CPU Upgrade-Worth it?

[talwynor]

Anyone have any thoughts on wether a CPU upgrade is worth the effort in the following scenario?

I have an Athlon XP 2500 recently upgraded to 1G of PC 3200 DDR ram at 400 mhz. In an effort to extend the life of the system, I impulse bought an XFX NVIDIA 6800 GT graphics card (AGP based). I use the system for a wide range of functions, (transfer of analog video via a plextor capture box, and gaming being the two biggest resource hogs). Do you think I would see a significant lift by upgrading my CPU? I think my upgrade path is rather limited given the socket A mobo...what is the highest I can go in the line? Do you think the 6800 gt will give me the lift I'm hoping for or will it bottleneck at the CPU? Any help and thoughts on the matter would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Hand of Evil]

Seach the internet for benchmark test, it is possible that someone has the numbers that could show the clocking difference.

You MAY want to upgrade your motherboard with the CPU to increase your bus speed, not sure what you got there.

Site that may help: PCSTATS

 

[Vagabond]

The video card will bring your gaming experience to respectable levels, more so then just the CPU upgrade alone would do. Where the CPU upgrade will help is with your video capture and editing. In particular, when you convert video from analog to digital, or if you need to resize the video stream, add effects, etc. What would help even more is if you add an hardware MPEG encoder card (which, like a 3d video card, takes away work from the CPU and does it much more efficiently then the CPU can). I have little experience with hardware MPEG cards, so I can't really recommend anything. However, I have heard good reviews of the Hauppauge PVR 250/350 series. The web page is http://www.hauppauge.com

Another thing that will help with all around performance is to add a Serial ATA or SCSI drive to your system, and place all your data on the new drive. Going SCSI is probably too expensive, with good controller cards starting around $200, and drives about 2 to 3 times as much as the equivalent capacity IDE drives. SATA is less expensive. Your motherboard may already have a SATA controller on it, in which case, you just need to start buying drives, which are comparable to IDE in price. Otherwise, controller cards can be picked up for about $40.

To sum it up the order of upgrade should be:

1. Video card for games
2. MPEG encoder for video capture
3. CPU, For video capture (If you can't find an MPEG encoder card)
4. SATA or SCSI hard drives for general performance boost
5. CPU for general performance boost

 

[talwynor]

Thanks for the suggestions..

Thanks for the suggestions...I've incorporated a few of them already I think with the 6800 xt purchase and a Plextor PX-M402U convertor. My mobo does support SATA (Its an ASUS A7N8X Deluxe). I've been hesitant to make the conversion to SATA just because I dont want to lose the existing data I have and I dont really understand SATA all that well...do you think I'd see a performance boost signbificant enough to jump on in? Also...my understanding is that my CPU upgrade path is limited without replacing my mobo...I I belive an Athlon XP 3000+ is the limit...is the leap from the the XP 2500 to the XP 3000 worth the expense?

Right now my goal is to extend the life of my system another 1.5 years or so until I can afford a top of the line gaming system. I've already purchase the convertor and the graphics card...I've got maybe another 200-300 to spend on upgrades to last me the next year or 2. If the CPU bump isnt going to be noticable, I'd rather save the money for when I do the system replacement.

Again, thank you for your input!

 

[Vagabond]

I belive an Athlon XP 3000+ is the limit...is the leap from the the XP 2500 to the XP 3000 worth the expense?

Again, thank you for your input!

Probably not, but maybe From the human perception point of view, you won't notice any difference. Applications might load 1/100th of a second faster, excel will calculate faster, but you won't really notice any speed gains for most of your computing. Looking at the raw speeds from PCStats (Great site by the way, thanks for the pointer Hand of Evil), I'd say that you will be able to shave a few minutes off of long editing sessions. As your motherboard will handle a 3000+ chip, you can try to overclock the 2500+ that is in there, and see if that makes an apprecable difference. Overclocking will be done in the BIOS, usually by selecting a faster bus speed, or clock multiplier, http://www.overclockers.com should be able to help you out with the pros and cons of overclocking.

However, the safest way to determine if the CPU is the bottleneck is to run either task manager (Press <Ctrl>-<alt>-<del> on a windows XP box to bring it up), or my favorite from sysinternals: Process explorer (http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/freeware/procexp.shtml) and then run your video capture/editing and see where the CPU usage sits. If it is constantly pegged at 100%, then a new CPU will help, if it only hovers around 100%, and spends most of the time in the 80-90's, then a faster CPU isn't going to help much.

As far as SATA drives go, you can add a SATA to your existing system without losing your old drives (assuming you have enough room in your case that is. If you don't then forget about going to SATA until your next PC). The BIOS on your motherboard determines what will boot first, and is probably set to default to IDE, even if SATA drives are present.

The advantage of SATA over IDE isn't so much the raw speed of the drives (spec wise, IDE and SATA drives are very similar), it is that SATA drives don't rely on the CPU as much as IDE drives do. On an IDE system, every time that the computer needs to access the hard drive, (or CDROM), the CPU must do most of the work setting up the drive for access, handling certain error conditions telling the drive to go to work, and handling the transfer of data. All this takes cycles from your applications. If you ever noticed your computer pause (as in even the mouse pointer doesn't move) at the same time your hard drive light goes on for a brief time, this is what is happening. On a SATA system, the CPU only has to hand off the request for data, and it can go back doing work on something else, until the hard drive request is completed.