I'm going to make a long story short. I plan on building a computer from scratch for myself, but not for 1 or 2 more years. my cpu is slow (+2400 sempron). I see a AMD Athlon +3000 socket 754 chip for 50$ on new egg. Sweet, I'll buy it and i should be set until i upgrade a few years down the road. The store i (my mom) bought the comp from told me i had a 754 socket. i pull off my cpu cooler and find a have a 462 socket (WTF! this was severely obsolete when i bought it)
I told someone what had happened and he told me to just upgrade the motherboard for cheep. i told him i didn't want to go through reformatting the hard drive and all that crap. I admit I'm fairly ignorant to computers, but my common sense told me this can't be done. He said that you can take a hard drive and just plug it into a new motherboard and it would work just fine. I figured settings with the board wouldn't be in sink and it wouldn't even be able to read the hard disk. Don't you have to set up a bios or something like that?
Is this possible??!!

EDIT:
Sorry i meant a new 3200.

The Hard drive would work just fine on a new mobo. Don't bother "upgrading" to a 3000+. Thats not even worth $50 IMO. Save up and shell out a couple hundred dollars for a whole new mobo, CPU, memory, and video card. Then rip out the harddrive, and cd/dvd drives from your old machine.

Your hard drives will work fine on whatever mobo you decide to go with, unless they are fried. The bios is stored on the mobo( I believe) and has nothing to do with your hard drives.

Thank you for the quick replies.

Wow, really. Cool. Think I'll spend 60-80 on a new mobo and give my self a little upgrade.

Ya, i agree that is stupid to spend money on such a small upgrade, but right now I'm pretty much satisfied with my comps speed. I'm just looking a year and a half down the road. I'll wait till quad possessors a affordable and i got my moneys worth out of my AGP graphics card.

The only things you'll need to watch out for when upgrading your motherboard, are the CPU socket, the RAM type and i guess these days sometimes the GFX card socket. I think the other stuff should fit just fine, ofcourse, the cooling system of your CPU might need a change if you change socket, but i guess that's not too major of an investment. The bios is indeed stored on the motherboard, your had drive really only contains all the data you install on it, like windows or whatever OS you might use, your games, music, and all that kind of stuff. I think it would be nice to go for a AM2 processor, since that's AMD's new line, and it will have a longer life span, and maybe some more upgrade abilities in the near future, than other AMD sockets.

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Hell, is an half-filled auditorium

RedWood said:
I'm going to make a long story short. I plan on building a computer from scratch for myself, but not for 1 or 2 more years.

In one or two years everything will prolly be moot by then.

Anything you price today could very well be so old, that the prices will actually be higher than say, a 939 pin mainboard, or something newer.

For instance, 72 pin dimms are higher than 168 pin simms. Both are available but the dimms are much older, and as such, harder to find now.

/ruminating.

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The best things in life, aren't things.

Good point Orpheus, I think that if you are planning on upgrading in a year or 2, like i did a long long time ago, you should just save up as much money as you can, to buy a completely new pc.
Since you might also find your Graphics card, and that sort of thing, to be outdated and obsolete by then.

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Hell, is an half-filled auditorium

I haven't priced anything yet. I can't even imagine what prices will be 2 years from now. All i know is that i plan on investing 700 to 800 on a entirely new computer when the time comes.

Well, watch the power supply as well, you don't want to put something in there and then have a melt down! A little over a year ago I bought the parts and built the computer I'm using now from scratch, that is: all new. I bought the AMD +3700 for $325, and now I can get it for about $100; it sickens me...

Two things I have not seen go down in price much are HDDs and RAM; not sure why. But because I'm using a 939 socket type, my comp is already dated, but it can run all of todays games just fine with a 7800 gt and fast enough loading times with 2 gigs RAM. Not sure how adequate it'll be in 2 years though; there's still room to upgrade. All I'm saying is: beware of the POWER!!

/2 cents & rant...

