computer upgrade time

[Hammer]

Ok I am getting the itch after reading about you guys upgrading.
I have an Asus P5Ne SLI motherboard and win xp.
Currently using Core 2 Duo E4300 (1.8GHz,800FSB,L2:2MB,65W,rev.L2) CPU.
I think this is the best CPU I can get for my motherboard: Core 2 Duo E8600 (3.33GHz,1333FSB,L2:6MB,65W,rev.E0)

Or this:
Core 2 Quad Q9650(rev.E0,3.00GHz,1333FSB,L2:12MB)

We mostly use this computer for games. No video editing.
So I think a quad core is overkill?

Next the video I have is a 9800 series geforce.

Would it pay to go to a new geforce 450 or 460 or 560 series?
I am limited to directX 9.0c with win XP.
So would these new cards add any speed or are they mostly for directX 11 support?
Would they even be compatible with direct X 9.0c?

I am not yet ready to upgrade to win 7.

[Polygon]

It wouldn't pay to upgrade to a 450, 460, or 560 if you're sticking with the processor. What's the most graphic intensive game you play?

[Hammer]

It will be sword of the stars 2 which is do for release in Sept of 2011.
The front runner for a new CPU so far is: Core 2 Duo E8600 (3.33GHz,1333FSB,L2:6MB,65W,rev.E0)
I will be running win xp and direct X 9.
What would be the best video card upgrade for this system?
Currently using a geforce 9800GTX.

[Frostedbutts]

Are you against upgrading to Windows 7? Or using an ATI card?

At the point that you're dropping $200 on a "new" processor, and then limiting yourself to those cards on an obsolete OS, it sounds to me like you should just hold out for a little bit more and build an entirely new machine. You can probably sell your old one to make back a decent portion of the money you spend, too.

[Polygon]

Well, your system could run it as is but not at full settings. However, with that CPU and say a GTS 450 you could run it on full. I would suggest you go with the 450 or 460 if you're on a budget. If not grab the 560 for a little future proofing.

[Hammer]

Are you against upgrading to Windows 7? Or using an ATI card?

At the point that you're dropping $200 on a "new" processor, and then limiting yourself to those cards on an obsolete OS, it sounds to me like you should just hold out for a little bit more and build an entirely new machine. You can probably sell your old one to make back a decent portion of the money you spend, too.

I have 6 networked computers using win xp. 3 of them are too old to upgrade to win 7 ever. Win 7 upgrade on the 3 that can upgrade will require more ram and larger hard drives. Win 7 upgrade is too expensive for my network at this time. I would also have to upgrade to office 7 on all of these. etc... too much!

[Jeremy C]

Are you adverse to overclocking? If not, find a q6600 G0 and go to town. Those chips are almost guaranteed to hit 3.0-3.6 without much help, and will cost a lot less than the other q processors you're looking at due to the EOL price bump. My B3 stepping ran at 3.15 stock voltage all day with no issues. Since your board is an x38 chipset it should be able to handle the load of a quad core just fine, and I honestly would never buy a dual core at this point in time. Even if the game itself doesn't utilize all 4 cores, responsiveness going in and out of the game or doing other things while gaming is greatly improved over dual core systems.

For gaming, anything higher than a 460 and you will really need an overclocked quad core to not bottleneck the GPU. Even with a 3.6GHz+ OC'd quad, you're going to be up against the limit of the CPU to handle the information (well, unless you turn up the eye candy enough and have a high enough resolution monitor to tax the card, but that's a different story). I generally put more money into my GPU than I do the rest of the parts as I want all the options to crank up. Most games coming out still use a lot of DX9 (thank you, consoles... fuckers) so you're not really missing much by not having DX11 capability.

[91stealthrt2]

man, getting my whole network to windows 7 was a must. 4 pc's and 2 laptops now. Your computers must be like 7 or 8+ years old. My oldest(first PC I built 9 years ago) actually ran windows 7 fine but I couldn't find a good enough video card(cheaply) to support it fully and I didn't want to spend the money to upgrade it. I use WMC and record all the tv shows and then share them over the network. Also have almost 1000 movies, using mymovies plugin for WMC.

you only need like 20gb hd for 7. And you can also run older versions of office. 2003 and newer is supported. 2000 works but has some minor issues.

