Upgrade To NForce3

[jluppenz]

Hello all,

I currently have an ASUS A7N8X-E mobo with an Athlon XP 2800+, 1GB (Corsair CAS2) and a Gforce 6800 Ultra. I'm told that my current mobo + processor is holding my video card back significantly, even though the games seem to run pretty well and the onboard sound seems pretty good. I'm considering an MSI Nforce 3 mobo (only because the video card is AGP and I think NForce mobos do away with AGP), an Athlon 64 3500+, 1 GB Corsair PC3200 CAS2 and an Audigy2 OEM since the MSI has crappy onboard sound.

Will I see a significant boost or is my XP 2800+ still good enough for another year? My only real worry is that Nforce 3 mobos won't be around in a year since they are being phased out quickly by Nforce4.

 

[jluppenz]

Oops I meant NForce4 mobos do away with AGP. =-)

 

[Fox5]

Your motherboard/cpu are definetely limiting you.
BTW, were you going to buy a new 1GB ram to go with that athlon 64, or reuse your current ram? Because if you didn't mind overclocking, you could get a moderately expensive motherboard(probably around $150), expensive 1GB of ram(around $250), pretty much any athlon 64(though I'd wait for the new 90nm with strained silicon and SSE3 athlons), and then overclock the beejeezus out of it. You wouldn't even need to max out the clock speed of the cpu, just by upping the memory bus and going really low latency you could have that thing performing better than an FX-55 at stock.

If you just want to be convinced that your upgrade is worth it, well you should check out some benchmarks online...
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2149&p=7
As can be seen here, your athlon XP can't even average 60 fps, and is likely to drop to very crappy framerates during the most intense situations.(maybe I should have linked to a hardocp graph, but I don't know if they've done any athlon xp versus 64 comparisons)

Generally, the high end XPs are just barely sufficient for the most recent games(a borderline 60fps average), while the 64s usually average at least 10 or 20 fps above 60 fps.
The 3500+ socket 939 cpu is kind of the black sheep of the athlon 64 family though, it performs worse than the 3400+ socket 754 cpu.