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Blog: www.playingarchitecture.net
LinkedIn: Eric Lancon
Twitter:@Riven202

I tink 700-800 euros/dollars would be a fairly decent price to pay for a new pc, i think mine was about 700 euros.
HDDs and RAM don't go down in price too much because the older types don't get made as much as the newer ones, and the newer ones are... new, and thus insanely over priced usualy. :smile:

The power supply shouldn't be that much of a problem if you get one set correctly to your wall outlets power outage right?
(I know the US has something like 10 volts more or less than in Europe or something and that could fry your pc/psu)

Also, don't try to get the best of what's out there unless you have the money to spare, often, slightly lesser equipment can save you 10s if not 100s of euros and will still be good enough to meet your demands.

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Hell, is an half-filled auditorium

LOL, i already learned that the hard way. I installed my ATI x1600 thinking i had a 350 power supply. When i went to replace a buzzing power box i found i had a 250 (eek). Not to mention that i didn't take into account my sound card. I'm now running a 430 W.

Hehe, I've got me a 450W just to be sure my future upgrades won't need a new psu, I hate replacing that thing hehe, maybe I'll just go for an external one if i need a new one next time. :smile:

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Hell, is an half-filled auditorium

I just learned something. The speed of your chip determines the speed of your ram. I'm sure I'm the only one hear who didn't already know that. (but if i wrong tell me) By the time I'm done i'll spend close to 200$. So F@#$ it. I'll save my money. Nice knowing that i can swap drives when i need to though.

That's completely inaccurate.

The speed (clock speed) of your CPU does NOT determine the speed of your memory. That's just ridiculous.

What you may be thinking of is the BUS speed, however (Front Side Bus, in the case of CPU to Memory connections). In which case, yeah, the bus speed will be the lowest of all possible bus speeds.

If your CPU supports a faster FSB speed than your ram is able to go ... then, that directly contradicts the idea of what you are saying.

Waiting isn't a bad idea, though, especially the current state of things.

Personally, I'd say save your money for the "real" upgrade. Plan on getting some SM4 video card with a Dual or Quad core CPU and lots of RAM.

Even building a machine like that right now could still be done for slightly less than $500 USD, assuming you're upgrading only the board, processor, ram, and graphics.

But, in the meantime you may want to brush up on what parts do what and the type of connectors they have ... you were asking if your current HDD would work or not. You should be able to look at the supported socket types of a given motherboard and figure that out on your own.

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Blame it on Microsoft, God does.

I chose my words poorly. My bad. Though, what I'm thinking is probably still incorrect. But am i wrong in thinking if i upgrade to a faster possessor ( http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819103035 ) that my current ram at a speed of 333 wouldn't be compatible? And what does "memory standard" mean? http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813186069 Is it the maximum speed the board can take or is it the only speed it takes?

And ya, I've been reading a lot off this site lately. http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/ saw a link for it some ware in SP. Sweet site, its answered just about any question I've had so far.

If it's the same socket type as the motherboard, then it is compatible.
In general, speeds like what you're talking about don't determine compatibility (though it is important to note that there aren't any 66Mhz DDR ram modules out there)

Seriously, if you're going to get a new processor and board, don't get that socket type. It's already dead.

You should also stay away from OEM stuff when it pertains to vital hardware (CPU, Memory, GPU, Motherboard/Chipset), you want a warranty on those types of things. Most of those are only 2 to 3 years as it is.

If you want any sort of longevity, you need to spend a little more than $150 range. The other issue is that right now there are a lot of legacy issues. AGP, DDR, and 754/939 are all being extinguished. This is a really bad time to do a "minor" upgrade from 3 year old systems. The physical connections are drastically different. Right now is a "Major" upgrade period (has been for about a year).

If you can't spend enough to really build a system, then don't waste your money (buying dead technology to try to upgrade is frivolous). Just wait until you can.

Again, I mentioned that for under $500, right now, you can build a decent system (one that's actually moderately better than mine).

MSI AM2 Socket, nForce 500 SLI chipset (2-3 Year warranty)
Athlon 64 X2 3800+ Processor (3 Year Warranty)
1GB DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Memory (Lifetime Warranty)
EVGA GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB Graphics Card (Lifetime Warranty) [Note: I'd go with the BFG, but it's more than $100 more expensive!]

So, it's not impossible to do some upgrading on a thin budget. You could even massively modify this set up to get something affordable that can be upgraded later.

I remember some BFG GeForce 7600GT cards being sold for under $100! I would imagine they're still under $200 (And they are).

Just don't try to buy shoddy parts to impulsively upgrade at the moment.

