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Going athlon 64

post #1 of 6
10/11/04 at 11:46pm
Thread Starter 
I would really like to upgrade to an athlon 64 system in order to enjoy hl2 in all of it's splendor. The main thing holding me back is my ram, as I have 3 sticks of pc2100( ) ddr with an athlon xp 2000+( ). Other than that, I have a radeon9800 pro, so that will do much better in an athlon 64 rig.

My question is, how much of a performance decrease will I get for using pc2100 ram in the athlon 64 system? I really don't care about synthetic benchmarks, and from what I've seen, the athlon64 really isn't too dependent on memory bandwidth. All I'm interested in is increased framerates in nextgen games. It would really save me a ton not to have to buy new ram. Any input is appreciated.
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post #2 of 6
10/12/04 at 12:44am
PC2100 runs on a 133MHz fsb (266 effective) while the RAM for an Athlon64 runs on a 200Mhz fsb (400 effective.)

I would think pairing that older RAM with an Athlon64 really eliminate most of the benifit of the CPU upgrade, and that is if the RAM would even be interchangable.
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post #3 of 6
10/12/04 at 12:07pm
lol,, ur like the only person i think i have ever seen that would rather upgrade the cpu than the ram. But as stated, pc2100 is getting old and slow,,,u should probably upgrade that first.
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post #4 of 6
10/12/04 at 12:18pm
does your motherboard support CPUs greater than 2000+? if so, why not upgrade the CPU to a 2500 or 3200+, then upgrade the RAM or visa versa... you'd be saving a lot more in terms of upgrading JUST for HL2... then later you could upgrade to 64-bit...

but if your mobo doesnt support any other CPUs, go for 64-bit..
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post #5 of 6
10/12/04 at 1:15pm
You can get a Mobile AMD Athlon XP 2500+ for only $85 and it should easily overclock to 3200+ speeds if you're willing to do so..then you'd be saving a lot of money not having to buy a new motherboard and expensive processor.
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post #6 of 6
10/22/04 at 8:27am
couple of things to research about 64 systems before you upgrade.

make sure you have a very good psu, the amd64 draws huge amounts of 12v amps,
so if your using an old power supply look for a sticker on it saying something like
28a 3.3 28 a 5v 18A 12V i recommend over 20 .
also amd 754 pin CPUs only use single channel, and if you use more then 2 double bank mem chips it will drop down to 333 speed anyway.
Take a look at the msi forum it has huge amounts of info on this.
well worth the reading.msi amd 64 forum (via chipset)
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