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jimmy-paillet
12-02-2006, 10:20 PM
Hello all,
I need some advice on an upgrade...

here what i have right now:
AMD 3800+
2 Go RAM DDR (2*1Go Corsair PC3200)
Asus A8R-MVP
Ati X1600XT
HD:160Go Seagate Barracuda SATA NCQ
PSU: Thermaltake 420W
2x19inch monitors....

it's working great but i feel there 's room for improvements...
i do mainly Photoshop and painter...some gaming but the rig is completely satisfying in this area....

windows is sometimes slow, photoshop and painter aren't slick with big brushes...

my first thinking was to upgrade 3800+ --> X2 4600+
(maybe opteron?)
but i don't know what's the future of socket 939...

there is maybe the solution of changing the MB to something around 100euros and buy a core 2 duo (E6300)...since core 2 duo seems pretty powerful....

what do you think? what upgrade should i have? (i can spend max 250 euros)

alos, do i have to change the psu if i pass from 3800+ to X2 4600+?

thanks
andytw
12-02-2006, 10:49 PM
AMD will not be releasing any new processors for socket 939 beyond what is currently available, so the an X2 is your only real upgrade without changing your mainboard.
The 4600+ should be fine with your current PSU.
I have an X2 4200+ (running at 2.4GHZ so effectively a 4600+) with 2GB RAM, a 6800GT and 2 Hard disks.I am using with a 430W PSU with no problems.

Given your budget restriction an upgrade to Core 2 Duo (or AMD's socket AM2) will not be practical unless you can save a bit more as you will also need to change you RAM for DDR2 (and replace your graphic card if it's an AGP one).
jimmy-paillet
12-04-2006, 03:46 PM
Can someone who has upgraded from a fast single cpu to a dual core share his experience?
i did a Pcmark05 benchmark and compared my results to those with dual X2 cpus...
it is really not worth the 250 euros...
it seems anyway that the weakest part of configs are the HDDs...
my hd is sata2 peak transfer: 250M/s sustained 60-70M/s

can it be much better than that?

otherwise i think i will stick with what i have, and save money for the next generation computer...
Damn when flash memory HD will be used??!!!
andytw
12-04-2006, 06:50 PM
My X2 4200+ was an upgrade from a 3500+.
While it has cut render times almost in half for multi-threaded applications and allows me to multi-task easily (i.e. I can have a single threaded render running in the background while I build a new scene), it may not help you much unless Painter is multi-threaded.

Photoshop is multi threaded, but I don't really use it enough to be able to tell you whether any performance gain is worth the upgrade to dual core.

This (http://tomshardware.co.uk/cpu/charts.html) allows you to compare the performance of 2 CPU's running various benchmarks including 2 for Photoshop and should give you a better idea of the relative performance than Pcmark05.
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12-04-2006, 06:50 PM
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