In fact, here:

Board: MSI K9N Neo-F nForce 550 $73 (2 Year Warranty)
CPU: AMD Athlon 64 X2 3600+ $89 (Only $14 more expensive than a 3200 single core!) (3 Year Warranty)
Memory: Patriot 512MB DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) $38 (Lifetime Warranty)
GPU: EVGA GeForce 7600GT 256MB $100 (Lifetime Warranty)

Total: $300
You can find other boards or chips too. The point is, a decent system can be build for not an extravagant amount. Too bad it's twice as much as your price range :sad:

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Blame it on Microsoft, God does.

On your motherboard, the set of wires that connects the CPU and ram is known as the FSB. This runs at a certain speed, in your case, 333mhz.

In most cases, the FSB should be set to the maximum speed of your memory. The speed the memory actually runs at is, generally, determined by the FSB speed. The speeds shown on ram are just rated maximums, so having the FSB set to a lower speed than the number on your ram wont cause any problems. Setting the FSB too fast might damage the ram, it might not, best not to try.

As for the CPU, the CPU speed is set at the FSB speed multiplied by some number. So for an 1800mhz CPU, on a 333mhz FSB, the multiplier would be something like 5.5. Again, the speed on your CPU box is just a rated maximum, you can run it faster than that but theres no guarantee it will survive. You set the FSB and the multiplier in your BIOS settings to give the best match for your CPU and RAM.

Hope that helps, its really "for all intents and purposes" style information but it helps to have a general idea of whats going on in the machine.

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"If you talk at all during this lesson, you have detention. Do you understand?"

• My yr11 Economics teacher

Nice peice of info, I think now I get why my pc is so slow, my FSB isn't up to par with the memory etc. I think.

Nice bit of info Wil5on :smile: cheers!

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Hell, is an half-filled auditorium

Thanks guys, I've learned a lot.

I bought the chip thinking it would be a quick, cheep, simple, cheep upgrade, Did i mention cheep?

While I do have enough money to build the computer of my dream (24" monitor and all). I'm just waiting for a good time to upgrade. Seams like Crono thinks that would be now.

When i do upgrade i'll be buying
case
mobo
ram
hard drive
new gfx card (about 200)
chip (200_400)
So that already about $800. EEK!

stay away from the geforce6600

There seems to be a new generation of graphics cards and CPUs to emerge this year. I'd be patient for this summer. You might either pay I-need-a-high-end-PC-right-now taxes or end up with a system that is fast but doesn't support some of the coming key features if you're getting impatient now.

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Why snark works.

I didn't say build a machine right now. I was just showing that you shouldn't upgrade to crap and that, if you are indeed impatient, and need to upgrade now, for not much more you can build a decent system.

That's all.

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Blame it on Microsoft, God does.

I didn't say build a machine right now. I was just showing that you shouldn't upgrade to crap and that, if you are indeed impatient, and need to upgrade now, for not much more you can build a decent system.

That's all.

Thats exactly what i got out of what you said. Sorry if it sounded like i was trying to put words in your mouth. I'll be waiting. Like Reaper said, I'd rather catch the beginning of a wave instead of the end of one.

Later this year, Nvidia is likely putting out the G90 cards (possibly SM5 specification as well). It may be another line entirely though.
I believe, ATI is planning on putting something major out by the beginning of 2008 as well (after whatever they're doing now)

I have a feeling that getting a GF8 card could be a premature investment considering this news (it's something I read, search around for some supporting information or something that completely contradicts it, if you wish.)

AMD is also putting out their quad core chips sometime this year.

This all means by the beginning of next year, GF8 cards will be at least as cheap as current GF7 cards and, hopefully, quad core chips will be down too, at the very least the X2 will be far cheaper than it already is.

At least they don't plan on switching sockets again (I hope)

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Blame it on Microsoft, God does.

Anyone have a guess on when they will change the socket again?

Hopefully not for a while >.> I was gonna get an AMD64 in S754, then AMD announced 939 so I got one of those, then AM2 came out relatively shortly thereafter. Intel has mostly stuck to Socket T in recent years, but man were the prescott Pentium 4's lame. :razz:

I haven't been keeping up with it lately, but AM2 and Socket T should last a while AFAIK. Now it's time for the competition to heat up, quad-core chips to be made widely available, and fast dual-cores to become affordable. At least... that's what I'm hoping.

