14 of a hotdog
Posts: 181 +1
I got a lot of money for my birthday this year, 370$, and I want to get some smaller upgrades and use the rest for games and other things. I have been looking into the new graphics cards a lot and I refuse to get a new one until they sell cheap motherboards with Lucid's Hydra 200 chipsets or at least until the gt300 series comes out and drives prices down.
My current specs are
PSU: bfg tech ls-550 80+ certified (when rage had that list in his signature it ether said it had a 49 or 46 amp combined 12v rail output or something like that)
Motherboard: gigabyte M57SLI-s4 V2.0 (gigabyte's site says its compatible with phenom 2 and 1 on am3 or am2+ but
RAM: Read carefully I have 4GB total but because Wintec sells Aeneon memory as if it was there own (as in its got the same model number on newegg and has the same heatspreader) I have ended up with 2gb of authentic wintec memory and 2gb of aeneon with wintec heatspreaders and they don't like to be overclocked together. When I overclock my current 5600+ windsoar (not a black edition) with the FSB clock to much, 2 sticks get ignored but still show up in programs like CPU-Z. Unless this is a problem with my ancient motherboard ignoring 2 ram slots, I will not be able to overclock by changing the FSB clock by more than 16 mhz!
Hard drives: One excellstor 160gb hdd (Cheap brand its loud but not sure about reliability) and one western digital blue 16mb cache (Very quite)
Video card: XFX 4850 512mb with an accelero s1 rev 2 and zalman copper ram heatsinks all with arctic silver 5 (All temps stay lower than 55c after well over an hour of constant 95%-100% usage but overclocks worse than... anything I know of)
CPU: AMD athlon 5600+ windsoar 2mb l2 cache at 3ghz with a zigmatec hdt-S1283 (speedfan and coretemp seem to show weird temps like 38c idle and 45c with 100% usage but easytune and my bios seem to show temps below 30c at idle so I'm not sure which to trust.)
Sound card: (Go ahead and laugh) A creative soundblaster audigy SE
Case: Thermaltake armor JR.
I am trying to keep the price below 200 but I can go over that, I am almost out of space on both of my hard drives so I want to get a new one but I could just stop copying entire game installations to mod them completely. Its for gaming I dont do much media editing though I do like to throw hundreds of objects around in the cryengine 2 sandbox 2 editor and I do mod real time strategies so they have almost no unit cap so I would think the extra processing power would help.
My proposed upgrade is based on the theory that a phenom 2 720 would overclock and work well with my motherboard.(Tell me if there is a better route.)
Phenom 2 720 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819103649
Western digital caviar green 500gb 32mb cache http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136358
Fan to keep hard drive cage cooler http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835200048
Please forgive my horrible spelling, sentence structure and grammar.
PS if you have had your head buried in sand here is a link about the truly amazing Lucid Hydra 200 chips.
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3646
My current specs are
PSU: bfg tech ls-550 80+ certified (when rage had that list in his signature it ether said it had a 49 or 46 amp combined 12v rail output or something like that)
Motherboard: gigabyte M57SLI-s4 V2.0 (gigabyte's site says its compatible with phenom 2 and 1 on am3 or am2+ but
so I'm not sure if that will effect performance.(Note) If you install AMD AM2+ CPU on AM2 motherbord, the system bus speed will downgrade from HT3.0(5200 MT/s) to HT1.0(2000 MT/s) spec; however, the frequency of AM2+ CPU will not be impacted.
RAM: Read carefully I have 4GB total but because Wintec sells Aeneon memory as if it was there own (as in its got the same model number on newegg and has the same heatspreader) I have ended up with 2gb of authentic wintec memory and 2gb of aeneon with wintec heatspreaders and they don't like to be overclocked together. When I overclock my current 5600+ windsoar (not a black edition) with the FSB clock to much, 2 sticks get ignored but still show up in programs like CPU-Z. Unless this is a problem with my ancient motherboard ignoring 2 ram slots, I will not be able to overclock by changing the FSB clock by more than 16 mhz!
Hard drives: One excellstor 160gb hdd (Cheap brand its loud but not sure about reliability) and one western digital blue 16mb cache (Very quite)
Video card: XFX 4850 512mb with an accelero s1 rev 2 and zalman copper ram heatsinks all with arctic silver 5 (All temps stay lower than 55c after well over an hour of constant 95%-100% usage but overclocks worse than... anything I know of)
CPU: AMD athlon 5600+ windsoar 2mb l2 cache at 3ghz with a zigmatec hdt-S1283 (speedfan and coretemp seem to show weird temps like 38c idle and 45c with 100% usage but easytune and my bios seem to show temps below 30c at idle so I'm not sure which to trust.)
Sound card: (Go ahead and laugh) A creative soundblaster audigy SE
Case: Thermaltake armor JR.
I am trying to keep the price below 200 but I can go over that, I am almost out of space on both of my hard drives so I want to get a new one but I could just stop copying entire game installations to mod them completely. Its for gaming I dont do much media editing though I do like to throw hundreds of objects around in the cryengine 2 sandbox 2 editor and I do mod real time strategies so they have almost no unit cap so I would think the extra processing power would help.
My proposed upgrade is based on the theory that a phenom 2 720 would overclock and work well with my motherboard.(Tell me if there is a better route.)
Phenom 2 720 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819103649
Western digital caviar green 500gb 32mb cache http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136358
Fan to keep hard drive cage cooler http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835200048
Please forgive my horrible spelling, sentence structure and grammar.
PS if you have had your head buried in sand here is a link about the truly amazing Lucid Hydra 200 chips.
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3646