Advice motherboard + CPU upgrade (old Acer)

[PP Mguire]

For the games of right now that CPU will do pretty decently with a 560ti. I popped my 465 in my 6000+ server setup for a friend of mine a few times and it did BF3 on medium to high settings at 1080p. There isn't much difference between the 4200+ and 6000+.

 

[Spazz]

That is pleasant to hear.

 

[Matt77]

I just looked at the pic of the tower. My uncle had one, it pooped out after a few months...

 

[Spazz]

I've had mine for almost 4 and a half years and the only issues I have really wanted to make sure I didn't face was overheating so I have my video card's fan turned up to maximum so it sounds like there is an airplane flying in my room and it is quite loud but it has prevented from overheating to the point of crashing. I don't even notice it unless I am trying to watch a video or hear some kind of audio where the talking is soft or not very loud and then I have to turn it down.

 

[hikaricloud]

Time to dispel another myth. When I originally purchased the 2900 PRO I did so because I thought that was the best 1.0 card I could afford and because someone had mentioned how since my onboard video is ATI brand or since I have an AMD CPU (or some similar explanation, it was 4 years ago) that it would be best if my GPU were ATI as this would be "more compatible." Is this false? Or in some cases true?

I just wanted to make a comment on this. Back in the day, ATI and nVidia did not play well together. Putting ATI cards on a board with an nVidia chipset made it so the computer would never restart properly among a slew of other issues. This is not the case anymore.

There was also "Hyrbid Crossfire", where certain dedicated PCI-E cards could "combine" with certain IGPs, maybe he was talking about that. Dunno.

 

[PP Mguire]

I just wanted to make a comment on this. Back in the day, ATI and nVidia did not play well together. Putting ATI cards on a board with an nVidia chipset made it so the computer would never restart properly among a slew of other issues. This is not the case anymore.

There was also "Hyrbid Crossfire", where certain dedicated PCI-E cards could "combine" with certain IGPs, maybe he was talking about that. Dunno.

I had an X1900XTX on the SLI-DR for the whole 6 months the card lasted. Got great performance with no "issues". I personally believe that crap was myth. Either that, or people were installing the drivers for their chipsets which wasn't needed after XP SP1a.

Hybrid Crossfire is a thing of this generation of computing.

 

[hikaricloud]

I had an X1900XTX on the SLI-DR for the whole 6 months the card lasted. Got great performance with no "issues". I personally believe that crap was myth. Either that, or people were installing the drivers for their chipsets which wasn't needed after XP SP1a.

Hybrid Crossfire is a thing of this generation of computing.

Firstly, the first thing isn't a myth, it happened quite a few times in the computer shop back when I first started working there, which was before that card was released (actually, before R520 was released at all, let alone that card.)...and most of the computers we worked on were already at the VERY least a year older than new stuff at that time. We're talking between R100 and R300 (the first Radeons), and the Rage series. We're also talking about fresh installs, sometimes with no IGP to start with, just a chipset driver.

As for Hybrid, I haven't seen anything "new" about it. The original Hybrid that I was talking about was solely for certain AMD 700 and 800 chipsets. I know there's a newer thing now with the A6 and A8 APUs with a couple HD6xxx cards, but it's called "Dual Graphic" or something now. So I guess that's "new" technically, but I was specifically speaking of a time when APUs weren't on the market, like this guy's computer.

 

[PP Mguire]

Firstly, the first thing isn't a myth, it happened quite a few times in the computer shop back when I first started working there, which was before that card was released (actually, before R520 was released at all, let alone that card.)...and most of the computers we worked on were already at the VERY least a year older than new stuff at that time. We're talking between R100 and R300 (the first Radeons), and the Rage series. We're also talking about fresh installs, sometimes with no IGP to start with, just a chipset driver.

As for Hybrid, I haven't seen anything "new" about it. The original Hybrid that I was talking about was solely for certain AMD 700 and 800 chipsets. I know there's a newer thing now with the A6 and A8 APUs with a couple HD6xxx cards, but it's called "Dual Graphic" or something now. So I guess that's "new" technically, but I was specifically speaking of a time when APUs weren't on the market, like this guy's computer.

I had Nvidia chipsets up until I finally got a 790FX (which is still relatively new) in 09. Radeon 7200 to 8500 on NF2 Ultra, and the latest was a 9800XT on my nF3 Ultra S939 DFI LP board. Also 4850s and 4870s on a 750a Asus board. I never had any issues with any ATI + Nvidia chipset setups hence why I said I personally believe it was a myth. I also never said anything about an IGP, I said chipset drivers. Most believe back then chipset drivers made things "better" when in all reality over half the time the only thing that worked well was the AGP INF which after SP1a in XP was redundant. They also caused a ton of problems too *cough* SMBUs and GART driver *cough*

Also as I mentioned, new thing in this generation of computing. IIRC the 700 series AMD chips + IGPs came out in late 08 early 09. That is still relatively new in the computing world because that was Phenom 2 era which are just barely being phased out now. Up until a week ago I had a 770 board + 6000+ setup in my server paired with a 260. They worked perfectly because I never installed any IGP drivers or chipset drivers. Did BF3 medium settings at 1080p and Skyrim at high. That's why I was telling him, adding a 560ti to his setup not only will be perfectly fine but also give him a great boost in performance even with his CPU/RAM setup.

 

[hikaricloud]

I had Nvidia chipsets up until I finally got a 790FX (which is still relatively new) in 09. Radeon 7200 to 8500 on NF2 Ultra, and the latest was a 9800XT on my nF3 Ultra S939 DFI LP board. Also 4850s and 4870s on a 750a Asus board. I never had any issues with any ATI + Nvidia chipset setups hence why I said I personally believe it was a myth. I also never said anything about an IGP, I said chipset drivers. Most believe back then chipset drivers made things "better" when in all reality over half the time the only thing that worked well was the AGP INF which after SP1a in XP was redundant. They also caused a ton of problems too *cough* SMBUs and GART driver *cough*

Thing is, there were a lot of boards that needed chipset drivers after a fresh install with XP...especially if it wasn't a factory reset on pre-built machines, but a standard XP disk. Back then we refrained from doing many factory resets since quite a few of them were hard drive based and easily got corrupted. Yay HP leading the charge on that one...

Wasn't trying to say you were wrong, was just explaining it was the case prior to the type of hardware you were using. You are correct in the fact that it doesn't happen anymore and hasn't happened for a while, starting around the time right before R420 or R520, can't remember which offhand now.

As for the Hybrid thing, was just saying that might have been what he was referring to, 4 years ago would have made sense since that's when it first came out with 700 series chipsets and the HD3xxx cards.

 

[PP Mguire]

Thing is, there were a lot of boards that needed chipset drivers after a fresh install with XP...especially if it wasn't a factory reset on pre-built machines, but a standard XP disk. Back then we refrained from doing many factory resets since quite a few of them were hard drive based and easily got corrupted. Yay HP leading the charge on that one...

Wasn't trying to say you were wrong, was just explaining it was the case prior to the type of hardware you were using. You are correct in the fact that it doesn't happen anymore and hasn't happened for a while, starting around the time right before R420 or R520, can't remember which offhand now.

As for the Hybrid thing, was just saying that might have been what he was referring to, 4 years ago would have made sense since that's when it first came out with 700 series chipsets and the HD3xxx cards.

Are you talking about those Geforce chipsets like the 630a or the 6025 or whatever the stupid number was? Only thing those needed drivers for were the IGP. I never had to install drivers for my nForce chipsets all the way up to 780i.