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o

What I mostly do is looking at what the next big game you consider playing a lot will need. That proved to be helpful for choosing.

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Why snark works.

To be perfectly honest, I'm not seeing the huge difference between 939 and AM2 socket ... physically. They have the same number of pins and pin positions. My guess would be that, generally, the AM2 has the ability to handle a higher FSB.

Because, what really happened wasn't that AMD decided to change sockets. They decided to support faster memory with a new access pattern.

So, I really doubt that a huge socket change will be happening any time soon. (I hear people are pushing GDDR3 to be used for system memory in the upcoming years ... which would make the system BUS unbelievably fast. Though, it would still only transfer 64-bits at any given moment even though that memory can access much higher amounts. Maybe it'll come when multi-core processors are common so the bus will transfer 128-bits or 256-bits (two or four cores respectively) That would be awesome.)

There are other AMD sockets out there alive and kicking, most of them are for incredibly expensive parts (FX, high end Opterons).

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Blame it on Microsoft, God does.

AM2 will also probarbly be expanded on more than the older ones.
I'm guessing you can't just slot a 939 proccesor into an am2 slot and make it work correctly.

And I'm to poor to find out :smile:

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Hell, is an half-filled auditorium

I hear people are pushing GDDR3 to be used for system memory in the upcoming years ... which would make the system BUS unbelievably fast. Though, it would still only transfer 64-bits at any given moment even though that memory can access much higher amounts. Maybe it'll come when multi-core processors are common so the bus will transfer 128-bits or 256-bits (two or four cores respectively) That would be awesome.

/envisions 32GB GDDR3 system RAM running a 256-bit bus at a clock speed synchronous to the 3GHz quad-core CPU

/drools

Edit:

@rant
I knew AM2 was basically 939 with DDR2 support, my only gripe is that AMD changed sockets three times in a relatively short time span, and the CPUs support one socket exclusively. They should have just cut 754 out of the whole equation IMO, from my point of view it was basically a slap in the face to early-adopters in order to say "We have a 64-bit desktop platform!" before Intel. 64-bit is still mostly hype, as unless you're running *nix or enjoy having no compatible drivers and minimal performance gain in a handful of apps, your 64-bit PC is no better than a 32-bit PC, even with MS's toothless donkey dressed as a stallion that is Vista.

I think it'll take another year or two at least before 64-bit is considered the standard for commercial apps and hardware drivers.

@rant off

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o

Well the 754 was really never out by it self. It was around for maybe two to three months before the introduction of socket 939.

If you have a 64-Bit machine now and you're running 32-Bit stuff you should notice a pretty large performance increase. Since, frankly, it can have two sets of 32-bits on the system bus at any given time. The processors are also pipelined so they can operate on more than a single value per cycle (This is not the same thing as having multiple cores). That's why a chip that says 3200+ has an actual clock speed of 2.0GHz or so, but it still has the same throughput as a 3.2 GHz chip.

So there is, in all actuality, an advantage: a chip that has higher throughput and uses less power and produces less heat.

I think the AMD64 was just a stepping stone onto multi-core processors. I think once Quad cores get here, it'll stay that way for awhile. But, who knows, maybe there'll be oct-cores around in the next two years.

To note, I don't think a household system with 32GB of memory would be using the GDDR3 access scheme. I don't think it's fast enough.
Graphics Cards are already on their last leg of using GDDR3 memory. Then again, GPUs are becoming general purpose.

I think in about 15 to 20 years it wouldn't be uncommon to have many general purpose chips in a home machine, especially for games. CPU, GPGPU, AIPU, GPAPU, etc. Companies are already developing AI processors, since AI needs massive speeds the algorithms behind it are usually Combinatorial or NP-C so they have exponential running times.

Really interesting stuff. I think the only processor that really shouldn't exist is a Physics Processor, that really should be done with the graphics, or at the very least ... put the damn thing on the Graphics bus. The PCI bus can only transfer about 32-bits. (This is why people are experiencing slowdown when using current PPU PCI cards)

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Blame it on Microsoft, God does.

