Computer Upgrade, part 1

corey

Well, it’s an even year, so that means it’s time to dust off the ol’ hardware reviews and find all those cool websites I used last time I upgraded my computer. (One of the nice things about getting deployed is that you don’t have much to spend money on, so you tend to have a little saved up when you get back).

Being the weak-hearted soul that I am (at least, when it comes to new gadgets and toys!), I couldn’t wait to get a new video card. This prompted me to drive to Boulder and buy the first available X800 card:

ATi Radeon X800 Pro [compusa.com]

But, after installing it and fiddling around a bit I wasn’t seeing much of an improvement in my frame rates while playing EVE Online. I read some forums and found this:

Omega Video Drivers [omegadrivers.net]

After installing the ATi Omega Drivers, I was seeing an improvement on my frame rates, but still way lower than I expected. The Omega Drivers are cool because they are very much optimized for gaming, so I expect I’ll use them in the future as well.

I then found this very interesting thread:

Another successful x800 pro to XT mod – here’s how [hardforum.com]

Very interesting indeed! For those of you who don’t want to read the forum thread, it’s basically a way to perform a software (bios/flash) upgrade on a X800 Pro card and have it perform the same as a X800 XT card. (XT’s are $100 more expensive and work a bit better). I wish I had known that before I bought this card: apparently it only works on cards that support VIVO.

Anyone want to buy a brand-new, used for 2 hours, ATi X800 Pro video card for $375? Comes with all original packaging! Pleeeeaasse?!

Well, after looking around for other ways to improve my video card’s performance (and stumbling across cool thing like this) I remembered that my motherboard only supports AGP 4x, which is half the speed of the video card! No wonder I wasn’t getting good results from it.

And so !BAM! down came the hammer. Time to pony up for a new mobo and cpu. After some extensive reading of reviews and finding prices I ended up with this:

ABIT “AV8″ K8T800 Pro [newegg.com]
AMD Athlon 64 3500+ [newegg.com]
Corsair XMS 512MB(256MBx2) DDR PC-3200 [newegg.com]

All-in-all, more than I wanted to spend, but it’ll last me a good while. One of the reasons I went with the new Av8 (Socket 939) motherboard is so that I could upgrade to the cool (but extremely expensive) FX chips in the future.

After ordering my new “dream” components, I decided that I should really run some benchmarks and see what kind of difference there is. This could be dangerous: maybe I won’t get much out of the $600 I just spent! But I plowed ahead, it’s kinda fun anyways.

I downloaded 3DMark03 from FutureMark, which allows you to compare scores with thousands of other users. After running 3DMark a couple of times and making some tweaks (changes to my video card settings) I was able to get a score of 8300. Blah. Not terrible, but it’s not very good when I see people with scores in the 11000 range with the same video card!

While I could find other programs to benchmark with as well, I’ll just stick with 3DMark for now.

I’ll let you know how it goes once I install my new mobo+cpu+memory.