I’ve been itching to upgrade my motherboard/processor for awhile. I’ve had it for years, and while it still runs okay, I’ve fallen way behind in the gaming world.
It’s a Athlon XP 2000+, clockspeed 1.67Ghz. Also, my motherboard doesn’t have a PCI-E slot, and I’d like to upgrade my video card sometime in the near future. From what I understand, AGP is going out of style quickly.
I found a motherboard/CPU combo on Tiger direct. Athlon 64 3200+ (2.0GHz) processor and a motherboard with PCI Express for fairly cheap. Also, the motherboard seems like it’s pretty upgradeable, and accepts Athlon’s dual core processors.
The thing is, even though it’s 64 bit, I’m not running many 64 bit apps, and I’m not sure if there will be any big increase in performance.
So here’s my options:
1.) Buy the new motherboard, and in a few months, upgrade my video card(Radeon 9200SE, by the way). Upgrade to dual-core later.
2.) Wait a few months, and buy a new motherboard and dual core processor. Buy a new video card later.
Also, are there any benchmark tests of the Pentium D vs. the Athlon 64 X2?
The “64” part of the Athlon 64 will be of literally no consequence to you unless you’re running Windows XP 64-bit Edition, which you probably aren’t. (Is anyone?) While being of potential benefit down the road when 64-bit apps become more common, it is right now not a whole lot more than a marketing gimmick.
Where you will achieve benefit WRT the processor itself is in both the speed of the processor (obviously) and the size of its L2 cache. A larger cache means it can hold more of the most recently processed instructions in its cache, which means a higher chance that subsequent instructions given to the processor will still be in the cache and won’t have to be fetched externally, which means a general boost in overall processing speed.
The board you linked to looks fairly basic, but that PCI-E slot is 1x, which means no high speed graphics card support, should that be of any consequence to you. (You need one with PCI-E 16x for that)
What are you looking to spend on this upgrade? There may be more viable alternatives that give you good performance for price while still giving you all available upgrade options for the future. The only problem is that every board I’ve seen with PCI-E 16x does not have an AGP slot, so the motherboard and video card would both have to be upgraded at once.
You may also need to upgrade your RAM, depending on what you have now.
If you are looking to upgrade, I’d go with an AM2 processor and board. AMD will be phasing out Socket 939; it is unlikely they will be developing newer, faster processors going forward. AM2 takes advantage of DDR2 memory, which you’ll also likely have to upgrade.
Alternatively, you could stick with 939 if price is a bigger issue. I would recommend boards by ASUS or MSI - these manufacturers generally get good reviews from the gaming community. Lastly, I usually find Newegg and Zipzoomfly to be cheaper than Tiger Direct, and both are very established, reliable merchants.