Time to upgrade or wait?

[tyoung88]

Hi All,

It's been awhile since I came to this forum. Specifically it's been about 2 years since you guys helped me build my 1.6a -> 2.4. I recently received a Radeon 9800pro as a gift and was wondering if now would be a good time to upgrade.

Current Rig:
P4 1.6a @ 2.4ghz 600mhz fsb
Samsung PC2700 512mb
Abit BG-7 (845G)
Radeon 9800pro 128mb (Ati built)

I'm not really sure where the bottlenecks in my current setup may be but I doubt I could push the cpu too much further with say faster memory. So basically looking for advice to build a new OC rig. I use my computer for surfing, web dev, photoshop, gaming, dvdshrink. Would I see a huge improvement by going to say a 3.2-3.4ghz setup? It seems like there are a lot of new technologies on the horizon such as PCI-Express, 64bit extensions, etc.

Thanks!

 

[o1die]

I don' think you'll see that much of an improvement. If you must upgrade, Fry's electronics is the way to go. They recently had the 2.8c with motherboard for $169 in my area.

 

[myocardia]

Well, if it's worth $500-600 to you to upgrade, I think you'd see quite a bit of a performance difference. Of course, if you aren't going to overclock your new processor, then you won't have to buy new ram. You will have to borrow some PC3200, though, so you can set up the bios to handle the slower ram that you already have. Just remember that you won't be able to take advantage of the hyperthreading unless you upgrade to (or already have) Windows XP.

 

[RobCur]

if you have the dough to blow, go right ahead

 

[tyoung88]

So what I think I'm hearing is that although there are newer and faster processors I won't really see a significant enough performance increase to really justify the cost at the present time. Example, I won't see the improvement that I saw when I upgraded from a PIII-800 to the P4 1.6a@2.4. Additionally, there aren't any real bottlenecks in the system I currently have setup?

Thanks again!

 

[Falloutboy]

I'd wait a few mounths at least your system will run any game quite well for the next year

 

[DaNorthface]

do you guys think it's a good time for me to upgrade my duron 800@1000??
i'm on pc chips mATX motherboard too.. all hard modded overlock. It actually runs pretty good, never crashes at all and it does everything i need it to do.. but i just recently got a dvd burner so i need some extra cpu power to recode/shrink..

 

[Falloutboy]

yeah I think its time for you to upgrade northface. I was running that chip 3 years ago (4 upgrades ago)

 

[Wingznut]

The question you need to answer is: What can your PC NOT do that you want it to do? Does it run your applications ok?