I agree, those PhysX cards really don't serve much purpose in advantages. To solve that either A.) get a better processor, or B.) better graphics card. Your right, Crono, they (gpu's) are getting pretty general purpose now with the induction of Vista.

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Blog: www.playingarchitecture.net
LinkedIn: Eric Lancon
Twitter:@Riven202

I heard rumors that TF2 has quad core only graphics features? Maybe just multi-core in general. Valve is quite excited with PUs growing more and more together from what I heard.

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Why snark works.

It has nothing to do with Vista. The step towards "general purpose" on the GPU began (pretty much) with Shader Model 3, since it introduced texture look ups in the vertex processors (SM3 was the first time we could do true displacement mapping)

SM4, however, is drastically different. The processors on the graphics card are no longer vector processors, they're scalar (like your CPU). This means it can't process as much data at a given time, so they upped the number of them and their clock speed. The reason why they did that is because of the limitations on vertex and pixel (fragment) shaders. Now, however, you can do many many more processes on the GPU. This is why they can now to physics on the GPU and we can morph entire polygons and meshes as opposed to individual verticies.

This is a hardware thing ... it has nothing to do with Vista or Microsoft code, even if they helped define the Shader Model standard.

Once you're actually on the GPU, it doesn't care what OS you're running or what 3D API you're using. nvidia's own shader language Cg has direct compatibility to OpenGL and GLSL. The whole thing with "general purpose" is just to give developers more power and choice when using the hardware. But, in all actuality even if you wanted to process audio on the GPU right now you can, it would just take some work in conjunction with the CPU (slow) then the result would have to be passed to the audio chip (slower).

I think what they're doing in the source engine as far as multiple cores go is doing physics on a seperate core. Which would, in turn, effect graphics.

To note, any dedicated processor for some aspect in a game would be leaps and bounds over what we have currently. The issue I was speaking of was their placement of the hardware is a completely ridiculous choice. I think in current machines it's also ridiculous that the audio processors take a long time to get to, even if you have some amazing Creative Labs card, it's still running on the PCI bus. Audio is at least as complex as lighting so it too deserves the processing power.

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Blame it on Microsoft, God does.

Well, I understood that they could do many more processes other than what their name implies, I thought it on a much, MUCH more obvious scale, that is, Vista, with its Aero view would be depending on more than just processor power to render what used to be simple windows and whatnot. But, yea, perhaps one day, there might be a card that can do it all, or processor(s) in cluster without the use of separate buses. (a potentially bad idea I suppose, with the skim of what I know about computers -just enough to build one, which is becoming increasingly easier.)

I probably don't know enough to back up all my opinions, so please bear with me... I'll refrain from commenting again in this topic lol :biggrin: .

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Blog: www.playingarchitecture.net
LinkedIn: Eric Lancon
Twitter:@Riven202

Opinions are fine, but sadly, a Single END-ALL-BE-ALL processor is not the way to go.
One of the reasons is pretty obvious: complexity for programmers. Time slicing, forking, multi-thread management, for example, are not things most people enjoy implementing. Making a single processor, or even cluster of processors, manageable from a programmer prospect is more difficult depending on the complexity of the hardware. Many processors or Cores in a single processor make things far more complex.

You might have an idea along the lines of, "well what if we just put a whole bunch of processors together and chain them up like a hypercube with n > 3 dimensions". Well, in that case, you have an issue of access. Now only a select few processors can be reached at any given time. Another problem is, once you begin computing things in conjunction (the only way it would work is if, regularly, you could use many of the processors to operate on given values), you may get processors sending data further and further away in the hypercube. So, then, unless precautions are taken, program performance is nothing close to reliable. It will just get slower as time goes on (since processors will be trying to communicate farther and farther away) There are ways around that. But the complexity for a human to program the system is still a very large issue.

If you have a 4D Hyper cube (which is two 3D cubes linked together ... that's 8 processors) you've got 16 processors operating on data. What if it was a higher dimension? Like 12, that's 4096 processors. That's very complicated!

Make no mistake, specially designed machines like this have existed for many years (in the mid-80s lots of schools had machines with 65,000 processors or so). But, the complexity is very high. They're also very special purpose.

One other thing is, you're saying, that we could speed things up by combining the buses ... so instead of having as many as we do now, we would have less that are larger.

