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breathing new life into an old computer
icefusion2k
Member Posts: 9
in Hardware
so i have a computer with an LGA775 socket motherboard and want to ugrade it as much as possible, i just bought an intel qx6800 2.93ghz quad core processor for it, have 4 gigs of 1066mhz memory on the way. still have to buy a PSU and video card. my main question is, i would like to get into an Nvidia 6 series gfx card for this build but dont want to over do it and bottleneck the cpu. was wondering what is the best new nvidia offering i could get without bottlenecking cpu and thus wasting money, obviously a 680 is out of the question, was thinking maby a 670 or 660 perhaps? not too sure on this one, maby someone can inlightin me on this quest that im on.
Comments
What worried me was that u said u had 4 gigs of 1066mhz ram incoming. The frequency is slightly low and it looks like u want gaming. You probably want something like 1600 mhz, or atleast 1300mhz, and they are fairly cheap. Since u got a lga, might want to go i3-i5-i7.
If ur on a budget, go to newegg.com and u can buy an amd pc with all the parts shipped to you ready to be put together for around $200 and play all games on medium settings.
The motherboard probably needs DDR2 memory, not DDR3, and DDR2 doesn't clock that high. There were some DDR3 versions of LGA 775 motherboards released, which is possible because it was an older architecture where the memory controller was in the chipset rather than integrated into the CPU, but those didn't launch until 2009, by which time the platform was basically obsolete.
Also, LGA 775 means you're restricted to certain variations of Core 2, Pentium, or Celeron processors. The Core i* line didn't come until later, and uses LGA 1366, LGA 1156, LGA 1155, or LGA 2011, depending on the particular processor.
Video card selection might depend on the PSU. I hear some of the new cards are beasts when it comes to power.
It's older stuff like nvidia 400 series and AMD 4000 series that hogged power
It depends on what you're comparing it to. The long-term trend has been for cards to use more power, simply because die shrinks tend to give you twice as many transistors, each using 70% as much power as before.
If you compare it to cards like the Radeon X1900 XT or GeForce 7900 GTX, then even the Radeon HD 7770 or GeForce GTX 650 use a lot of power (in exchange for several times the performance!), let alone today's higher end cards.
While power consumption may seem to have held roughly steady for the past couple of generations, that's only because Fermi was such an awful power hog and the GPU that should have been the highest power one of this generation (GK100) was canceled.
Big mistake on the processor, at least if you're just looking for price/performance. (If it's more akin to a hobby like people restoring very old cars, then have at it.)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819113286&Tpk=FX-6300
Six cores instead of four, substantially faster on a per-core basis, brand new, much better energy efficiency, and cheaper than what you paid for a five year old processor.
If you repeat that with a bunch of other components, you could easily end up paying enough to get a fairly nice brand new gaming rig, except without actually getting the fairly nice brand new gaming rig. It sounds like you may have already done so by buying DDR2 memory rather than the much faster and much cheaper DDR3 that you'd get for a modern system, but you may want to think about stopping and cutting your losses.
The reason older CPUs aren't that much cheaper, and partilaly for DDR2 being more expensive than DDR3, are people looking for replacement parts for systems where they just can't upgrade/replace the motherboard.
Like Industrial PCs, POS computers, embedded applications, custom/non-standard applications, etc - where your only choice is to replace it with a like-item, rather than newer technology. Especially in applications where the software is hardware-keyed (Windows licenses aren't the only thing, there are a lot of expensive software items that do this), replacing the entire computer, or upgrading to the latest technology can often be a more expensive or difficult proposition than it's worth.
For instance, we still have several x486 clones running DOS in some industrial applications, because they are tied to custom vendor-specfic software for embedded hardware that just can't be upgraded or transferred without significant ($50k+) expense. There is nothing really special about the PC's (except they take 24vDC input power rather than 110/220VAC), but they aren't easily replaced. When a component dies, like a old PATA hard drive, we pay through the nose to get a like component so that we don't have to change out the entire system.
And all of that stuff is in severely diminished production (it is still being produced, but only marginally) - so supply and demand takes effect, and keeps the price high even though the technology has depreciated.
If you have the capability: a traditional ATX or uATX case, with a decent power supply, I would strongly recommend a new motherboard and just getting up to date with the latest sockets and RAM. That gets you a nicer computer for a similar price. You can re-eBay most of that stuff off and recoup most of your loss.