need couple hw suggestions

[Rambler]

Hi guys, my younger brother wants to buy some hardware and i could use your help to decide what i should recommend him.

1) the budget is not big, it's approx. $320 at most.
2) he currently has Celeron D325J (2.53GHz), Asus X300 gfx card (AX300SE-X/TD 128MB, PCI-E IIRC), 80GB HDD, 512MB DDR400 and some other not important junk
3) he wants to buy a sound card and some other component - that most probably being GFX/CPU - now he doesn't need any special sound card, so i was thinking about Audigy2 Value (which i could buy for him). But his local store doesn't have this one, it only has Audigy2 ZS bulk and higher. Is there any real-world difference between these two? (price diff. here being approx. $30).
4) the other component - when i subtract the price of Audigy2 Value/Audigy2 ZS, i'm left with $270/240. What would benefit him the most? In this price range, i could buy regular P4 520 (2.8GHz) for $210 or nice GF6600GT, which range from $190 to $250 (depends on brand, 128/256 RAM etc) here. In case of 6600GT, which of these brands would u recommend (or doesn't it matter?) - Microstar, GigaByte, Asus, Leadtek, Inno3D? I'm personally thinking 6600GT will be more noticable than the CPU, but will the Celeron be able to benefit from it?

Thanks for any suggestions

PS: If you'd like to bash me for not doing my research on the web, save it and don't reply at all, thanks All i'm asking for are your opinions.

 

[kmolazz]

Hum... i'm really not up to pair, but i think you could get a A64 3000 plus a nforce4 motherboard for some $260 at newegg, or cheaper if you go for a Xpress200 or Via board. The celeron would be really bad for games, even with a good graphics card.

I would skip the soundcard (onboard sound is "good enough", more if you're running a low budget), sell the old cpu+mobo combo and graphics card and buy a used 6600 or 9800pro.

Much better than a P4 2.8 plus X300 card or a Celeron with a 6600GT i think.
just my 2 cents.

 

[Sxotty]

1st priority must be getting rid of celeron.
2nd don't get a p4
so you are left geting a64+mobo.

BTW a64 3000s (90nm) have extremely good overclocking potential.

Can the x300s be unlockedor anything like the 6200s? I got a refurbed 6200 for $50shipped and all pipes unlocked.

 

[Rambler]

Heh, don't know why i haven't thought of the A64 route. Interesting suggestion - i could fit in $290 with A64 3000+ and cheap socket939 motherboard. But wouldn't the performance suffer alot with X300? What's the ALC655 snd. chip performance/quality like? Can it be compared to Audigy2?

I was thinking that when going the celeron+6600gt route it wouldn't allow for high resolution gaming, but would do fairly well in 8x6/10x7 resolutions?

Sxotty: i don't know about unlocking the X300 - i might do bit of a research there.

 

[Pete]

US$320, and is this to be a gaming system?

You'd be better served putting the money toward a CPU/MB/GPU than a sound card, but if you must, Buy.com has the Audigy 2 ZS for about $36 ... after a $40 rebate. This might be a blessing, in that by the time the rebate comes back, A64 CPUs and MBs would be cheaper.

But, at this budget, and unless he's an audiophile, I'd skip the sound card and put all the money into a faster overall system.

That X300SE is just not great for gaming: only four pipes, 64-bit memory bus, 200MHz DDR, and nothing to unlock. If you can sell it, do so and put the money toward a faster card.

Some reading material on budget (1, 2) and integrated (1) video cards. If there's a common theme in there, it's to avoid all of them.

Hmmm, maybe a ~$60 socket 754 nForce 3 MB (the Chaintech that Anandtech likes that's at ZZF?) with a <$100 Sempron (90nm SSE3--see XbitLabs.com's review, or a used s754 A64) and a ~$100 9800P (used or new)? Not very future-proof, but you should be able to find s754 A64s for some time to come, and AGP cards still get plenty fast (X800XT, 6800GT) and can be pretty cheap compared to their PCIe versions (~$220 for X800XTs). This is probably your best bet, as even Cel-Ds suck at gaming compared to AMD's offerings. If you go Sempron, aim for 256kb L2, as more L2 is generally better. The diff b/w 128 and 256kB seems relatively small, tho, except in Doom 3 (and there your video card is probably more important, at least with full shadows and other effects). With this setup, you could squeeze in an extra 512MB and maybe the Audigy 2 ZS, but only after rebates, so just one at a time. Note that kyleb of this forum has said that NF3 MBs may have compatability issues with certain 6800s. I'm not sure if this extends to 6600s or all GF6s, or even if it affects all NF3s.