The problem is ... that's the current problem. The system bus is slow because ALL memory access go through it. So, quite obviously the solution is not to constrain everything to a single bus (or fewer). If anything, we need more specialized buses. To note, if you had a processor hive you'd have many, thousands, of buses to connect all the processors together. The problem may not be as simple as it seems!

One quick thing about graphics cards and processing 2D data. Modern graphics cards simulate 2D, they can't actually do 2D anymore. They do 3D with no depth values. While that does cut out a lot of calculations, going to 3D only adds "pressure" when doing rotations and things like that. Otherwise, matrix calculations are still being done, the vector is just one value smaller (in all actuality, they may not even do that, they could just make the third value 0, in which case, it's still processed)

I hope all this helps!

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Blame it on Microsoft, God does.

I'm thinking of getting a dual core processor and a new GFX card sometime soon.
I'd need a new mobo, processors and a GFX card.

Now I've got an AM2 3500+ AMD processor on an AM2 socketed motherboard.
And an ATI x1600something graphics card.

What do you guys reccomend me to buy, now we're going on about this kind of stuff anyways, and what price range would those suggested items be in?

Cheers :smile:

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Hell, is an half-filled auditorium

If you've already got an AM2 socket board ... why buy another when upgrading? Just get a new chip and graphics card. (are you simultaneously building another system?)

You can get a 3800+ X2 AM2 socket for under $200 USD (transfer the currency).

What chipset is on the motherboard?

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Blame it on Microsoft, God does.

Uhm, it's the crappy type am2 motherboard called ASUS M2NPV-VM, I think there's a VIA 333 chipset on it.
The praphics card slots into a PCI Express slot.

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Hell, is an half-filled auditorium

You might have an idea along the lines of, "well what if we just put a whole bunch of processors together and chain them up like a hypercube with n > 3 dimensions".

I doubt many of us had this idea. :biggrin:

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Why snark works.

I've got a x1600 also and I'm running a sempron 2400. I run HL2 Ep 1 on the settings cranked all the way up. except antianalising is on like 4x or something. It's a good card (right?). Do you think it's time to upgrade already? Although i wouldn't mind having an x1900 myself, if i had money to burn.

Don't burn money. I'd wait a little more. I don't know the exact background of the hardware details but I can only recommend the "what game do I need it for" tactic. Buying a graphics card before the next big game comes out you consider buying is a waste of money because every month you wait can be 25 bucks or 25% faster/better graphics cards.

x1600 should run most games today at good enough quality to stand the waiting time.

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Why snark works.

I'll probably upgrade to a PCIe motherboard and a 7950GT 512 once they come down to $200 (only ~$250 now), that is, if I've got $300-350 to blow on an upgrade at that point =/ Either that or I'll just wait till UT3 or HL2:Ep2 is out and upgrade accordingly. My 6800 Ultra is starting to show it's age, but it's by no means slow.

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o

A 7950GT can run either of those at maximum (or very close to it) settings as far as graphics go. You may want to look into a multi-core cpu however, to really allow them to perform well.

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Blame it on Microsoft, God does.

I've got a x1600 also and I'm running a sempron 2400. I run HL2 Ep 1 on the settings cranked all the way up. except antianalising is on like 4x or something. It's a good card (right?). Do you think it's time to upgrade already? Although i wouldn't mind having an x1900 myself, if i had money to burn.

How many RAM do you have? And what kind of motherboard? Since my pc won't run hl2 with the settings cranked I think.

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Hell, is an half-filled auditorium

I have a gig of cheap ram and the mobo is a socket 462 of a low quality ( i assume)

Do you end all unnecessary processes before you start your games? I end mine every time i start my computer. I even end explore.exe when i play Doom 3 or F.E.A.R..

do you end explorer.exe redwood. I thought that was like needed for your computer to run. Oh well :bandit: .

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Aaron's Stuff

Ya, without it you have to start every program by finding it in your programs folder. I usaly restart my comp afterworlds. When i don't feel like starting explore.exe manually.

Hehe, I don't close explorer, but depending on the game msn etc. are shut down.
I just updated my GFX drivers, because hammer was playing up, maybe it was that :smile:

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Hell, is an half-filled auditorium

Dam man. Just goes to show that there is soooo much still to learn for da_killa.

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Aaron's Stuff