New PC Time Frustration

More… Go for 20+… 16 wasn’t enough for my Athlon 64 and 6600 GT.

You’re right, I should’ve written supported by SLI in that first sentence. But the point stands: two $200-250 boards in SLI are only going to give you comparative performance to a high-end single graphics card in the games that can make use of SLI, and even then not every game that’s supported by it scales as well as some of the others.

Well, I guess there’s a chance that this will be better than the options we have now but I doubt that dropping in the second card a year or two later will really provide comparable results to the newer high end card.

It used to work like this:

1998- Buy $300 video card
2000 - Video card is aging and doesn’t run new games that well. Buy new $300 video card.
2002 - Video card is aging and doesn’t run new games that well. Buy new $300 video card.
2004 - Video card is aging and doesn’t run new games that well. Buy new $300 video card.

Proposed system:

2005 - Buy $300 video card for an SLI motherboard
2007 - Buy another video card of the same model as 2005 original at half the price
2009 - Throw out two previous cards and buy a new $300 video card
2011 - Buy another video card of the same model as 2009 original at half the price

I think what I’m waiting to see is whether the performance of the 2007 and 2011 graphics setups are comparable to what you would get if you simply bought a new $300 card every two years. My guess is that the performance will be lower, maybe 50% better than the original but 50% worse than the new card.

Now, for some people this is an ok deal because over the course of six years they spent $900 instead of $1200 even if they only got a complete upgrade every four years instead of every two.

But for most of us I would imagine that the lure of having the newest card is too much to resist and will always trump saving money.

Now what if it worked like this:

2005 - Buy $300 video card for an SLI motherboard
2007 - Buy the new $300 video card and add it to the second slot. You get one and a half times the performance of just buying the new $300 card.

It seems to me like that’s a really tall order from a technical perspective. You’d have to design your new card so that it would work effectively with the 2 year old model by offloading some of the simple tasks to the old card but performing the new cool effects itself.

That would be extremely impressive because it would finally break the cycle of constantly throwing away your old card. (I currently have a geforce Ti 4200 in an old machine, a Geforce 2 GTS, TNT2, and TNT in a drawer)

Um, that was $300 for both videocards. A 6600GT is going for about $150 nowadays.

I have a PNY in the office that’s SLI compatible, so I’m guessing that if you bought it today and all games were groovy at 1280x1024, a year or two from now you could buy another one for $100 (or whatever) and nearly double your videocard performance. That’s not a bad deal.

At a minimum, it’s unlikely you’d ever be able to get as big a performance boost for as little money.

You can set what?

I have an SLI setup right now for testing (with two 7800GTX cards… um, it’s fast… like 1920x1200 is pretty much the same in performance as 1280x1024 with a 6800 Ultra), and there are no driver options beyond “work in SLI” or “don’t work in SLI.”

Are you saying some games won’t launch while SLI is enabled? If that’s the case, I haven’t seen any yet.

It’s very easy to install XP yourself. You simply put the disc in the CD drive, set that as the first boot drive (if it’s not already set that way by default in your BIOS), and then boot up. The Windows XP CD will boot your PC and ask you all the pertinent questions to get your hard drive partitioned and formatted and then you follow the prompts to install. It’s as painless as can be. I’ve been doing OS installs since DOS 6.0/Windows 3.1 and XP is the easiest its ever been IMO.

Building yourself is definitely doable. I’ve built a lot of PCs and worked on many others both here at home and at work. It’s pretty hard nowadays to get something messed up. All the cabling fits only one slot usually. Card installation is just like plugging in a game cartridge, etc. The hardest thing to install is a processor and heatsink. You can skip that though with a place like www.mwave.com where you simply buy a “motherboard bundle” and pay the $9.00 for them to assemble and test the box. They’ll put the motherboard, RAM and processor in the case you specify and check it all out then send it. Works great and saves you some time. I guess a downside is that you won’t be able to pick your own heatsink/fan but I’ve never had a problem with the stock AMD stuff because I don’t overclock.

Thanks for all the info everyone. I’m going to continue researching through the weekend as my current box seems to be working ok at the moment. I think the processor fan on this old AMD 1700+ has finally succumbed to the dust and cat hair that flies around here. I think it’s stopping and when it does the BIOS senses that and shuts me do…

+++

NO CARRIER

Yeah…I got that. But that option fills up BOTH slots. What I’m talking about is buying one $300 card now, buy the same card a year or two later at $150 or $100. If you fill both slots right at the outset you don’t leave any room for the upgrade.

I have a PNY in the office that’s SLI compatible, so I’m guessing that if you bought it today and all games were groovy at 1280x1024, a year or two from now you could buy another one for $100 (or whatever) and nearly double your videocard performance. That’s not a bad deal.

Yeah, that’s not a bad deal I agree. But it’s a cost cutting measure at heart. I just think most power gamers will simply buy the new $300 card to get the new features.

At a minimum, it’s unlikely you’d ever be able to get as big a performance boost for as little money.

I agree that it’s an improvement. I guess you could even say it’s a kind of upgrade strategy if it would really deliver double the performance. But I don’t think it’s realistic to assume that double the performance of a 2005 card in 2007 is exactly the same thing as 1x the performance of the new 2007 card.

