Upgrading my computer

[KukriKhan]

I have decided to buy:

2 if these
http://www.pcwcomponentcentre.co.uk/...mvaluevdt6464q

and 1 of these
http://www.pcwcomponentcentre.co.uk/...at,4,shop,f,fa

The graphic card is out of stock so I will wait a week or two until I buy them.

Can anybody see any problems with these items.

Those selections seem to match up with your mobo spec's. Looks good to me. Seems you found a good deal on the vid card.

[The_Doctor]

Seems you found a good deal on the vid card.

I agree. I was going for a 128Mb then I found this, which was cheap, powerful and works on my computer. The cheapness worries we though...

[Red Harvest]

I am not sure what to make of the "supply voltage: 3.3V." 3.3V is used for SDRAM. DDR DIMM's run 2.5 V and use their own internal voltage regulation from what I've read. You can give them more juice from motherboard jumpers or BIOS settings, but it is only likely to help if your motherboard's signal is poor. So the 3.3V listing has me baffled and appears to be a typo.

They have a DRAM Value PC100 PC133 listed as well with 3.3V...so it looks like they made a bad assumption/forgot to upgrade the fields for DDR.

A FX5200 looks like a downgrade from a GF4 Ti4200, sorry. Check out Toms Hardware Guide VGA CHARTS III

What you really want if you are looking to upgrade is a true DX9 card. The 5200 really can't do the DX9 shaders well--it actually does a poorer job of them than the GF4's (look at the Aquamark comparisions for pure DX9 benchmarking.)

Entry level for a true DX9 card is twice as much, something like the 9600XT (beware of other 9600's some have a stripped down memory bus--never buy an ATI card with "SE" in the name, they are crippled.)

[The_Doctor]

Thanks for the warning, I will keep looking

[fret]

I agree the 3.3 Voltage thing is a bit weird.

When I referred to the voltage only being necessary for overclocking, I was referring to the same thing as Red Harvest; where you can force the voltage supplied to the memory modules via the motherboard BIOS (on decent mobo's at least).

This is only used when you are seriously overclocking the memory, in the same way you need to increase CPU voltage, because if you want to run the module ~30%+ faster than its rated speed, the module will require greater voltage otherwise it wont get enough power to operate properly. The side effect of this is of course increased temperature.

[The_Doctor]

I agree the 3.3 Voltage thing is a bit weird.

I think they puy the wrong info on the website. They have done it with some of the graphics cards. Its say 8x AGP, but on the image of the box it says 4x/8x.

Next question: ATI or nVidia?

[fret]

Next question: ATI or nVidia?

Be careful when taking advise for this on a forum, its an area of choice that usually comes attached to extreme fanboyism.

For example, if you were to purchase one of the latest generation of cards (6800 / X800 ) I would say go with whichever you chose - the reason being that while the benchmarks and reviews will favour one card over another (ATI perform best with HL2 / DirectX9 ../.. Nvidia perform best with Doom3 / OpenGL) , in reality, you will be gobsmacked by the performance of both cards - and aside from seeing a differant frames per second score when running benchies, you will barely be able to nitice the differance between the two.

Currently, if you want raw power in a single card - ATI have the lead with the X800 XT PE.

With features, Nvida have the lead, with its HDR implementation, support for Shader Model 3.0 etc.

If your talking budget cards, im sorry I cant advise, I would just echo what others have said and get a true DX9 card.