What should I upgrade to?

**HughTower** · 02-03-2007, 01:04

Many thanks for all the advice on this. Shortly after I posted, my MB blew up & suddenly I was looking at spending more ££ than I intended.

So I decided to spend even more than I should & but a whole new base unit -
Intel Core Duo E6300, 7600 GT, & 1 gb RAM -& suddenly I'm playing a whole different game. It's very cool.

I even managed to put my own wireless card in it without mishap, & then it struck me quite how simple changing components really is (within reason of course). These PC repair shops are charging money for old rope.

**Beirut** · 02-03-2007, 01:11

Originally Posted by HughTower

Many thanks for all the advice on this. Shortly after I posted, my MB blew up & suddenly I was looking at spending more ££ than I intended.

So I decided to spend even more than I should & but a whole new base unit -
Intel Core Duo E6300, 7600 GT, & 1 gb RAM -& suddenly I'm playing a whole different game. It's very cool.

You are talking PCI-E, not AGP, correct?

**HughTower** · 02-03-2007, 10:06

Yes PCI - E. Which confused me earlier when you said that 7600GT was a AGP card....

I also read a PC magazine review that was using M2TW as a benchmark. It said the CPU power was as important as GPU for that game, & at that budget that chipset outperformed the AMDs.

**sapi** · 02-03-2007, 11:33

You made the right decision with teh core 2 - there's no reason to get anything else.

@the 7600, it's both an agp and a pci-e card and works as a mid-range one for both

**Geezer57** · 02-03-2007, 17:42

Regarding the 7600 GPU, I believe the chip (at least the 7600GT, maybe all of them) is designed to work on PCIe expansion slots only, but the manufacturers use a "bridge" chip along with the GPU on the AGP versions of the card, to translate PCIe commands into AGP ones (and back). There is apparently almost no overhead (i.e., slowdown) to this.

**The Foolish Horseman** · 02-03-2007, 20:14

Originally Posted by Geezer57

Regarding the 7600 GPU, I believe the chip (at least the 7600GT, maybe all of them) is designed to work on PCIe expansion slots only, but the manufacturers use a "bridge" chip along with the GPU on the AGP versions of the card, to translate PCIe commands into AGP ones (and back). There is apparently almost no overhead (i.e., slowdown) to this.

wrong geezer because i have a 7600 gt agp staright from the retailer and i have overclocked so technically it is the best agp card you can get

**Beirut** · 02-03-2007, 23:48

Originally Posted by General Boreaus Brittanicus

wrong geezer because i have a 7600 gt agp staright from the retailer and i have overclocked so technically it is the best agp card you can get

Except for the OC 7800GS AGP card I have in my machine.

cough...

**Geezer57** · 02-04-2007, 18:57

Originally Posted by General Boreaus Brittanicus

wrong geezer because i have a 7600 gt agp staright from the retailer and i have overclocked so technically it is the best agp card you can get

Read the third paragraph here: http://www.ocworkbench.com/2006/alba...0GS/Intro.html

And paragraph six here: http://legionhardware.com/document.php?id=579

Here's a picture of a 7600GT AGP card: http://www.trustedreviews.com/graphi...-Group-Test/p4
It shows the bridge chip covered by its own heat sink, just below and forward of the main GPU heat sink.

From what I can gather, just about all Radeon x1xx and GeForce 7xxx series chips were designed for native PCIe operation, and so use bridge chips when adapted into AGP configurations. It's one of the reasons why those versions cost more than the PCIe types.