I mean, for instance, an theoretical SLI geForce 4200 bought in 2002 followed by another one bought in 2004 is really not the same as one 6600 or 6800 bought in 2004 in terms of performance is it?

I was really talking about buying a single $150 card today, not two of them. A 6600GT is really fine for any game running at, say, 1280x1024. Which is generally the max for anyone with a 19-inch LCD.

I mean, for instance, an theoretical SLI geForce 4200 bought in 2002 followed by another one bought in 2004 is really not the same as one 6600 or 6800 bought in 2004 in terms of performance is it?

Nope, but there’s a big architecture change between the 4- and 6-series NVIDIA cards (DX9, pixel shaders, etc.). And of course the same thing could happen between now and whenever you’d buy a second card.

But assuming the 4200 was a DX9, PS 2 card, two 4200s might be the equal (or superior) to a 6600GT, which is really the best you’d hope for 2-3 years later. Assuming you could buy this theoretical 4200 for less than the cost of a 6600GT, it might save you some money.

Wow, I didn’t know 6600 GTs were going for that these days. Definitely not a bad idea if a person is upgrading to a PCI Express mobo to consider dual PEG.

I know, it’s crazy. Though it’s more accurate to say they’re about $165 on average, though one is $139 with rebate at newegg.

The PNY that I know is SLI capable out of the box is about $180.

Buying an SLI card now, and a second one later is a good proposal except…

Buying a second one doesn’t really give you a 100% performance increase like they want you to believe. I saw a recent benchmark for Doom 3 running 55 fps with one card and 60 fps with two (maxed out everything naturally). So unless future cards do a better job of load balancing it doesn’t look like you would get your money’s worth to buy a second card later (esp. because knowing the video market’s oligopoly the prices are likely to be the virtually same 2 years later).

One 6800GT is a better bet than two 6600GTs, from the benchmarks I’ve seen. Plus, a single-card solution produces less heat, less noise, and needs half the juice.

You can get them for under $300 if you poke around. Just make sure you don’t get tricked into buying the 128MB version.

Do you remember if that was a 6600GT? I might try to get another card from PNY just to see what two of those will do.

Maybe they hit a CPU limit, because I tried two 7800GTX cards and saw a significant boost. Not 100%, but 60-80%, particularly at higher resolutions. Ooh, I have it here:

DOOM 3 at 1600x1200 with 4X AA and 8X AF: 54.3 FPS
DOOM 3 SLI: 92.4 FPS

There was less gain at 1280x1024 (like 50%). And even more at 1920x1200 (nearly 80%). 3D Mark scores all scored about 80% higher, regardless of resolution.

We’re not talking about buying the two cards today. We’re saying buy one now, with the possibility of getting another down the road. If you have $150 to spend on video, buying an SLI-capable 6600GT may give you an upgrade path.

But if you have $300 to spend today, buy a single card. A 256MB 6800 (non-GT) or an X800 XL will do nicely. Or pony up another $50-$100 for a 6800GT.

Steve, you can get a 6800 GT now for $300, not $350-400. Pretty sweet price for the performance and supported features you get in the NV4x chip.

Really? When I last checked, they were still $350-$400.

Holy cow. I take it all back. Buy a 6800GT for $300. They rock.

6800GT in the PCI-e flavor? I seem to be having problems finding one for $300 that isn’t AGP. The AGP cards are cheaper.

I’m probably going with the SLI motherboard and the 6800GT. I’ll pay a little more for the video card. I might also notch the processor down to 3500+ but I haven’t decided yet. I’m definitely putting in 2GB of RAM right away though. You can never have enough RAM. :)

The rest of it will fall out from there. The flat panel is still a little up in the air too. I might make do with the Sony G400 19" monitor I have here right now for just a little while longer and then pick up a 20" or bigger 1600x1200 capable flat panel later.

–Dave

Sounds like you’ve got a good system then. Just remember to get the Dell flat panels instead of the imitation brands.

There’s a weekend special at Newegg right now for $350 with a $50 mail-in rebate.

But yeah, it appears AGP is $300, PCI-e is $350. Which makes sense, as more people going high-end are moving to PCI-e.

I’d personally go with the cheaper CPU. One interesting thing about the 2GB cranking your memory speed to DDR400 to DDR333: I just downloaded a BIOS update for my MSI motherboard at home that switched it back up to 400. (It also flipped the switch on product activation, grr.)

Flat panels will keep dropping in price, so it’s not a bad idea to wait. As for the Dells, they’re terrific LCDs at a good price but not exactly the God-like entities people make them out to be. They’re not really better than any Samsung (who I think makes the unit for Dell), Sony, NEC, LG, etc.

It’s an issue when you fill up all the banks. I’ve used 2 x 1GB modules without this happening.

Also, the Venice / San Diego 90nm cores have tweaked memory controllers, so it’s not an issue at all with those spins of the CPU.

That’s just it, I have all four banks filled with 512MB modules. It previously dropped to 333, but now after the BIOS update (which went from version 3.1 to 9.x, has a new menu, new opening screen, lots of… new options), it’s now sitting at 400 with the same RAM and CPU.

Very odd.