Or consider a used A64 3000/3200+ for about $115, a cheap and full-featured MSI RS480 Xpress 200 MB for about $90, and whatever video card you can fit in there (a used 6600 would be decent, a 6600GT or X800 would be great). The MSI MB won't let you OC at all, and it's apparently not for Linux users, but it seems to fit the bill as an almost-ideal budget MB: s939, PCIe, 1394a. I say almost b/c its integrated sound probably isn't the best, but it should be good enough. This will be slower than the s754 system b/c of the cheaper video card, but much more upgradable (dual-core s939 A64-X2s, and PCIe is the future of video cards).

And be on the lookout to add another 512MB PC3200 stick. They can go for as little as $20-25 after rebate these days, and newer games really like 1GB of RAM.

 

[Sworkhard]

I'd say keep that cpu. The celeron D is not a bad cpu for its price and can keep up with my Athlon XP 2500+ quite easily. I'd say get the 6600GT. You'd notice by far the largest peformance boost in gaming with that.

 

[incurable]

I second the notion for a GPU upgrade. Sure, the Celeron isn't exactly setting the world on fire, but upgrading to an Athlon will gain you very little when you have to keep that sad excuse for a graphics card in there.

Now maybe you can fit a double-upgrade in the budget, but if you have to chose one, upgrade the GPU.

 

[Rambler]

Thanks for all the opinions, in the end I decided to buy him the 6600GT along with the snd. card he wishes. I believe it will be of greater value to him, because it's not likely that he would have to money to make another upgrade in like a year, so 6600GT should be more beneficial to him IMO for the time being.
Now just to figure out what brand I should pick. Any last suggestions? The available selection is in my original post.

Edit: oh now that i'm looking at the prices - how do compare 6600 256MB vs. 6600GT 128MB? Can the 6600 be OCed easily to 6600GT level? Those 256MB versions of 6600GT are too expensive

 

[mczak]

Edit: oh now that i'm looking at the prices - how do compare 6600 256MB vs. 6600GT 128MB? Can the 6600 be OCed easily to 6600GT level? Those 256MB versions of 6600GT are too expensive

While 256MB may be of some (limited) use on those midrange cards nowadays, don't get the 6600 plain just because you think 256MB ram is nice. Core overclocks quite well, but memory won't. A 128MB 6600GT runs circles around a 6600 256MB (almost two times as fast at stock speeds), the additional memory isn't that useful (it would make a difference if you play at 1600x1200 with 4x fsaa, but the card can't handle that anyway).

 

[Pete]

Quality still matters more than quantity. The GT is typically clocked at 500MHz core and 450MHz DDR RAM (the AGP version's stock memory clock is slightly slower, but some AGP versions clock their RAM at the PCIe's 500MHZ DDR), while the 6600 is ... well, I don't know off-hand, but it's considerably slower. (Check B3D or Anandtech or just NewEgg's specs.) You can always turn texture quality or AA level down a peg and maintain GT speed, but the regular 6600 won't attain GT speed, regardless of textures or AA.

And 256MB cards tend to have their RAM clocked lower than 128MB versions, so that 256MB 6600 may be that much slower than a GT.

Just try to get a card with a cooler that isn't too noisy. Read some of the many 6600GT roundups out there (Anandtech and BeHardware, for starters).

For the sound card, Buy.com has the Audigy 2 ZS Value and Gamer editions for about as cheap as the come after a $40-50 rebate and the 10% off offer you should see on their website: $36 and $49, respectively, IIRC (and the offers are still good). No idea of the diff b/w the Aud 2 and the 2 ZS. NeoSeeker.com may turn up some reviews of the former that compare it to the latter. The Gamer bundle is pretty decent for the price if he hasn't yet played Halo and Splinter Cell and wants a firewire port. I placed an order over the weekend but nothing has shipped yet, so they may have a backlog of orders.