cant decide if to get a 8800gts 640mb, or an ATI x1950 xtx?

which would you pick?

the 8800GTS, its faster - but also more expensive (seems like the £131 deal was a mis-print )

What the specs of the rest of your PC?

950d cpu, 300gig hd, 2 gig ram, atm is running a 7600gs 512mb graphics card, going to get a 600w ps to

i would go for a 7900GT unless you plan on getting a new CPU - with that setup it will just be bottlenecked

thought my processor was fairly good

not amazingly

Ahh unlucky about that Jak, and I quote it now "£500" lol. It always sounds cliche but if it sounds too good to be true it 99% of the time is Like the C2D I bought for about £120 has gone 'somewhere' in the post - that's the royal mail's fault, but its pissing me right off. Luckily I've been in the 1% before, but its always a gamble.

Defo agreed about the bottleneck there, no point buy an 8800 unless you plan to upgrade the CPU pretty soon.

yup - chances are my order will be canceled, but i can hope. Either way i've lost nothing trying!

wheres the bottle neck?? upgrade to a what? E6600? my 950d has 800mhz fsb the 6600 is 1066, is that the big difference? 2.4 clock speed on the e6600 where as mines 3.4 both duel core?

because for each MHz the Core 2 Duo can do DOUBLE the amount of calculations - plus its even quicker than that because of its Architecture

Think of the E6600 as a 4.8 Dual Core P4

Quote from Jakg :

Think of the E6600 as a 4.8 Dual Core P4

so whats mine a 3.4 p4? not a true dual core?

yours is a 3.4 Dual Core, but that E6600 will blow it right out of the water

**for sale 950d and 7600gs**

Lol

I've got a 3700 (performing like a 5 GHz P4 due to overclocking - although the Core 2 Duo is still way faster than that) and a 7950GT, laps up BF2 and LFS with lots of AA

thing is atm i run 2142 on full graphics no problem, and lfs runs good, but both could be smoother, gonna buy the card and new ps first then a cpu at the end of the month, should be ok for now

Quote from andybarsblade :

so whats mine a 3.4 p4? not a true dual core?

you cant compare nowdays MHz to MHz.P4 is very old architecture and was even slower then AMD A64 processors.

now C2D is much faster then AMD A64 processors.

I would buy ATI 1950PRO.Cheaper and faster then 7900GT.Still 8800GTS would be not so much big overkill for your CPU thought.

slightly OT but, you say that the old pentium dual core is nowhere near the new ones, even if its the same Mhz, is that just down to the fsb or what? (and you can go into the arcitecture if you wish, i think i can just about remember the van neumann (sp?) diagram)

There are a lot of things...
P4 can do less instruction per one cycle,it has slower FSB which is very limited for dual cores its even limited for C2D cpu.AMD use hypertransport(something like FSB) which give much more bandwitch for data processing.

P4 has bigger latencies for accessing memory as well.Longer stage pipeline so it can achieve higher frequencies but it cause longer time to process data.

This is really simple description but you can find a lot of interesting articles to read on the web about it.Pretty interesting stuff to read.P4 archirtecture was really bad move from Intel.C2D is going back to P3/Pentiumn M architecture a bit.

in REALLY simple terms, for each clock (which MHz, GHz etc are a measure of) a P4 can do 6 calculations, an AMD 64 can do 9 and a C2D can do 12 - this means that a C2D can do double the amount of calculations at a given clock speed than a P4

Quote from Jakg :

in REALLY simple terms, for each clock (which MHz, GHz etc are a measure of) a P4 can do 6 calculations, an AMD 64 can do 9 and a C2D can do 12 - this means that a C2D can do double the amount of calculations at a given clock speed than a P4

...so a C2D at 1.8GHz is equivelant to a Pentium D at 3.6GHz, to a X2 at 2.4Ghz. (just adding to your post Jakg )

Thanks to all 3, i understood devil 007 nicely, jakg kinda made it too simple and then i got set values so i'm back where i started (but i think i got it) so, to hijack the thread again (sorry) currently im not really using anything that "needs" dual core, would it be a better idea for me to get a single core system? LFS is pretty much all i play, and a few older games (which i think were out before dual cores :shy and i have a very small budget. but anything to beat my old athlon 2400xp will do. (oh and if anyone can throw(post WOULD be better) an upgrade on my geforce fx5700le just send me a pm )

I use both of my cores mostly when scanning while playing games, and running many programs at once like multiple tabs in firefox and no slowdown. Dual Core helps alot during startup too, processing everything faster. New games are starting to take advantage of Dual Core so if you are planning on upgrading, I would get one just to future proof yourself for a few years.

Whats your budget you can use for the upgrade and whats your current setup so we can see what could probably re-used.

Buying single core now is like throwing money out of the window.

Currently...
Athlon 2400xp (socket A i belive)
512MB DDR ram
geforce fx5700le (agp)
asrock k7 series motherboard.
80gb (nearly full) hard drive.
thats about it i think.
and budget? £240, thats how much i made that pc with 5 years ago

AMD/ATI have just released the Radeon X2900XT. (Read here.) Maybe you should consider investing in that.