The New AMD Building Thread

Haha messing with drivers and settings is never a good idea. I usually find it best to just look for a working driver and leave it at that. The programmers know far better what is wrong and what is causing the problem. Be patient and let them figure it out for you before you mess something up good.

Haha one idiot friend messing with firmware and BIOS flashes. 1 bricked DVD-RW drive, 2 bricked mobos, and a bricked 9600GSO all in a week. Then he gets PO'd and bitches at me to fix it all because I taught him how to flash :S Man I gotta stop helping my friends do stuff. They never actually listen. They just wait for me to write down the procedure and then proceed to wreak havok on innocent PC hardware

 

This is why I don't update BIOSes and firmware for the sake of it.

 

Hey guys, new to these forums but I love the information you have. I'm currently looking to upgrade my system and looking for some help.vista, amd 9500 phenom quad core, 3gb ram, nvidia 8500gt and looking for some cost effective solutions to upgrade my gaming experience. I've already researched video cards, but decided making a post here couldn't hurt =p. yes my pc is about 2yrs old and in dire need of an upgrade. I have about $900to play with and have been debating scrapping this motherboard for a higher-end board or just seeing if added memory and a high end video card can be supported on what I have. I'd hate to spend the money and kill my pc..so any help is largely appreciated! =D

 

Whats your current board?

 

Well the CPU you have is pretty dire, so you would want to upgrade that, and the video card isn't great either. Assuming your motherboard only supports older Phenoms (I'd imagine that probably is the case) you're best off scrapping the board. CPU and GPU for some more up to date components. Of course by scrapping I mean selling on ebay but I doubt you'd make a great deal.
For $900 you can get some pretty reasonable parts these days, that's ample for a major upgrade. Something like a Phenom II X4 940, MA790X-UD4P and Radeon HD4890 will only sum about $500. You could use that extra money to upgrade storage, get some more RAM perhaps, do all sorts of things. Or you could go a little higher end still and go for an Intel Q9650, EP45-UD3R and a Radeon HD4870X2 for $800 - you may very well need a new PSU for any upgrade at all though, you will need to state which one you currently have - you will also need to state which case you have, as it may not be sufficient for cooling top-grade components.

 

Sammy wouldn't he be better off just starting from scratch, hell with 900 bucks I would, I know I'm no where near in knowledge as you guys bur starting from scratch wouldn't that avoid possible compatability issues with hardware and possibly software he already has.

He would also get nothing in selling parts from his old PC, but if he sold his whole old unit you know he could get something.

 

He could start from scratch, but there's not always need to throw away good disk drives, power supply and RAM if you don't need to. It depends what spec the original PC was built to.
As it stands he could well actually make more from selling the old bits than selling the old PC as a whole.

 

Just drop about $150-200 and upgrade your graphics card for the lowest cost solution.

You didn't say what your mother board is but if you are intending to upgrade it then you might as well go for a new processor, motherboard, and graphics card providing the rest can be recycled.


List all your system parts for a better answer.

 

A phenom 9500 is really weak though, there's not much point in having a cutting edge GPU with a CPU like that.

 

in games the biggest differnce int he GPU, so if he can only upgrade one thing, its the GPU id say.

 

If the one desireable task outside of surfing the net and word processing is gaming then a decent GPU will fit the bill even with a Phenom 9500. A fast processor helps stretch out those extra frames but in the end most of the work is still being done by the graphics processor. I feel comfortable recommending a decent graphics card with that setup because I used an 8800 GTS (G92)in the old Opteron 170 dual core system which my son now has and it played Oblivion with no video issues whatsoever and the Phenom 9500 is a faster processor. Now if he wants to get into transcoding, encoding, or reencoding then that's another issue.

My druthers is always to go for faster stuff but my experience and common sense tells me that more often than not it's to have a car that can do 175 even though I intend to do the speed limit.

 

You say the 9500 phenom is week. Whats weeker, the athlon 5200, or the 9500 phenom. Cause the dual core 5200 continues to impress me. But then, I have an unnatural amount of patience. Perhaps obtained by my having dial-up internet for a time. Ahh memories *wipes a tear away* lol.

Is afterdawn displaying incorrectly for others???

 

Well perhaps, but there are limits to the CPU's ability as well. Were it a 9850 or so it wouldn't be such an issue, but slower CPUs like that can still drag down reasonably priced GPUs in some games, the processing power required for many is quite substantial these days. If you can only afford to replace one component, make it the graphics card, but when someone is willing to perform a complete system upgrade, I see no reason to deny them it, when they have an outdated CPU like that.
Omega: The X2 5200+ is much stronger per-core. The Phenom 9500 is a quad core 4200+, and it's not an xx50 series either, so suffers from the TLB issues that plagued the first Phenoms, cutting its performance down to the level of a pair of 3800+s, if not worse.

Afterdawn is looking fine to me atm.

 

Wow. Glad I never purchased one of those then.

The current problem with afterdawn is, the words don't wrap when changing the window size. I need it maximized so I don't have to scroll for every sentence! Rather unusual.

 

Ah yeah, mine's doing that as well. I didn't notice as the window was big enough not to be an issue

 

MAN I want a 30" monitor!!! LOL

 

even my 24" is getting stretched acros... (albe it by 1cm)

 

Near the top left column of the forum there is a "Browse by topic" menu. Close it and since the page is not fixed (fluid)it will expand.

 

Yes! I hate having to scroll back and forth. I think it's Hybride's post. Looks like it was done on Notepad and copied here. He needs to turn on Word Wrap! There's no huge graphics, so after looking at all the posts on the page, his is the likely culprit! I'll send him a PM and ask him to edit it! The last page is fine!

Russ

 

No, using word wrap in notepad

makes your posts come out

like this, with line spacing.


I write most of my posts in notepad without word wrap, and it doesn't usually cause this.