Upgrading from a 7600gt to a 9600gt - Is it a good idea ?

[DetConan]

Here is my config :

CPU : Athlon X2 - 4200 (s939)
GPU : 7600 gt
RAM : 4 x 512 DDR
Case Sonata II with 450W

My harddrive is beginning to show some signs of dying on me. I must change it. I will have to bring it at my computer specialist so he can open the case and change the hard drive.

But I begin to wonder if i should not take the opportunity to make him change my GPU too. I would not pay more than $100 (cdn) for a new card, so I think that a 9600gt would be in my price range.

Would it be worth it ? Would it make a big difference in games ? Would it make a difference in photo and video editing application like Photoshop and Premiere Elements ? (Which bring me another question : Does a bigger hard disk can help the performance of photo and video application ? ) At this price range, would it be the best choice.

Thank you for your time and help

 

[tcsenter]

9600GT would be a pretty huge upgrade to 7600GT, probably would be slightly CPU limited but nothing major.

 

[toyota]

Originally posted by: tcsenter
9600GT would be a pretty huge upgrade to 7600GT, probably would be slightly CPU limited but nothing major.

for gaming, yeah pretty much. a 4670 or 9600gt would be as high as I would go with that 4200 X2. having just 2gb of system ram can hurt you too in a couple of games especially if running Vista.

 

[betasub]

Upgrading from a 7600gt to a 9600gt - Is it a good idea ?

Can't see why it wouldn't be a good idea, unless PSU or motherboard prevents it.

A good performance increase (DX9), plus plenty of more modern features (DX10 and the rest), without being overkill for your old CPU platform.

 

[Smartazz]

To answer your questions about whether a bigger hard disk could help you with the performance of photo and video applications, no I think that you'd still be cpu bottlenecked there. A video card might help in Photoshop and Premiere, though I don't know by how much. I think that Photoshop uses GPU acceleration for certain tasks now, I'm unsure about Premiere Elements though.

 

[bryanW1995]

Originally posted by: toyota

Originally posted by: tcsenter
9600GT would be a pretty huge upgrade to 7600GT, probably would be slightly CPU limited but nothing major.

for gaming, yeah pretty much. a 4670 or 9600gt would be as high as I would go with that 4200 X2. having just 2gb of system ram can hurt you too in a couple of games especially if running Vista.

way to show some restraint, I'm amazed that you didn't recommend a 4350 b/c the 7600 gt is clearly cpu limited already

 

[firewolfsm]

I would spend a bit more for a 4850 or 5770, the CPU bottleneck would be limited, and you could fix that with your next upgrade. The card will last you twice as long.

 

[toyota]

Originally posted by: firewolfsm
I would spend a bit more for a 4850 or 5770, the CPU bottleneck would be limited, and you could fix that with your next upgrade. The card will last you twice as long.

a 4850 and 5770 are in completely different price brackets. the 5770 is way more than he wants to spend and would be pretty foolish with his 2.2 X2 cpu anyway. a 4850 is a good bang for buck card but if he is not going to upgrade the rest of his system anytime soon then he might as well just get a 4670. that will be about 3 times faster than what he has now so its certainly worth the 50-60 bucks to do that. a 9600gt is also a decent choice but not if its more than 10-15 bucks than the 4670.

 

[AzN]

Originally posted by: bryanW1995

Originally posted by: toyota

Originally posted by: tcsenter
9600GT would be a pretty huge upgrade to 7600GT, probably would be slightly CPU limited but nothing major.

for gaming, yeah pretty much. a 4670 or 9600gt would be as high as I would go with that 4200 X2. having just 2gb of system ram can hurt you too in a couple of games especially if running Vista.

way to show some restraint, I'm amazed that you didn't recommend a 4350 b/c the 7600 gt is clearly cpu limited already

He thinks everything is CPU limited.

 

[iGas]

Originally posted by: Azn

Originally posted by: bryanW1995

Originally posted by: toyota

Originally posted by: tcsenter
9600GT would be a pretty huge upgrade to 7600GT, probably would be slightly CPU limited but nothing major.

for gaming, yeah pretty much. a 4670 or 9600gt would be as high as I would go with that 4200 X2. having just 2gb of system ram can hurt you too in a couple of games especially if running Vista.

way to show some restraint, I'm amazed that you didn't recommend a 4350 b/c the 7600 gt is clearly cpu limited already

He thinks everything is CPU limited.

Could also be PSU limited.

9600GT need a 6 pin connector.

 

[toyota]

Originally posted by: iGas

Could also be PSU limited. 9600GT need a 6 pin connector.

surely his 450watt psu has a 6 pin connector

 

[alcoholbob]

9600GT is a good idea. My X2 4200+ was stuttering a lot with a 7800GT in Bioshock but when I bought an 8800GT it was completely smooth. Definitely a good upgrade.

 

[DetConan]

I am not that good in computers. I do not know if my PSU has a 6 pin connector (whatever that is)

The PSU came with the Sonata II. It is an Antec Smartpower 2.0

 

[JosephBAdams]

A long time ago I jumped from 7800 GTX to 9600 GT. HUGE performance boost. However, NVIDIA's latest round of drivers are a headache on a lot of the games that I play.

 

[TurtleCrusher]

He is not CPU limited at this point. It's an X2 4200+.

I've had an ATI 3850 512mb and a Zotac 8800GTS 320mb with my s939 X2 4200+ and they were perfect matches. The 9600gt is right there.

 

[crazylegs]

9600GT is an awesome value for money card, been using one myself up until very recently.

