Best VCard for around 200$?

[Panther5060]

Well dale, ya i want to get the most performance out of this thing for a friend that has been running a 433 p2 celeron since his upgrade from a 486 in 98'. But as he doesnt have much money Im gonna have no choice but to oc this thing as high as it will go.

the 3000+ winchester core cpu will probably go to a 275mhz fsb no problem, and the ram will be the bottleneck if I get anything slower than pc4400. The ram will only cost me 167$ so thats not a major problem.

as for the motherboard, theres the biggest copy paste error I have made in a LONG LONG time. Here is the motherboard that i ment to copy paste

ABIT AN8 NVIDIA nForce4 for 142$

The X800XL is a great buy from the perf : price ratio but what about the X800Pro with the hardmod for the other 8 pipelines? i thought i saw a webpage with info on how to do that about a month ago, i could be mistaken though and that would NOT be fun.

 

[Panther5060]

6600GT

Endo of story.

bah ill just chip in 50$ from my end to get him a better system. X800XL it is

 

[dale5605]

True, you could unlock the pipelines on an x800 pro but it is risky and not guaranteed to work. Considering the x800 xl's are the same price if not lower than the x800 pro's I would not bother going down that road.

For the RAM try to budget in for a gig. If you get it in 4 256mb sticks it will be a bit cheaper.

2 sets of these is probably the cheapest and most overclockable option:
http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=20-231-003&depa=1

And those puppies will hit 275mhz without even having to overclock them

If I did that math right 275mhz would be perfect, because the RAM would be running at stock and you would be all set

 

[Panther5060]

god im overlooking everything today, BAD day for building computers

 

[dale5605]

We're helping you through this. Hang in there! :bald:

don't die on us

I edited my above post btw

 

[Chankama]

6600 GT. As for ur other parts, interesting selection.....

 

[Panther5060]

If I did that math right 275mhz would be perfect, because the RAM would be running at stock and you would be all set

Thats why I chose pc4400 and said anything slower would be a bottleneck. Now watch my motherboard/cpu fail to get to 275 and I'm sitting there looking SH*TFACED with ram having timings of 3-4-4-8 lmao

 

[dale5605]

No you would still be cool because the latency as nubius, dj chris, and others will tell you doesn't affect you as much as you think. But even so you should be able to tighten up the timings at lower frequencies so I don't think it would do any harm. I think 2 sets of the ram I linked ya will do just perfect.

And with a good heatsink I think you'll hit 2.5ghz no problem

I'm not sure about abit's overclocking abilities though. I'm hoping someone will reply to give some clarification on this. But if the abit board won't allow you to pump up the vcore very much then that would limit your overclocking. DFI may let you increase it more but I'm not sure. hopefully someone on this forum can tell us.

 

[dale5605]

In the meantime what are you considering for processor cooling? This could make a big difference in your ability to overclock to 275mhz. I believe the 7700-cu is good, considering I get 21C idle on my 3000+ winchester, but I haven't overclocked it much so I don't know how high that would overclock to. I have also heard that venus 12 is a good cooler.

 

[DJ-CHRIS]

Yeah those are 2 great coolers, im agreeing too much with dale now



Yeah, the latency barely affects bandwidth, some 3-3-3-7 is all you need if your not overclocking