My Radeon 9800 Pro is starting to show it's age a little so I think it's time to upgrade.

ATM I have a P4 Prescott 3.0Ghz and 2.0Gb of 4200 matched RAM which I think should be OK to recycle.

I want to get a new GFX card (up to £300) and a mobo which must have SATA raid (preferably ASUS). Can anyone make any recommendations?

I was tempted by this for £250 but not sure whether GeForce 8 is just about to be released following the new ATI launches or not. Basicly I want to make sure I'm not spunking my money up the wall as I would like the upgrade to last a couple of years if possible but accept that I will have to upgrade the CPU at some point.

Any opinions are welcome.

Thx

EN

Hiya mate. I haven't kept up to date with gfx cards as much as I should. And now I know why after looking at some of the performance comparisons. Seems my card is well and truly at the shit end of the scale after only 9 months. Tom's Hardware does regular VGA charts, which compare loads of cards but I can't vouch for their data and don't know if they 'lean' towards either Nvidia or ATI.

The Feb issue of Computer Shopper has a motherboard review. Of the few socket LGA775 boards reviewed, they highlight the ECS 945P-A (never had one myself). This board meets your RAID criteria, holds its own in their benchmarks and costs £58.75 (inc vat) from www.pcnextday.co.uk.
Edit: Bugger.... just noticed it's got no firewire ports though, which might be important to you what with your new camera

At that price that card's a steal really. ATI topped the charts @ the end of last year with the highest performance card. Those cards go for silly money tho. 1 step down for ATI would be the radeon 850 XT series and tbh a geforce 7800GT would beat that hands down.

You won't get the full range out of the card anyways with ur current proc. To get max potential of this card u'd need the high end AMD64 procs.

I have a 7800gt and it kicks ass tbh.

I always had radeons before that and they left me feeling a bit as though I wasn't getting the full bang for buck out of them. The 7800 has always performed well above what I expected

I have the abit 3rd eye motherboard with sata raid. It only has one ide channel which is a bind but the sata raid is very very cool.

http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/products ... _uid=95458

If you want an ASUS mobo the above would do the job and seems to recieve very good reviews.

M

Thanks chaps, I just wanted to make sure that next week wasn't the grand release of a 8200GT or something silly for the same money.

Firewire isn't that important as I have firewire ports on other cards although only one EIDE channel could be a bit of a bind.

The SATA raid is only important because that's what I already have and I've been used to raid speeds for the past 5 years now and I'm not known for my patience.

The ASUS part for the motherboard is that out of the PC's I've built for people and myself, they seem to be the most thought out packages in the box when you buy them and also pretty well supported.

Thx EN

EDIT: Goose that mobo is an AMD one btw not P4

Sry m8

So used to getting AMD mobo's I go on autopilot - stunned that you're limiting yourself with a P$ tbh

M

I already have a P4 CPU, so it just saves cash, when I bought my current rig that was the fastest CPU for the amount of cash taht I had.

If it's not up to the job tho I may end up changing families.

The X800GT0s are supposed to be good, no idea though but my 6600gt and 6800go are spot on and run everything i've tried with ease.

Same card at overclockers for a few pennies less but I guess you can pop into Aria, rather than pay for delivery. CoD2 is bundled with the Overclockers card for £201.95+vat.

Just don't get a water cooling kit it WILL make you cry !!

Right current thoughts are....

ASUS A8N32 SLI mobo (£143.29 Microdirect) (opportunity to run two of the cards at full tilt with the 32 channels)
AMD Athlon64 X2 3800 (£233.10 Aria) (Cheapest dual core I could afford)
XFX GF 7800GT 256Mb GFX card (£247.93 Aria) I was a big ATI fan, but the past 12 months they do not seem to be as well supported in games as NVIDIA
Creative X-Fi Xtreme Music Sound card (£93.94 Aria) (My old Audigy 1 is sounding tired and I dislike on board sound cards)
Vapochill Micro Ultra Low Noise CPU Cooler (£30.55 Aria) (I Put one in my bro's PC and was the business.)

Gonna recycle the RAM and Drives out my existing PC with 2x160Gb sat on the RAID still and hopefully I can still run dual displays.

Any thing in there that looks like it would be better value to change, I've put the prices to help make any comparisons, I will only be buying from those two dealers tho.

It was more than I wanted to spend initially, but then I reminded myself that the above still costs less then 1 months nursery fees

Yeah nursery schemes are harsh.

Does your company run a HCI scheme for nursery?

The college is looking at putting together a HCI package to offer us cheap bikes, nursery vouchers and computers for home.

Might be worth having a chat with your personnel department. They cost companies nothing other than the time it takes to find a supplier to set up.

M

Yeah they do, but you can only buy in at certain times of the year.

Plus when you sit and work it out, it saves you a few quid but not masses tbh.

EN

Jeez Neil. That's some pretty hefty childcare spend. Are you putting poor sprog in there 24x7?

At the risk of turning this into a childcare thread...
Are your employers likely to consider salary sacrifice schemes? My company has just started one where I pay for £217 (max) worth of childcare vouchers out of my gross salary. That means I get that part of my salary untaxed and don't pay NI on it either. The benefit for the company is that they don't have to pay their portion of the NI on that money either.

Aye and if you're earning over 30k and the childcare brings you to under 30k you don't get that wanky supertax or whatever it is.

Btw, do you really need a £93 soundcard? Dunno about that mobo but most have excellent sound built in.

Yee, I stopped using my Audigy to use the onboard one, far less hassle with drivers etc and same sound pretty much.

You only get hit for higher tax on the amount over the threshold, which for me the threshold is about £37k from memory by the time you deal in my allowances, I can buy vouchers from work, but they are started on an annual basis so I can start them in teh summer so they will help quite a bit in terms of tax relief and stuff.

Childcare round our neck of the wood for 5 days a week is £750/month, so I'm preparing myself for a few years of having no cash.

I dislike onboard soundcards as from previous experience you get noticeable interference at loud volumes from fans and stuff and the quality difference on seperate cards is noticable.

Interestingly as well, if you have your sound settings on high, then a good sound card can push your FPS up in games like BF2 by a good 17 FPS reading several magazine articles over the past few months due to the load reduction on your CPU.

Thanks for the advice so far chaps, much appreciated.

EN

What's all this about supertax!? I thought there was just lower rate and higher rate of earning as per at the bottom of this page.

Thats the one I meant. Supertax was Maggie's doing wasnt it.

I dunno, don't ask such questions to someone who hasnt worked for 2 years :S

I can understand the fps gain etc, its why I tried using my audigy again recently, but it was a right pain in the arse. For one, my mic port was fucked so I had to use my onboard anyway. And secondly I couldn't find anywhere in Windows to allocate sounds speraretly to the devices e.g. I wanted normal sounds coming through the onboard sound, and I wanted Teamspeak going through the audigy - everything went through the audigy anyway.

Then there was the problems I had after installing, my device manager window would hang and slow my computer when I tried to mess about with permissions of the sounds, til I did hard reset.

Pain in the ring.

Erm hope you haven't visited Aria yet Neil. Prices may drop if this ATI chip gets released soon:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/01/20/ati_r580_benchmarked/

Went today and bought all the stuff, got the ASUS 7800GT instead for £230, you can hang on forever and a day so I just took the plunge, the next generation NVIDIA's aren't due out for a few months yet so I figured what teh hey.

Just trying to back up all my shizzle now ready for the rebuild.

A royal pain in the ass tbh.

EN

All worth it in the end though

Show us your 3D Mark score if you cba.