Managed to play all my games at 1920x1200, with medium to high settings.

 

[toyota]

Originally posted by: Scholzpdx
He is not CPU limited at this point. It's an X2 4200+.

I've had an ATI 3850 512mb and a Zotac 8800GTS 320mb with my s939 X2 4200+ and they were perfect matches. The 9600gt is right there.

perfect matches? how do you come to that conclusion? with a 9600gt he could get better performance from a faster cpu so saying its a perfect match seems odd. yeah its not really enough to worry about in most games with that level of gpu so if thats what you are saying then it makes sense. the 9600gt is certainly about as high as i would recommend that 4200 X2.

 

[Schmide]

All this talk totally ignores the fact that a more powerful card can play at higher resolutions regardless of the CPU driving it.

 

[toyota]

Originally posted by: Schmide
All this talk totally ignores the fact that a more powerful card can play at higher resolutions regardless of the CPU driving it.

regardless? so a 9800gt can play at a higher resolution than a 9600gt if you have a 2.4 P4? lol. I hate to tell you but when you start getting close to a cpus absolute limit then the res doenst matter since the game will be nearly unplayable anyway. of course different gpu and cpu combos can vary greatly in performance from game to game.

for example if I lower my cpu to 2.0, Batman sees zero benefit when overclocking my gpu past stock speeds even at 1920x1080 so having a card faster than my stock clocked gtx260 is of no use. 1024x768 all the way to 1920x1080 will result in the same framerate no matter how much faster card you go with in that game with the E8500 lowered to 2.0. for some perspective my cpu at 2.0 would be like an athlon 64 X2 at 3.0. so even though its rare, there are plenty of people that are close to the point where any more gpu power wont do squat in some games.

the op would get a massive improvement with a 4670 or 9600gt but even those cards would still noticeably benefit from a faster cpu in some newer games especially at a lower res. I would certainly take the 9600gt over the 4670 if they are within 10-15 bucks in price though. btw did he even say what res he is at?

 

[Schmide]

How is what I said a lol?

I don't know what point you're trying to make? A lot of what you said had nothing to do with what I said. A 9600gt will bog down above 1680x1050, a 4870+ not so much. Most of us understand the concept of a CPU cap, but fill/rasterization rate has nothing to do with that. As the resolution goes up the geometry remains the same.

 

[toyota]

Originally posted by: Schmide
How is what I said a lol?

I don't know what point you're trying to make? A lot of what you said had nothing to do with what I said. A 9600gt will bog down above 1680x1050, a 4870+ not so much. Most of us understand the concept of a CPU cap, but fill/rasterization rate has nothing to do with that. As the resolution goes up the geometry remains the same.

I was doing the lol about the 2.4 P4 in my comment. anyway you said regardless of the cpu and thats not true. if you are already 100% cpu limited at very high res then a faster card would be of no benefit. of course its almost impossible to actually be 100% cpu limited at all resolutions with a decent modern cpu so I gave you a silly example of a 2.4 P4. I did give you a rare example of how it can happen in some games even with the equivalent of a 3.0 A64 X2 though.

 

[Schmide]

Originally posted by: toyota
I was doing the lol about the 2.4 P4 in my comment. anyway you said regardless of the cpu and thats not true. .

Well a resolution limitation is regardless of the CPU, it's completely GPU. You just gave an example of CPU limitations which has absolutely nothing to do with what I originally said.

For example. COD 4-5 a 4200x2 can render at least 90fps on any map. A 9600gt will never reach this number at 1920x1200, a 4850 maybe, a 4870/90 easily.

 

[lopri]

Originally posted by: toyota

Originally posted by: Schmide
How is what I said a lol?

I was doing the lol about the 2.4 P4 in my comment.

So you quote someone else to laugh at yourself?

 

[lopri]

Originally posted by: Schmide
For example. COD 4-5 a 4200x2 can render at least 90fps on any map. A 9600gt will never reach this number at 1920x1200, a 4850 maybe, a 4870/90 easily.

He is talking about a game where X2 4200 can't render 30 FPS under any situation.

 

[TurtleCrusher]

Originally posted by: toyota

Originally posted by: Scholzpdx
He is not CPU limited at this point. It's an X2 4200+.

I've had an ATI 3850 512mb and a Zotac 8800GTS 320mb with my s939 X2 4200+ and they were perfect matches. The 9600gt is right there.

perfect matches? how do you come to that conclusion? with a 9600gt he could get better performance from a faster cpu so saying its a perfect match seems odd. yeah its not really enough to worry about in most games with that level of gpu so if thats what you are saying then it makes sense. the 9600gt is certainly about as high as i would recommend that 4200 X2.

In most games you'll be GPU limited if the game can effectively use two threads. The X2 4200+ is two 3500+'s on one die, which still packs quite a bit of power. In a CPU heavy game such as TF2, I typically got 60-140fps on all high/very high 2xAA with my 8800GTS 320mb @ 1680x1050. When I tested my 4830 (w/OC) on the same setup my fps still rose a bit here and there, but really that was the ceiling for that CPU.

My FPS in crysis went from 15-17 to 24-27 when I went from the 8800GTS to the 4830. 27FPS in Crysis is still fast enough. My Q8200 @ 3ghz doesn't offer hardly a couple FPS increase. This shows that the 4200+ can still hang with the mid-range in most games.

Really, the 4200+ and the G80 core were near/at top of the line when released. The 9600GT is right there and make sense being paired together. However, anything above the 3870/8800(G80)/9600GT/GSO is not a good idea. It's money wasted at that point.