Upgrade question

[Dogbert]

Out of curiosity, and please be as honset and objective as possible:

Assume that some guy has a P-III/Athlon/Duron 600-900Mhz and a G400 (let's assume it's a vanilla)

He has $400 to spend on an upgrade, would you recommend a new CPU + Fast memory or a Parhelia ?

[Jazzz]

i would go for the new CPU etc, 400 is wat too much for a parhelia and that money would be better spent on other stuff and the price of the of the parhelia will most likely be reduced soon as well seeing that the r300 is just around the corner

Parhelia = good card but overpriced

[Dogbert]

I see it's a tie now 4 vs. 4

In my real life scenario, I keep my old G400 and buy a new computer.
My scenario is a bit different cause I have an OC Celeron 500
(@562Mhz).
It'll cost me over 400$ cause it's a brand new computer, but it's sure going to be fun moving from 562 (celeron Mhz) to 1.53 Athlon Ghz

[thop]

go for the cpu,mobo,ram no question! with the parhelia you will only notice the improvement in games, more over that cely 562 is a bit too slow for the P.
but with cpu,mobo,ram you will notice a speed increase everywhere.

[DGhost]

i tend to agree, it all depends on what you do...

unless they have a reason to buy the parhelia (can use TH, gigacolor, wants to play games but wants a matrox), i would have to suggest a system upgrade.

granted, it does all depend on what the system is...

if it were a 900, the differences between that and a higher speed processor/memory are likely going to be negligable to him, but it does depend on what he does with it. if he does just basic word processing/email/internet, i would just recommend he go out and do something nice for his significant other if possible.

Jazzz - see, the problem is that Matrox has a significant advantage over ATI's R300. what is it you ask? the fact that the Parhelia acctually worked when it was released. if the R300 is supported like the 8500 is now (or the old Radeon is now), it will be a piece of crap no matter how fast it is. if you had to worry about having the fastest gaming card, i would be more afraid of NVidia, they have acctually grown fairly competent with their drivers as of recent.

[DuRaNgO]

I guess you need to ask yourself which upgrade would last longer?

the faster cpu won't help the g400 as much as the P would help the processor

[Nuno]

Now for some heresy

With $400 you should be (almost?) able to get a SiS745 motherboard, an Athlon XP 1800+, some quality DDR RAM and a budget DX8 card (Radeon 8500LE or GF4 Ti4200).

Then you could save for Parhelia, or whatever Matrox will do next time.

Pairing a 1.53Ghz Cpu with a vanilla G400 would not be very productive, it wouldn´t be not much faster than with a 600-900 Mhz cpu. Been there, done that.

I imagine a Parhelia would be seriously underpowered with a celeron (66Mhz bus/no SSE, right?).

[Dogbert]

I agree with you Nuno, but as most people agree: most of the time we spend on our computers, we do a lot of 2D (being on the forums is an example). Massive 3D takes 25% of our time (tops).

Besides, my best upgrade came from portugal a month ago (and it's not for my computer, it's for me)

[Jazzz]

Originally posted by DGhost
i Jazzz - see, the problem is that Matrox has a significant advantage over ATI's R300. what is it you ask? the fact that the Parhelia acctually worked when it was released. if the R300 is supported like the 8500 is now (or the old Radeon is now), it will be a piece of crap no matter how fast it is. if you had to worry about having the fastest gaming card, i would be more afraid of NVidia, they have acctually grown fairly competent with their drivers as of recent.

Well that was like over a year ago to assume the r300 is gonna fail is pretty stupid if you ask me. The parhelia works fine you say the FAA doesn't do too well in most games i hear, its opengl performance is pretty poor and in professional apps it is getting beat by a Ti4400, not a typo the Ti4600 probably beats it by even more. The parhelia is one big disappointment if you ask me the only thing it has over other cards is its superior 2d quality and triple monitor support. The surround gaming thing seems slow on new games so i don't see the point of promoting it as it only gets like 20-30 fps on games like SOF2. In conclusion parhelias performance is far from satisfactory in newer games where it was meant to shine it hasn't and at high res it gets low fps. Too call the R300 crap is pretty stupid if you ask me as you haven't even seen it perform I agree though the nvidia card will probably be a screamer as well but i doubt ATI will make the same mistake twice.

