Recommendations on a minor upgrade

[DGhost]

Originally posted by eftychios
Thanks for all the replies,
My only problem is with my G200. How can I quarantee that it will work with AGP V2. Unless there is someone willing to buy it

the G200 does not support AGP 2.0. this however will not be a problem unless you are running a P4 w/ Intel chipset (i850, i845, i860 is probably in the same boat), an NForce motherboard, or have an ****ole vendor that decides to disable it on their motherboard.

AGP 2.0 is a superset of AGP 1.0. it includes both 1.5v and 3.3v support, and support for up to 4x transfers (versus the 2x limit that 1.0 had). as long as you stay away from AGP 3.0 boards (anything advertising AGP 8x) and those mentioned above, you should be fine.

[UtwigMU]

Can your RAM run @133MHz? (Try it with a borrowed PII350 that can hit 133fsb or in friend's board and run Memtest86)

If the RAM cannot do the job for you you are limited to Duron, Celeron (not overclocked) or underclocked AthlonXP.

P4 (and P4 based Celerons = 1.7 and above) with SDRAM are a castration since P4 is bandwith hungry.

If your RAM is badass ninja one continue the 815EP/Celeron or K7S5A/AthlonXP idea. I am in the same boat (PII350@467/512MB PC133CAS2) and I would rather go for ABIT ST6 (A friend is willing to sell) or Asus Tusl2/Celeron 1.0A@1.33 or 1.2A@1.6 than ECS K7S5A, since that board is not stellar and I saw a few problems popping up in forums.

If not sell it and go 845G/P4 (1.8A@2.4 or 2.0A@2.66) or Tyan Tiger MP (S2460) with two hacked XPs (into MPs or real MPs to be on the safe side) 1600-2000+ - have best price/performance now. From local pricelists o'ced P4 costs about as much as hacked dual XPs.

[Gurm]

DGhost,

I would beg to differ on a number of points.

1. Arctic Silver is MUCH MUCH MUCH MUCH MUCH (I cannot stress this enough) better than regular thermal goo. So much better that it'll make your head spin.

2. Retail boxed AMD chips come with a dinky heatsink and a fan that is not big enough to cool a 486, nevermind an Athlon. I ran my stock sink and fan, and overheated my chip the very first time I tried to encode a large divx file. You NEED a better cooler. It's just not a question, unless you happen to leave your case off and you live in the polar regions.

3. As for ThermalTake, I like their fans due to the speed adjustment. I understand that some people like other sinks better, but the big-ass fan sells me (it's the size of a case fan) on the Volcano 9. Also it has 3 clips on both sides of the sink, which is important in case one breaks off. It's just a really solid unit, and is substantially cheaper than many competing units.

- Gurm

[az]

I don't think you'll be able to find anything with 4 RAM slots nowadays - it just gives too many problems (stability and performance) to do it on a consumer-priced board.

You MIGHT want to get the ECS K7S5A, since it's damn cheap, which would allow you to run 2 SDR sticks, and when you have saved some more money, make the transition to DDR. It's dirt cheap also, and not too bad, if you don't want to O/C. You won't want to run more than 2 modules on a modern board anyway. Make sure though, like Utwig said, that your RAM can run at 133 MHz. It's possible to run MEM and FSB out of synch on the board,but it's slowing it down more than you think (running the CPU at 100 FSB and mem at 133 can in fact be slower than running both on 100, due to timing issues).

Thermaltake isn't as bad as they used to be when they made all this Orb crap.

AZ

[DGhost]

the stock AMD hsf units work fine. i have personally built out so many of them that had NO problems using the stock HSF that its not even funny. from the tbirds to the XP chips to MP configurations, the stock fans worked fine. granted, there are better aftermarket coolers on the market. there are a fair amount that are better. but, the stock fan is fine.

the arctic silver compound offers no benefit unless you are overclocking or doing extreme cooling. period. i've used it. i have a tube sitting in my desk right now. hell, i'm using it in one of my computers (a 1.33 tbird). it still doesn't make that much of a difference.

as far as thermaltake heatsinks, i've seen the regional AMD rep making fun of them. the orb fans just plain sucked, and so did most of the volcano series. we acctually saw better cooling with the AMD stock fans than some of the volcano 6/7 series. we saw thermaltake fans that would put down pressure into the wrong spot and would fry chips.

[Gurm]

Ok, you and I are obviously talking about different AMD H/S/F combos here.

I bought two retail AMD Athlon XP 1800+'s.

I installed them with standard thermal grease and the stock HSF's (which came with the pink stuff, no need to add any more).

The RESTING temperature for the chip, running at idle, with the case off, was 54'C. That's kinda high, no?

The ACTIVE temperature for the chip was closer to 60'C.

When running VirtualDUB with a DIVX encode, it jumped to 69'C, and after just a few minutes powered off due to exceeding the 70'C damage threshhold.

On two different chips.

I installed a Volcano 9. At 4000rpm I never touch 60'C, even under full load the hottest I get (WITH THE CASE ON) is 58'C.

If I up the RPM to the fan's max (5600-ish) I can drop it to the low 50's, although ambient case temp keeps it from going any lower.

The difference between standard thermal grease and Arctic Silver was several degrees.

So obviously your experiences and mine don't jibe. You should SEE how dinky this stock HSF is. It looks like a Pentium cooler. Blech.

And the "regional AMD rep" is a marketing idiot. He can make fun all he likes, the truth is that their stock HSF's fail. Ask Greebe or anyone else who has built a rig similar to mine recently.

