Interesting economics

[unixronin]

So, I've been researching parts for rebuilding whitestar, the machine UPS smashed.  It seems the price differential between rebuilding with an Athlon XP and an Athlon 64 is pretty minimal - $60 or so.  More interestingly, the lowest-priced decent socket-939 PCI Express motherboard (without SLI) is only about $40 more than the lowest-priced decent socket-939 PCI/AGP motherboard.

Here's where things really get interesting.  I've been advised to avoid the nVidia 5700LE and FX5700 graphics chipsets.  256MB GeForce6800 boards start around $350.  GeForce6600 boards start around $135 .... but as far as I can see, all GeForce6600 boards are PCI Express.  This leads to the odd conclusion that I can apparently get close to GeForce6800 performance while rebuilding the machine for $160 less overall by going the PCI Express route.

Intriguing....

Comments

[radarrider.livejournal.com]

The GeForce 5x00 chipsets have a real performance problem with DirectX 9 games, or at least with the biggest one out there right now which is Half-Life 2. If the cards are run in DX8 mode, however, they run great and that's what HL2 does by default.

Also, I seem to recall hearing that GF 6600 boards can be overclocked to 6800 levels of performance pretty easily. Even if not, the bang for your buck is going to be considerably higher with one of those.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Yeah, both of those are pretty consistent with what I'd heard. Not that I'm big into overclocking ..... (though back in 286/386 days I did see some pretty significant performance boosts from overclocking the bus from 8MHz to, in one case, 11MHz.)