Comments wanted for new motherboard and graphicscard

[Frank N. O.]

After seeing the Ford-parts for my sim still aren't available and finding a specific motherboard that supports both the CPU and RAM I have while having intel chipset and PCI-E slots I've swapped the purchase-order and am now looking for comments on if this should work well together.

The current PC-specs are:
1 year old:
Asus P5P800 i865PE motherboard, glan
Intel Pentium 4 - 530, 3.0GHz, 1mb, 775pin
Kingston DDR PC3200, 400MHz (3-3-3), 512mb, 2x selected to match for 800MHz FSB Dual Channel mode
510W Chill CP-510A Advacnced PSU, 120mm, 12dbA
Creative SoundBlaster Live! 24-bit
2 year old:
Sapphire Atlantis Radeon 9600Pro Ultimate Edition (pipe-cooled) 128mb AGPx8 using at most a few weeks old Sapphire ATI drivers.

What I found, at the same store as I got the above 1 year old parts are:
Asus P5GPL-X i915PL DDR/GLAN
The card has DDR RAM sockets with up to 800MHz Dual Channel mode like my current CPU and RAM, I guess there's no need to buy 1000MHz DDR2 RAM when my CPU still "only" runs 800MHz, especially when I don't have the money for it.
It neither has RAID or FireWire but I don't even know what that is so np.
It costs just 735 DKK and that's not that bad I guess, it's a little over 100 USD if I remember correctly and the exchange-rate hasn't been radically altered.

Edit: I just found this: ASUS P5GD1 Pro, i915P, DDR/GLAN/RAID that has 4x RAM sockets and up to 4gb instead of 2 and 2 on the above, and it has RAID 0 and 1 for less than 100DKK more, I guess it could be good since I can then save up to get 2gb RAM total. This would just be 798DKK for 2 more Kingston 512mb RAM blocks identical to my current two.

The card is a Asus Radeon X800GTO PCI-Ex16
But how much of an actually noticeable performance difference is there between that and a X800XL and X850Pro? All of them btw have 256mb 256-bit GDDR3 RAM.
The first card costs 1695 DKK and the two others around 2300 and 2500 DKK.

My mom just told me that the giant savings on meat and soda we've been so lucky to get, also thanks to an extra freezer, has saved me a bundle of money, and of course, not buying the Mondeo-parts this month, partly because none are available, also helps a lot, in fact it pays for the graphics-card, at least the cheap one.

Frank

[FIATLOVE]

Frank,
THIS MOTHERBOARD!!! Asus A8N32-SLI Deluxe, Nforce SLI X16

Most other mainboards for dual SLI does use the 16x bus sharing it between the 2 slots, means you get only 8x for each slot...
The new Asus card does have 16x at each slot ;) so GO for it! I will buy it myself.

Regarding videocard, I will try the XFX Geforce 7800GTX 512MB GDDR3 XXX


Edit; I do also have a freezer, wow shaves my foodbudget to half from what it was some years back -^

[VQ]

Why not ring aroung wreckers for parts? There should be one out there that has them.

[Frank N. O.]

Frank,
THIS MOTHERBOARD!!! Asus A8N32-SLI Deluxe, Nforce SLI X16

Most other mainboards for dual SLI does use the 16x bus sharing it between the 2 slots, means you get only 8x for each slot...
The new Asus card does have 16x at each slot ;) so GO for it! I will buy it myself.

Regarding videocard, I will try the XFX Geforce 7800GTX 512MB GDDR3 XXX


Edit; I do also have a freezer, wow shaves my foodbudget to half from what it was some years back -^
:eek: a 256mb version of that card alone costs more than my whole update budget + a good condition Mondeo-seat! The CPU is almost my entire months pension! And the motherboard twice as much as I planned, plus I'd need new RAM.

VQ: It's already used parts but from a professional autopart recycling center. It's the only one that seemed respectable, IE not were you have to dismantle it from cars in the rain and pay under the table after you zeroed in on what you had to pay after long haggling.

Would there be a big difference in performance from a X800GTO to a X850Pro? (the Pro seems to be considerably cheaper than the X850XL cards, and only slightly more expensive than the X800XL). All cards have 256-bit 256mb GDDR3 RAM but I'm not sure how many pipelines they have. I think the smallest have 12 but the others might have 16, and there's a speed difference in the RAMDAC and memory between the cards.

Tuuka and Mario helped me in the chat earlier and said that my 1 gb dual-channel RAM most likely is enough so I'd probably settle with the "small" card with just two RAM slots and no RAID support, I only have 1 hdd anyway and the two slots is for the 2x512mb DDR RAM and then I can keep the dual-channel 800MHz FSB between the CPU, MB and RAM instead of having different speeds.

Frank