- Gurm

[rugger]

Originally posted by Gurm
DGhost,

I would beg to differ on a number of points.

1. Arctic Silver is MUCH MUCH MUCH MUCH MUCH (I cannot stress this enough) better than regular thermal goo. So much better that it'll make your head spin.

No it isn't, but Arctic Silver is conductive, making it a real pain to work with if all you want to do is to install a CPU onto a motherboard and use it at stock speed.

Originally posted by Gurm
2. Retail boxed AMD chips come with a dinky heatsink and a fan that is not big enough to cool a 486, nevermind an Athlon. I ran my stock sink and fan, and overheated my chip the very first time I tried to encode a large divx file. You NEED a better cooler. It's just not a question, unless you happen to leave your case off and you live in the polar regions.

Wrong. My Athlon XP 2000+ is boringly stable under full load, (encoding/decoding divx+deinterlace filters) using only the AMD supplied fan+heatsink. I don't leave my case open, and I am using it in an older Aopen KF45 case, with only the power supply fan to move air out of the case. Also, in this case, is an IBM GXP60 drive (they get hot), and a Geforce DDR (sorry, can't afford Parhellia yet)

Yet still boringly stable.

[Gurm]

Rugger,

AMD must have two sets of athlon heatsinks then. The ones that I got are unstable under normal load no matter what. Greebe can vouch for that - his were just as bad.

Maybe AMD wised up.

- Gurm

[rugger]

Hmmm

Maybe AMD use different heatsinks for different CPU's, because my AMD heatsink wasn't dinky at all. Its big and chunky with a 60mm, 5500 rpm fan on it. It had dozens of small fins on it to maximize surface area.

My temps are:
Unloaded: Low to Mid 30 degrees celcius
Loaded: About 52 degrees celcius

[Gurm]

Yeah, must be. Mine is EXACTLY big enough to cover the chip, looks like a boring pentium sink, and has a dinky-ass fan that runs at around 3600rpm tops.

- Gurm

[Sasq]

yeah mine came with the same fan as gurms. I swapped the fan on it and got improvement. must swap it over with something else

[DGhost]

Originally posted by Gurm
Ok, you and I are obviously talking about different AMD H/S/F combos here.

I bought two retail AMD Athlon XP 1800+'s.

I installed them with standard thermal grease and the stock HSF's (which came with the pink stuff, no need to add any more).

Dunno if it is the same or not, you should get pictures. they did recently change their coolers (within the last month or two) so its possible that the ones i built out (tons and tons and tons of them) do not use the same coolers. when we built them out we used the standard pink stuff on the bottom side of the hsf.

Originally posted by Gurm

The RESTING temperature for the chip, running at idle, with the case off, was 54'C. That's kinda high, no?

The ACTIVE temperature for the chip was closer to 60'C.

When running VirtualDUB with a DIVX encode, it jumped to 69'C, and after just a few minutes powered off due to exceeding the 70'C damage threshhold.

On two different chips.

yeah, thats a bit high. we could put an 1800+ into basic case using only the PSU fan and the stock HSF and the temps would never go above 60C. ever. period. most wound up in the 45C-55C range for max temps. i dunno what the hell conditions you are experiencing, but i can tell you that this is not the norm.

nice you did it with two chips. we went through at least a box or two of the processors a week. on a slow week. and believe me, if we saw problems with the retail fans, we wouldn't have been selling retail boxed procs.

Originally posted by Gurm

I installed a Volcano 9. At 4000rpm I never touch 60'C, even under full load the hottest I get (WITH THE CASE ON) is 58'C.

If I up the RPM to the fan's max (5600-ish) I can drop it to the low 50's, although ambient case temp keeps it from going any lower.

thank you for proving my point that thermaltake fans suck. again, on an 1800+ with the stock fan most systems ran below 55C even under load. Globalwin FOP32-1's keep them at around the same temps. and we had a $15 retail fan. we sold the AOC D5-825 fan (newegg sells it for $8) and it could keep an 1800+ in the low to mid 40's without a problem.

if you want a serious fan, the Alpha Pal8045 can keep a TBird 1.33@1.5 at 40C.

Originally posted by Gurm

The difference between standard thermal grease and Arctic Silver was several degrees.

So obviously your experiences and mine don't jibe. You should SEE how dinky this stock HSF is. It looks like a Pentium cooler. Blech.

And the "regional AMD rep" is a marketing idiot. He can make fun all he likes, the truth is that their stock HSF's fail. Ask Greebe or anyone else who has built a rig similar to mine recently.

- Gurm

the 1-3C that arctic silver saved is wasted money for most people. the difference is not enough to make my head spin.

your experiences and mine don't jibe. i have the experience of using the AMD retail fans on for the last year without problems, and you have the experience of two boxed processors that fail. i dunno what is going on for you, but again, we saw no problems.

i wouldn't dis the AMD rep too much. he was not a marketing idiot, like many of the other vendors i dealt with. he was not their to sell us products, he was there because we were a strictly amd shop and were selling more procs than any other store in the city, and (according to him) more than many stores in the state. shit, we had a tiger mp well before they were released because of him. it was quite suprising when he talked about how badly the NForce boards sucked.

edit: clarified stuff.

[Wombat]

No it isn't, but Arctic Silver is conductive, making it a real pain to work with if all you want to do is to install a CPU onto a motherboard and use it at stock speed.

Huh? It's only conductive under some very idealised conditions. Unless you tell me you install your system in a clean room with latex gloves on, I won't count it as conductive, because your finger oils are much more of a troublemaker. Then again, there's always Arctic Alumina.