Mike T. said:
Yes, but that performance increase won't be related to anything other than
the new video card. A gaming system is built around a video card, period.
As long as the rest of the system is not under-powered enough to slow the
video card down, games will run fine. If your current system will fully
support a Radeon X1900GT (don't forget the power supply!), you will likely
get similar results by just replacing the video card. In fact, the new
system you are planning to build might even be a tad slower, for gaming use
(assuming both systems had the same video card). You'd be switching from a
2.8GHz processor to a 2.13GHz processor (the second core is ignored by all
games, as far as I'm aware of, so the core duo will perform like a single P4
processor running at 2.13GHz, while playing games).
The extra RAM will also help, to a point. But I doubt if your games are
going to be significantly slowed down because a system has "only" 1 Gig of
RAM.
But make sure your video card has anywhere from 256 to 512MB of RAM *ON* the
video card. 512MB would probably be better, considering you are driving a
23" monitor at wide resolutions. -Dave
Forgetting, of course, that the IPC on the Conroe/Allendale series is
higher than the P4. By a factor of about 1.5x or so. If a single core
on the E6400 is being used, it gives performance equiv to 3.2GHz or so.
So the CPU is better, even if chugging along on one core.
AFAIK, SPECINT and SPECFP are single threaded. The E6400 does seem to
like to run that benchmark.
http://www.spec.org/cpu2000/results/cpu2000.html
Dell Precision Workstation 390 (Intel Core 2 Duo processor E6400)
CINT2000_Base = 2187 CFP2000_Base = 2168
Dell Precision Workstation 360 (2.8 GHz P4, DDR400)
CINT2000_Base = 1091 CFP2000_Base = 1186
To the OP: You should find benchmarks as a means to estimate the
difference. There aren't any "two dimensional" benchmarks, where
every processor is tried with every video card. Instead, you can
find benchmarks that compare processors (where the video card is
a powerful one), and you can find benchmarks that compare video
cards (where the CPU is a powerful one). There is no way to
combine these two charts, to give a meaningful performance
multiplier when both the video and CPU change.
http://www23.tomshardware.com/graphics.html
http://www23.tomshardware.com/cpu.html
Now, what is one of the problems with the Toms benchmarks ? They
emphasis dual core test cases, and not cases where a single core
is doing the work. That makes it hard to estimate what happens
in old games, where a single core would be working for you. Thus
those benchmarks can be deceiving.
Oblivion Elder Scrolls is GPU limited. The video card ratio is
about 1.5x, if this means anything.
http://www23.tomshardware.com/graphics.html?modelx=33&model1=548&model2=574&chart=204
This page lists the particulars of the video cards. I don't see a
match for your first video card, and copied the closest one (which
may not be appropriate):
http://www.techpowerup.com/gpudb/
X850XT R481 AGP 256MB GDDR3 520Mhz 540Mhz 256Bits 16/16/6 DX9.0, PS2.0, VS2.0
X1900GT R580 PCI-Express 256MB GDDR3 575Mhz 600Mhz 256Bits 12/36/8 DX9.0, PS3.0, VS3.0
This chart, is one of the few two dimensional comparisons I know of.
Video cards were compared, using an Athlon 1000 versus AthlonXP 2700+.
Improving both the CPU and the video card does help.
http://www.tomshardware.com/2003/01/20/vga_charts_ii/page6.html
This chart in particular, shows how the more expensive video cards
are being wasted, until the owner of the machine also upgrades
the processor. So both the CPU and the video card have to be
improved in equal measure. Using an uber video card with the
same old processor is not nearly as good as improving the
video card and the CPU. The tough part for the purchaser, is
determining how much CPU a particular video card needs, to extract
all the potential performance.
http://www.tomshardware.com/2003/01/20/vga_charts_ii/page5.html
I would estimate your new system is faster, but I won't go out
on a limb and say how much faster. What will be an eye opener, is
installing any new games, that can use more than one computing
core. I don't know of a reliable source of information right off
hand, that keeps track of what games are single core and what
games use dual core.
In terms of future upgrades, at some point, Vista and DX10 will have
some kind of games worth playing. You may need to upgrade the
video card again at that point.
Paul
