later to build a new AM2 setup like mentioned above or I will buy one of those new ATI 38xx (single or X2) and use everything else? Will I get good performance? Though I will miss going into Quad, but I don't really need to spend a lot.

In this way I can either sell my AGP rig or give to my brother.

What are your thoughts?

Thanks,

:toast:
 
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Will the Gigabyte board take the new 38xx series video cards? They say they are PCI-E 2.0 and not sure if it will be compatible.
 

EnglishLion

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The new PCI-E 2.0 cards are backward compatible from what I understand. As are the new PCI-E 2.0 mobos with older cards.

You just loose bandwidth with a PCI-E2.0 card in a PCI-E1.0 slot
 
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So will it be good enough if I just buy one of those 38xx or 88xx series video card? I don't need whole new AM2 setup right?
 

ShadowFold

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My HD 3850(PCI-E 2.0) works on my DS3L-P35(PCI-E 16x) also the HD 3870X2 is not PCI-E 2.0
 

BullGod

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The new PCI-E 2.0 cards are backward compatible from what I understand. As are the new PCI-E 2.0 mobos with older cards.

You just loose bandwidth with a PCI-E2.0 card in a PCI-E1.0 slot

Actually you don't as there is no card out there that can max the PCIE 1 specifications. Getting a new AM2 board seems like a good idea to me...
 

EnglishLion

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Actually you don't as there is no card out there that can max the PCIE 1 specifications. Getting a new AM2 board seems like a good idea to me...

That is very true... at the moment! Try running a high end 8x AGP card in a 4x slot, it works but you're missing out.

Maybe somepeople have the money to upgrade more regularly than I do but I tend to like to factor into my motherboard features that I can see myself using down the line, even if they are pointless today.
 
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That is very true... at the moment! Try running a high end 8x AGP card in a 4x slot, it works but you're missing out.

Maybe somepeople have the money to upgrade more regularly than I do but I tend to like to factor into my motherboard features that I can see myself using down the line, even if they are pointless today.

Actually thats my problem. I am coming from MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum which has 2 IDE, 4 SATA, All the audio options, Firewire ports, 4 pci slots and good overclocking features. No board in the AM2 setup is close enough to that in feature set. Especially very few comes with 2 IDE connectors to connect 4 IDE drives. I don't want to throw away all those I invested. I don't know why the f..k the mobo manufacturers do this. SATA is good, but what to do with those IDE? My IDE 200G drive is just 5 months old.:mad:

Gigabyte has similar setup with the Nforce4 SLI chipset for AM2. But will that be good enough?
 

EnglishLion

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Actually thats my problem. I am coming from MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum which has 2 IDE, 4 SATA, All the audio options, Firewire ports, 4 pci slots and good overclocking features. No board in the AM2 setup is close enough to that in feature set. Especially very few comes with 2 IDE connectors to connect 4 IDE drives. I don't want to throw away all those I invested. I don't know why the f..k the mobo manufacturers do this. SATA is good, but what to do with those IDE? My IDE 200G drive is just 5 months old.:mad:

Gigabyte has similar setup with the Nforce4 SLI chipset for AM2. But will that be good enough?

If you need to connect an ide drive to a sata interface, you just need one of these.
http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=SIL3611&cat=CBL
 
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Cooling Silenx 4 pipe Tower cooler + 2 x Cougar 120mm fan, 3 x 120mm, 1 x 200 mm Red LED fan
Memory Kingston HyperX DDR3 1866 16GB + Patriot Memory DDR3 1866 16GB
Video Card(s) Asus R9 290 OC @ GPU - 1050, MEM - 1300
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