Albatross_1
Solid State Member
- Messages
- 6
My athlon64 3200+ venice CPU has bit the dust. Faulty PSU took it out.
So I'm looking to upgrade. What socket 939 CPU will give me the best performance for gaming, and also be able to give photoshop CS2 some juice to handle extremly high resolution images? I'm looking at spending no more than $300 or close to it.
here's my current hardware (including the bad CPU):
- Asus A8N32-SLI Deluxe Motherboard
- AMD Athlon64 3200+ venice CPU
- 2x eVGA Geforce 7900gt in SLI
- OCZ 2gb of PC3200 2-3-3-6 DDR400 ram
- Antec 550w PSU
- Ancient Maxtor 80gb IDE hdd, 7200rpm ata133
- Windows XP Home Edition SP2
- Lite-on DVD-RW drive
- Floppy **** drive
- 19" LCD running at native 1280x1024 for games
here's the games I play:
- Oblivion
- Hitman: Blood Money
- Battlefield 2
- Quake4
- FEAR
- HL2 / HL2DM
- AoE III
- and other various titles
Ok. So what CPU should I upgrade to that won't cost more than $300? I heard that dual-core is needed to get the most from SLI, but I'm using XP Home edition, which doesn't support multithreading so that sounds kind of pointless.
No matter which cpu I get, I plan on overclocking it to the best of my ability on air.
Besides gaming, I do a lot of photo editing on extremely high resolution (45 megapixel raw files) in photoshop CS2. Right now, the editing is too 'laggy' for my tastes. I know that a dual core CPU would help tremendously here, but like I said, XP home doesn't support multithreading. So what kind of an upgrade besides CPU should I do to improve photoshop performance. Get another 2gb of ram for 4gb total, or get a new SATA 3gb/s HDD which would be like 30x faster then the IDE ATA133 one I'm using now?
thanks for the help.
So I'm looking to upgrade. What socket 939 CPU will give me the best performance for gaming, and also be able to give photoshop CS2 some juice to handle extremly high resolution images? I'm looking at spending no more than $300 or close to it.
here's my current hardware (including the bad CPU):
- Asus A8N32-SLI Deluxe Motherboard
- AMD Athlon64 3200+ venice CPU
- 2x eVGA Geforce 7900gt in SLI
- OCZ 2gb of PC3200 2-3-3-6 DDR400 ram
- Antec 550w PSU
- Ancient Maxtor 80gb IDE hdd, 7200rpm ata133
- Windows XP Home Edition SP2
- Lite-on DVD-RW drive
- Floppy **** drive
- 19" LCD running at native 1280x1024 for games
here's the games I play:
- Oblivion
- Hitman: Blood Money
- Battlefield 2
- Quake4
- FEAR
- HL2 / HL2DM
- AoE III
- and other various titles
Ok. So what CPU should I upgrade to that won't cost more than $300? I heard that dual-core is needed to get the most from SLI, but I'm using XP Home edition, which doesn't support multithreading so that sounds kind of pointless.
No matter which cpu I get, I plan on overclocking it to the best of my ability on air.
Besides gaming, I do a lot of photo editing on extremely high resolution (45 megapixel raw files) in photoshop CS2. Right now, the editing is too 'laggy' for my tastes. I know that a dual core CPU would help tremendously here, but like I said, XP home doesn't support multithreading. So what kind of an upgrade besides CPU should I do to improve photoshop performance. Get another 2gb of ram for 4gb total, or get a new SATA 3gb/s HDD which would be like 30x faster then the IDE ATA133 one I'm using now?
thanks for the help.