I'm in the process of putting small SSD drives in my PC's. And have one main PC that also acts as a server to the other rooms for media.

[Hammer]

Are you adverse to overclocking? If not, find a q6600 G0 and go to town. Those chips are almost guaranteed to hit 3.0-3.6 without much help, and will cost a lot less than the other q processors you're looking at due to the EOL price bump. My B3 stepping ran at 3.15 stock voltage all day with no issues. Since your board is an x38 chipset it should be able to handle the load of a quad core just fine, and I honestly would never buy a dual core at this point in time. Even if the game itself doesn't utilize all 4 cores, responsiveness going in and out of the game or doing other things while gaming is greatly improved over dual core systems.

For gaming, anything higher than a 460 and you will really need an overclocked quad core to not bottleneck the GPU. Even with a 3.6GHz+ OC'd quad, you're going to be up against the limit of the CPU to handle the information (well, unless you turn up the eye candy enough and have a high enough resolution monitor to tax the card, but that's a different story). I generally put more money into my GPU than I do the rest of the parts as I want all the options to crank up. Most games coming out still use a lot of DX9 (thank you, consoles... fuckers) so you're not really missing much by not having DX11 capability.

Thanks Jeremy,

I will oc the cpu. The Core 2 Duo E8600 (3.33GHz,1333FSB,L2:6MB,65W,rev.E0) was the fastest CPU I could put on the motherboard. In my first post I listed the wrong motherboard. It is a P5n-e SLI ASUS board. The fastest quad core it can support has 1066FSB, 2.66GHz,L2:2MB,95W the front side bus speed and L2 cache of 2 MB would make it quite a bit slower than the E8600. The E8600 is able to hold oc speeds over 4 GHz on my motherboard without problems. And it does not throw that much heat which is good for the rest of the system like the video cards.

How about driver support? Will a geforce 460 have driver support for win xp and direct X 9.0c? Or are they simply designed for win 7?

Win 7 is nice but I have around 100 hours invested in each machine on my network installing and patching programs to work with win XP. To buy 6 copies of win 7 and office and reinstall and patch all the programs on all the hard drives is not something I want to do ever. The whole system does what I need it to do now with the simple exception of the one high end gaming rig. If I change this machine over to win 7 will I still be able to swap office data between a win 7 and win XP machines? Word files etc? Will it still work on my network with XP machines?

Has anyone gone to a LAN party with a mix of win 7 and XP machines? How does that work out for a gaming session?

[Jeremy C]

I had that board. Don't even bother looking at quad cores. I had a hard time keeping the q6600 stable at stock clocks on that board. I'm not sure I would go with the e8600 as you are already at such a high FSB. To get a good solid OC I would look for chips that have the 1066 fsb with a higher multiplier. The chips with lower multiplier/higher FSB are much more difficult to get high clocks from.

As for your questions on 7 - XP plays just fine with 7. I had a few small problems with 7 wanting admin rights to certain XP files after the upgrade, but it didn't take much time to figure it out. I've ran a home network with one 7 machine, two XP machines, and a 2K Server box and there were no issues. Now I'm down to three 7 boxes (with plans on a fourth), and so much happier (network sharing is infinitely better in 7 than XP - not even on the same level). There is no issue with swapping Office data. Depending on which version of 7 you buy, you can install virtual XP and not even worry about compatibility. Another reason to think about win7: 64-bit OS. With games today and any games coming out, you're going to start running into ram limitations on XP. I regularly see 2-3GB of ram usage in game, and if I'm multi tasking I've used up all 6gb I have installed. XP simply doesn't give you an option to put in large amounts of ram due to the 32-bit OS (XP64 doesn't exist in my book).

All nVidia drivers still play nice with all new hardware and XP. XP support isn't going to fade for years to come on any hardware. Software incompatibility will start to show up more before you run into hardware compatibility problems.

[a2j]

I recently build couple of computers with SSD. even with low end mobo, cpu and ram, those machines fly! win7 or mac os x. I'd get SSD.

