Am I stupid for buying this?

[Lare Kikkeli]

Motherboard: Asus a8v deluxe/ SATARAID/Firewire/GigaBitLan/8CH audio

 

CPU: AMD Athlon64 3500+ (2.31Ghz)

 

2 x 1 gig ram sticks (400 mhz)

 

GeCube radeon x800 pro 256

 

DVD-RW 16x

CD-RW 52x32x52

 

Power: Nexus 400W 12cm hiljaisella tuulettimella.

 

Case: EnLight

 

I'm getting this for €290 (haven't won the auction yet)

 

The motherboard only has an AGP slot, so i can't upgrade it much. I can barely afford the 300, so buying a new computer is out.

 

Is this rig going to be useless in six months and am I really stupid for buying it?

 

edit: Do you guys know how well this will run NWN2 or STALKER? They're my main reason for buying tthat POS.

Edited September 12, 2007 by Lare Kikkeli

[mkreku]

It's not a useless rig. It will still be able to play most of the games out there reasonably well. But it's also an upgrade dead-end. You can squeeze out a tiny bit more performance by buying a faster CPU and you can upgrade to a slightly faster GPU, but after that you're stuck.

 

If you upgrade to a AGP X1950PRO you'll be good to go for another year or so. And it will run both STALKER and NWN2. Easily.

 

http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/09/05/the...oney/page6.html

[Lare Kikkeli]

It's not a useless rig. It will still be able to play most of the games out there reasonably well. But it's also an upgrade dead-end. You can squeeze out a tiny bit more performance by buying a faster CPU and you can upgrade to a slightly faster GPU, but after that you're stuck.

 

If you upgrade to a AGP X1950PRO you'll be good to go for another year or so. And it will run both STALKER and NWN2. Easily.

 

http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/09/05/the...oney/page6.html

 

 

Whew, that's great to hear. I'm not big on upgrading anyway, i'll just buy a new cheap-ass computer in two years that can run new games in medium details. I did it three years ago as well.

[Lare Kikkeli]

btw, how high would you go with this? It's currently at

[kalimeeri]

The A8V runs off the Via chipset, which will run rings around NForce4; and this particular motherboard was built with overclocking in mind. There is at least one whole site devoted to tweaking it. It can be touchy, though, with regard to the PCI bus (which is slightly underpowered, IMO), and certain wireless cards can be a bluescreen nuisance. It is a socket 939 board, however, and CPU upgrades are getting scarce, as AMD isn't making any more (not that the 3500+ isn't a great processor--I have one myself).

 

FWIW, my daughter has one of these with a dual-core in her machine, as she had a 512mb AGP video card that was almost brand new. When I originally installed it, it was totally unstable--I spent so much time tweaking her rig that I almost never saw my own--and I yanked it back out in frustration and gave her an NForce4 board. This time around with slightly different PCI cards, it's rock solid, and she couldn't be happier, runs Oblivion with all settings maxed out.

Edited September 12, 2007 by kalimeeri

[Lare Kikkeli]

Someone outbid me, so i'll wait and bide my time. If the price goes too high I won't make a new bid, but if it stays at roughly 300, i'll buy it.

[kirottu]

edit: Do you guys know how well this will run NWN2 or STALKER? They're my main reason for buying tthat POS.

 

It will run NWN2 with medium settings quite nicely. I have similar build with athlon 2700+ and geforce 7600gs.