C2D + AGP + DDR?

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MrWizard6600

Supreme [H]ardness
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Jan 15, 2006
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long story but this board is perfect for my broke friend, who has a decent X800XL graphics card, but is only running AGP 4X and on a S478 Northwood and board [yeah hes got two computers, i thought he was referring to the other one]. his benchmarks are ok but a new CPU (and 8X) would really make this a pretty killer gaming machine.

so, his plan is to get one of these, a C2D E6300, and keep everything else the same (case, memory, HD, and ram). I donno, it just seems iffy to me. This board implys that Via has come up with a memory controller that will support DDR for a C2D proc. this is something intel themselves has yet to do. Is it true? will it run with any performance? these people seem to think so, but are they just full of it? or are they ligit?

any advice would be great. the plan is to keep the cost low. it would be nice to slide into C2D like this but, if its not possible. thats OK.

thanks for any advice.
 
i ran a C2D with AGP 8x and DDR1 on an ECS board, it was ok, but it really sucks to waste a C2D on crap like that. only reason i had it running was because it was the way it was bundled which was cheaper than buying the CPU itself. the memory will really bottle neck the CPU. and overclocking is really unstable with DDR1 and C2D
 
I took a long hard look at this a while back when I was AGP,DDR1 and wanting conroe. I decided against it and did the full upgrade.

My view is, he will probably not be happy with the performance so why spend good money on something that he won't be happy with.

I strongly suggest he saves his beans and replaces the MB,CPU,RAM,GPU, I know it sucks, but at the end he will have a much quicker rig and easy future upgrades for a few years. This is a case were the easiest fastest option is not the best.


Found back the review
http://en.thethirdmedia.com/article/200608/show5252c17p9.html
 
Via chipsets suck for overclocking. From what ive read this one tops out around 300fsb. That would cap you out at 2.1ghz. That would definetly be a huge upgrade over what he has but a bit of a waste. Could always build the system like that though and slowly shop for the other parts used or something. All in all you probably would get better performance from an X2 system unless he will be ready to plop down for a PCIE card and DDR2 fairly soon.

Too bad ULI didnt make one. They make great hybrid boards.
 
As long as your friend is not planning to overclock, he should be fine. VIA chipset is not the greatest, but you get the best of both worlds - run C2D with your old hardware. Its the cheapest upgrade to C2D possible. As long as he has DDR400, performance lost will be minimal and probably wont be noticable.
 
I've done this. I got an e6300 and the 775dual. I carried over all my hard drives, case, x800xt, and a gig of ddr400. Basically a motherboard/processor swap and it's been awesome. My athlon xp3200+ was really holding me back in games, now my system is very well balanced. I'm running games at 1440x900 with moderate amounts of aa and af.

Basically, it's really only costing you approx $60 for the mobo. You'll be keeping the c2d for when you upgrade later and you'd be buying all new components anyways. The difference is the $60 you spent on the 775dual.
 
I grabbed the black friday comboe Frys had that included an E6600 and an ECS P4M800PRO-M (V2.0) mobo. Haven't tried to overclock it (not much point in it with this mobo/ram combo), but it has been rock solid so far. As I was coming from an A64 3400+ I noticed a pretty big difference with the extra core alone.

At the very least this board bought me time to wait for DX10 cards and the newer C2D mobos to mature and drop in price.
 
I'm interested in this as well, I've been considering the COnroe upgrade path for sometime now from my 64 3400+(getting super old).

I don't want to toss my DDR400 or AGP vid card in a river yet either.

If I do get it I'll let you know how it works out. :)
 
anyone know of a board that will take 4 slots of ddr 400, agp 8x and core2duo?
 
skadebo said:
I've done this. I got an e6300 and the 775dual. I carried over all my hard drives, case, x800xt, and a gig of ddr400. Basically a motherboard/processor swap and it's been awesome. My athlon xp3200+ was really holding me back in games, now my system is very well balanced. I'm running games at 1440x900 with moderate amounts of aa and af.

Basically, it's really only costing you approx $60 for the mobo. You'll be keeping the c2d for when you upgrade later and you'd be buying all new components anyways. The difference is the $60 you spent on the 775dual.
Click to expand...

do you have any benchmarking numbers? were you using DDR or DDR2?
 
my asrock board worked for me for my x800 xt pe until i got a 7900gs. and then i found a cheap dfi nf4 sli and did the rig i have now
 
If he's using S370 => he has SDRAM memory.

For Conroe you need at least DDR.

My advice would be to buy the Asrock mobo which supports both DDR and DDR2 and buy DDR2 memory.
 
even if you get it running and stable, the ECS board the memory divider is like 3:8 for C2D. which really sucks, i had DDR2-800 and it ran at DDR200 speeds, what a waste, but, hey if you want a cheap set up and a C2D then it is great, go to fry's and grab the bundle, hella cheap
 
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