[DGhost]

Originally posted by Jazzz


Well that was like over a year ago to assume the r300 is gonna fail is pretty stupid if you ask me. The parhelia works fine you say the FAA doesn't do too well in most games i hear, its opengl performance is pretty poor and in professional apps it is getting beat by a Ti4400, not a typo the Ti4600 probably beats it by even more. The parhelia is one big disappointment if you ask me the only thing it has over other cards is its superior 2d quality and triple monitor support. The surround gaming thing seems slow on new games so i don't see the point of promoting it as it only gets like 20-30 fps on games like SOF2. In conclusion parhelias performance is far from satisfactory in newer games where it was meant to shine it hasn't and at high res it gets low fps. Too call the R300 crap is pretty stupid if you ask me as you haven't even seen it perform I agree though the nvidia card will probably be a screamer as well but i doubt ATI will make the same mistake twice.

i wasn't talking about a year ago. i was talking about now.

as i type this i have an 8500 in my box. ATI cannot get their drivers straight for even a Radeon 64MB VIVO, let alone the 8500 i am currently using. what makes you think that the R300 is acctually gonna work right? hmm?

i'm not talking performance. i'm just talking about the fact that ATI has really, really crappy drivers. and it doesn't make a bit of difference how fast the card is or how good the card is, because people will buy other products if the drivers suck.

ATI has made the same mistake twice. they have made the same mistake many, many times. first with the Rage 128's. then with the Radeons. now with the 8500's. have they gotten better with their driver development team? no.

really, the R300 could be the fastest card out there, but after my experiences with the 8500 (which have honestly been better than my friend with the Radeon 64mb VIVO), i would honestly buy an nvidia card over an ATI any day. at least NVidia knows how to write drivers.

if i were you buy a matrox card, it would be for the drivers and the quality of product it is.

Nuno: you *could* buy a Sis745 chipset board and a radeon 8500LE.... or you could simply dose yourself in gasolineand light yourself on fire... it will be much more enjoyable at the end of the day

[afterburn]

I'm going for Parhelia, no question about it. I already have a kick-ass system in my opinion, that doesn't need upgrading anytime soon, but I do need a new VGA card. My G400 doesn't cut it anymore, and the GF3 I bought last year is crap compared to the G400 IQ. Since I don't trust ATI when it comes to drivers, and I already have too many bad experiences with anything having something on board saying nvidia, there is no alternative.

[PAugustin]

I'd get a Parhelie, my current system is ok for what I do with it. It's weakness is the graphic card (G400max). My next upgrade will be Parhelia, but first I need to find a job to earn money....

[xortam]

Assuming that you only have $400 to budget on your PC for the next 3-6 months and your 3D card needs mainly concern gaming ...
If you play only a minimal amount of games, definitely go for the MB/CPU/Mem upgrade.
If you play at least a moderate amount of games, go for an inexpensive competitive card ... say around $100, and replace it with one of the latest 3D cards when you can afford to.
If you want to get heavily into gaming, than you'd probably need a total upgrade anyway. You could buy one of the leading 3D performers and be fairly satisfied for another year.
Personally, I'd go for the MB/CPU/Mem upgrade if I was constrained by that budget.

[Jazzz]

one thing i found very odd is some people have never had problems with ATI drivers and some don't see the end of them, e.g. Gibbo from OcUK hasn't had any problems. But then some people like yourself who have many problems

As for buying a matrox card, very good quality hardware, drivers hmmmmmm i hear the current parhelia drivers are real good

[mungu]

i work at a high school, and most of the systems have ATI cards (XPERTs, or Raden VEs) and its such a hassle when you need to install the drivers. ATI's own driver installation EXE gives me a "severe error" mostly because it cant identify the card, or cant find the inf file. I have to manually uncompress their exe and and manually install the inf. It is a huge pain, we are upgrading the lab and we are going with GeForce2 GTSs, it is a cheap decently performing card we can use for OpenGL programming.

As far as the upgrade goes, definately go with upgrading the vital system parts. the parhelia is cool and all, but if you're still riding on an old CPU, you're not going to notice much of a difference. Plus, RAM, CPUs, Motherboards are DIRT cheap right now. Might as well buy that now and save up for a parhelia while the price of the card comes down. it's a win-win situation.