P4 owner. Need advice on Nvidea card to buy. Thanks

The machine was also equipped with up to a Pentium D 3.2, I simply gave you the psu specs.

 

It was not an attack, I just made a comment relax.

The OP has a P4 in his thus why I said that.

 

I'm in London Barwell. Novatech seem to be doing some really good deals. The 9600 GT 512 is only 66 pounds there plus whatever shipping costs they add. RAM is cheap there too, 40 pounds for 4 gig DDR2 667. I have to go for four since I have four 512mb sims in there at the moment so have to dump the lot.

The strange thing is I haven't really found a game I can't play at that resolution yet. Even Crysis is okay at 1680 x 1050 at medium settings, so I kind of assumed upgrading the 7800 GTX and popping in another 4 gig of ram couldn't be a bad move but hey ho it seems I was a bit optimistic.

 

ohh right ure another dirty stop up all nighter like me then

and i would stick with 2gb atm because you can get some high speed DDR2 when you upgrade the lot and if ure not having any problems with ure current card save the money and put it towards a new system

 

Yeah I'm wondering whether to upgrade at all or not. I probably will though, it's going to be a while before I can afford a good rig with all the trimmings and 110 pounds doesn't seem much to spend as a temporary measure. It can't hurt to have extra ram anyway.

 

Okay, me again with what might be a stupid question. I am thinking of buying a 9800 GTX+ so when I get a new rig later I can still use that and SLI it with another one to get good performance.

What I want to know is will my P4 3.2 cpu bottleneck the single card to the point it will make stuff unplayable and/or will there be no noticeable improvement over the 7800 GTX with that combo? I'll be playing stuff at 1680 x 1050 and I'll have four gigs of ram too. Also, will my psu have the right connectors for that card?

Thanks again.

 

The 9800GTX+ is a relatively good improvement over the 7800GTX, but I wouldn't expect a great leap without you changing your processor.

 

I went from a Pentium D 915 with an 8800GT to the current processor I have now. There would be a serious bottleneck with that processor and a 9800GT. I was getting 7.7k in 3dmk06 with the D and going to my Q6600 I went to 12.5k. I would say a 9600GT at the very most, beyond that would be bottleneck city and not worth the extra expense. Why shoot for the moon if you are going to burn up in the atmosphere with that setup.

There is no way with that processor, regardless of the graphics card, that you could do 16x10 unless its an older game that supports that rez, 4gb of RAM not withstanding.

 

Thanks guys okay I'm seriously going to stop trying to flog a dead horse here and just get the 9600 GT or nothing.

Thanks everyone for all the replies. This is a really great forum I hope I can be of help to other people when I get around to building a new rig and have a bit more of an idea what it's all about.

 

Good choice, it should do ok until you decide to build your uber gaming rig.

 

yep good choice there and you could still use it in ure new rig or just leav it in the ring u have now and make thata media center or somthing happy playing

 

upgrade your cpu and keep your old card lol. Get a Core 2 Duo.