Originally posted by: Budarow
Originally posted by: Mr Vain
Originally posted by: Budarow
LOL...just how "fast" of a video card are you peeps willing to run with any 4CoreDual mobo and it's crippled 4x PCI-E?
If a 8800GT or 9600GT suffers a 10-15% penalty due to the 4x PCI-E (verses a 16x PCI-E), wouldn't a faster video card suffer an even greater penalty? And at some point, the 4x bandwidth will become totally saturated and almost no performance gain will be had no matter how fast the video card. Correct?
There are people installing ATI 4xxx cards on these 4x PCI-e boards at the moment.
This from a user in another thread.
I have this board, I went from an AGP X850XT to a HD4850. I have significant stability issues with the machine, specifically the ati2dvag.dll driver going into infinite loop and crashing the machine. I have 2gb adata pc800, a mild overclock + bsel mod on an E4300, 500W Antec Smart power. I have installed the 2.01 modded bios and disabled the PCIE Downstream item in the advance chipset options. the Ram is set to auto for speed. I can run furmark 1.40 for more than an hour at full stability, I can run Guild Wars at 1600x1200 max settings, seems happy. However, the moment I attempt to do anything more than open Steam, it dies. The overall crashes have reduced, it was doing it with any little thing, but still making the machine difficult.
Has anyone else gotten a 4850 stable on this board yet?
Thanks
If you already got one of these boards with some older DDR Ram, PATA drives and inadequate AGP Card then a move ATI 4xxx card upgrade is not that silly as it still works out as a cheaper option than also buying a new motherboard and DDR2 ram.
No need to go "bold" on Mr. Vain. I don't think it's silly at all to upgrade the video card in this mobo to a certain point (an upgrade from ANY AGP card to say an ATI 4850 for ~$150 would be well worth it in performance gains). Since the ATI 4850 is only ~20-25% faster than a 8800GT, the performance hit from 4x PCI-E to 16x PCI-E might be ~15-20%? So upgrading this mobo to a 4850 for ~$150 (from a slow video card) would make since from a "bang for the buck" standpoint.
And to think of all those "PC enthusiasts" out there cringing at the thought of faster and faster video cards being installed in a 4x slot make me. These same peeps still go on and on about how "fast" AGP cards should NOT be made any more because AGP is "dead".
BUT, if someone's going to spend ~$250 (or more) for a video card (e.g., ATI 4870) for their 4CoreDual PC, I'd recommend using that money to upgrade to a faster mobo with 16x PCI-E (for $80), DDR2 RAM (2GBs at $20) and an ATI 4850 ($150). Much better bang for the buck, but with the pain up swapping everything out.
I'd like to see some benchmarks from an ATI 4870 on 4x PCI-E and 16x PCI-E. Be interesting to see if a 4870 is the "breaking point" for 4x PCI-E.
As for me, I've pretty much "maxed" out my 4CoreDual system with 2GBs of RAM, a 9600GT video card and a E4600 cpu at 2.8 GHz. Next step for me would be passing down the ASRocks PC to the wife and upgrading her PC (an AMD X2 at 2.46 GHz, with 2GBs of RAM and a 8800GT 256MBer) in a year or 2 to the "next" great thing for my use.
Regards,
Bud