[Hammer]

I recently build couple of computers with SSD. even with low end mobo, cpu and ram, those machines fly! win7 or mac os x. I'd get SSD.

Seems like this tech still has a lot of failures. I have read a lot of complaints about it. But when it works it is great. I wonder how stable these drives are after they are rewritten a few times. It should be said that these solid state drives do nothing for improving frame rate in games. But if a game does a lot of file swaping mainly because you are short on ram and use a ram drive then a SSD can really boost game performance. But they seem to have a high failure rate. When I compare to a platter hard drive I have only had one hard drive failure ever since 1984. In fact my oldest hard drive is still running from 1984. Mostly useless as it is so small and slow but it does still work.
I have 12 hard drives only one failed to date. The one that failed is 14 years old.

[Hammer]

I had that board. Don't even bother looking at quad cores. I had a hard time keeping the q6600 stable at stock clocks on that board. I'm not sure I would go with the e8600 as you are already at such a high FSB. To get a good solid OC I would look for chips that have the 1066 fsb with a higher multiplier. The chips with lower multiplier/higher FSB are much more difficult to get high clocks from.

As for your questions on 7 - XP plays just fine with 7. I had a few small problems with 7 wanting admin rights to certain XP files after the upgrade, but it didn't take much time to figure it out. I've ran a home network with one 7 machine, two XP machines, and a 2K Server box and there were no issues. Now I'm down to three 7 boxes (with plans on a fourth), and so much happier (network sharing is infinitely better in 7 than XP - not even on the same level). There is no issue with swapping Office data. Depending on which version of 7 you buy, you can install virtual XP and not even worry about compatibility. Another reason to think about win7: 64-bit OS. With games today and any games coming out, you're going to start running into ram limitations on XP. I regularly see 2-3GB of ram usage in game, and if I'm multi tasking I've used up all 6gb I have installed. XP simply doesn't give you an option to put in large amounts of ram due to the 32-bit OS (XP64 doesn't exist in my book).

All nVidia drivers still play nice with all new hardware and XP. XP support isn't going to fade for years to come on any hardware. Software incompatibility will start to show up more before you run into hardware compatibility problems.

Thanks again I was not aware win 7 was this backwardly compatible. An idea is forming. Maybe get a SSD drive and install win 7 on it. Make it the boot drive. Keep XP on the hard drive. If the SSD drive fails I can go back to make the hard drive with XP the boot drive and have XP running as a backup. It would be nice to have a multiple boot configuration for windows I really do not want to reinstall all the software under win 7 and repatch it all. Is it possible to do this with win 7 and xp? Some of the old games might not even work under win 7. Can I have 2 boot drives and choose which one to boot from at a prompt during startup?

[Jeremy C]

If you are worried about SSD's, get an intel one. I've had mine for a couple months, and so far there has been no issues. With the wear leveling and updates to the controller/firmware that Intel has done their SSD's are great. Mine has actually increased in speed significantly since installing it. The Win7 startup screen doesn't even get through it's entire animation sequence before I'm at the login screen. I have my SSD as my OS drive and have a pair of velociraptors in raid-0 for gaming.

To be honest, I haven't done a dual boot system in so long that I doubt my knowledge for that will be worth much anymore. I do know that to install 7, you cannot do a straight upgrade to 7 but requires a fresh partition.

[91stealthrt2]

I have 2 intel SSD's with 0 issues. Just bought a kingston(cheap) that has huge failure rates if you don't upgrade the firmware. (haven't used it yet)

If you only need one gaming w7 machine then just put professional on it w/ xp mode for the older files and programs.

Personally there has been no software issues for me to need to use my xp mode at all.

If your worried about a drive failing then back up your info. HDD's are super cheap.

[a2j]

any drive can fail. this is why back up is important. I tried OCZ and Kingston SSD. both work fine for quite some time already. HUGE speed upgrade, especially over a 5400rpm laptop drive.

[Mikes2nd]

only SSD failures ive had are with OCZ... Kingston, Crucials are all great for me so far since i switched.