An old AGPer wants some advice

Heya experts....I would like some advice. I am running an old AGP board, the Abit KR7A 133, with a 3400+ processor. At least my processor is the fastest available for this board!

Anyway, I am not in the position to upgrade my entire system, so I am looking at getting an x1950 pro, a 600 watt power supply, and a total of 3 gigs of RAM. I currently have 1.5 gigs, so the 512 mg strip will get pulled and replaced with two 1 gig strips.

I do not plan to get Vista for at least a year, so DX10 hardware is not a concern for me at all as that hardware will be much cheaper in a year when I do get Vista and a total system upgrade.

Does anyone have any advice for me in this area? By going with an x1950 pro and 3 gigs of RAM, I hope to keep this machine viable for the next year, with the obvious exception of DX10 games.

Thanks!

that should work, but that isn't exactly the fastest processor. is that a socket 939 or 754?mig_killer2

It is a socket 462...and a 3400+ is the fastest processor for a socket 462. I once saw a 3600+ for this socket 462, but that was years ago when I bought it. They are no longer available even on eBay (Well, until one is listed of course, but that hasn't everhappend to my knowledge).

I dunno, to be honest i would save your money, scrap the board and drag you sorry ass into the 21st century with all its pci-e, ddr2, c2d fangled goodness.

Seriously though, there is little point in spending all that money in upgrades now, your processor it outdated and upgrading everything else will help, im sure, but it will be better value for money to get a new mobo, cpu, gpu and ram at this stage.

I would also not recommend spending lost of money on a system with that type of motherboard. Certainly not on the ram

1) You won't benefit from 3 Gb of ram

2) that ram won't fit a modern machine so it will be wasted once you upgrade the mobo

I dunno, to be honest i would save your money, scrap the board and drag you sorry ass into the 21st century with all its pci-e, ddr2, c2d fangled goodness.

crazytom49

As for your rig, 1.5GB is plenty - maybe another 512MB if you really want, but to be honest, 1.5GB is more than enough. As for the graphics card, I'd check out the cheapest AGP card you can find out of these: 7800GS, X1950GT, 7600GT, 7900GS, and X1950Pro. Those will help keep your system decent for another year, but remember: The less you spend now, the more you'll have to spend later.

Also, if you're not that extreme on graphics, a 7600GS would likely save you $50, and still be a powerful enough card to carry your system until Christmas.

pbbbt, who gets 3 gigs of ram?!

Is that 3400 a Sempron? I always thought the fastest Socket A CPU was the Athlon XP 3200. My_name_a_Borat

The OP is mistaken. You are correct. For s462, the Semprons' largest performance number was something less than 3200, but here is the entire list of all of them:

http://www.thedigerati.us/info/amdcpuchart.html#ath

The only S462 model numbers that I have familiarity with "133" in them have been "PC-133" boards that do not use DDR and thus would put a major crimp in the performance potential of an AMD K7 CPU. I'll look that MB one up in a moment (hmm? I'll have to post this now and edit a further comment in, it seems).

(Here's the edit.) Abit is seemingly embarrassed about that one, and makes it difficult to find information about it now. It used the Via KT-266 Chipset and does have a limit on RAM, since the maximum FSB it expected to work with was 133 MHz (PC 2100, or DDR266). The two fastest AMD CPUs on the s462 interface require DDR400 to run at full speed. The maximum speed CPU the KT-266 boards run natively (without some variety of overclocking) is probably the XP 2600 Thoroughbred A.

There are one or two programs that will benefit from more than 1 1/2 GBs of RAM, with Gothic III being infamous in that regard. A total of 2 GB can be very useful, but the rate of return from more than that falls off rapidly.

(Some edits added here) Although this one was not nearly as much of a waste of money (compared to the KT-133 Chipset I expected to see) to put a really good GPU in such a limited performance system (yes, this time we can safely say that there will surely be bottlenecking -- maybe not a lot, but some, between the effective maxiumum effectiveness of the very fastest CPU for that MB, and the X1950 video card), it's just not an economically sound idea to go much past an AGP X1650 these days for any system, because spending more than about $100 - $130 on a video card means you will get too little use out of it to justify the expense. Within a year, there just would be no point in hanging onto this old relic.

Wow, an old KR7A? man, that brings back memories. That was the first board to EVER get DDR400 speeds via overclocking, and took MONTHS of burn-in to get there, what with the lack of an AGP/PCI clock lock. Had to set hard drives to PIO mode too. :lol: man, talk about a legend of a board.

Sadly though, even if you don't plan on going for DirectX 10 and Vista, it would be hard to justify just getting even those upgrades... the cost to do it versus how much of an improvement you'd see is far too small for what you'd need to spend to make that upgrade happen. We're already starting to see games that literally mandate something from the A64 era at least, and more importantly games like Supreme Commander that make it impossible to play unless you have a minimum of a dual-core processor (or two physical processors) to really play effectively.

The only S462 model numbers that I have familiarity with "133" in them have been "PC-133" boards that do not use DDR and thus put a major crimp in the performance potential of an AMD K7 CPU. I'll look that one up in a moment (hmm? I'll have to post this now and edit a further comment in, it seems).

Abit is seemingly embarrassed about that one, and makes it difficult to find information about it now. It used the Via KT-266 Chipset and does have a limit on RAM, since the maximum FSB it will work with is 133 MHz (PC 2100, or DDR266). The two fastest AMD CPUs on the s462 interface require DDR400 to run at full speed. The maximum soeed CPU the KT-266 runs natively is probably the XP 2600 Thoroughbred A.

There are one or two programs that will benefit from more than 1 1/2 GBs of RAM, with Gothic III being infamous in that regard.

Although it's not nearly as much of a wast of money (compared to the KT-133 Chipset I expected to see) to put a really good GPU in such a limited performance system (yes, this time we can safely say that there will surely be bottlenecking -- maybe not a lot, but some, between the effective maxiumum effectiveness of the very fastest CPU for that MB, and the X1950 video card).Kiwi_1

But if you need a short-term upgrade, I would upgrade to 2GB's of RAM at least, and get a modest video card improvement, so that you can save more money for being able to do a total upgrade bigger and/or sooner. No need to spend too much on an AGP if you plan on going PCI-E soon enough.