30 | MAXIMUMPC | JUN 08 | http://www.maximumpc.com
A
s we’ve said, the upgrades here are
borderline optional, as this machine
is still very useful. But presented with
an unexpected windfall of cash or permis-
sion from the family CFO, here’s how we’d
bring this already capable machine up to
modern specifications.GPU
The Radeon X1950 XTX was a com-
petitive card in its day, with full
HDCP support (albeit single-link
only). Unfortunately, GPUs age far
faster than most components in
your PC. So our two-year-old GPU is
akin to a three-year-old CPU or a four-
year-old optical drive.
We thought about adding a second
Radeon X1950 XTX to the machine but
got cold sweats at the thought of trying to
use the original permutation of CrossFire.
Instead of the internal bridge that’s used in
SLI and modern CrossFire setups, the old
system uses a clumsy, unreliable dongle
cable. Worse yet, we couldn’t just grab any
two X1950 cards, one of the cards had to be
an X1950 XTX “master card.” Well good luck,
buddy. We looked around and couldn’t find
any reputable establishments selling master
cards. In the used market, people wanted
$250 for them, so we opted to just remove
the X1950 XTX and replace it with today’s
top of the line.
Well, almost top of the line. For $350—or
$100 more than what you’d have paid for a
used X1950 XTX master card—we were able
to get Nvidia’s new GeForce 9800 GTX card.
The card supports dual-link HDCP, uses the
new G92 core, and, fortunately, does not re-
quire the newer 8-pin/6-pin power connec-
tors. That means we can continue to use the
600-watt Thermaltake in the machine. How-
ever, we encountered another unexpected
twist. The longer 9800 GTX board just barelyfit into the midtower CyberPower case. If it
had been even a few millimeters tighter, we
would have had to buy a whole new case
too. So before you upgrade your GPU, make
sure your case can accommodate it.
We achieved performance gains of 92
percent in PCMark GPU and 72 percent in
UT3, our two GPU-centric benchmarks. Not
too shabby. And that’s at normal resolu-
tions. At 1920x1200 or 2560x1600,
the 9800 GTX eats the X1950 XTX’s
lunch, dinner, and midnight snack.CPU
The D975XBX motherboard isn’t
actually certified for quad-core sup-
port, but it runs fine with a Conroe quad.
We reached for Intel’s 2.4GHz Core 2 Quad
Q6600 as a fairly inexpensive way to gain
more performance. While tempting, making
the jump to a $1,000 quad Core 2 Extreme
seems, well, extreme for this box. Selling
for $240 today and possibly even less by
the time you read this, the Q6600 gives
you the performance benefit of four cores.
And in apps that scale with cores, such as
most video encoders, a quad pays off. With
something as simple as slide-show creation,
we were able to cut a third of the time off the
project’s encode. If a job typically takes three
hours, what would you pay to have an extra
hour for playing games instead of twiddling
your thumbs in front of your dual-core box?HARD DRIVE AND SOUNDCARD
A 250GB drive doesn’t cut the mustard any-
more, so we dropped in the biggest, fastest
drive around: Samsung’s F1 terabyte drive. It
doesn’t hurt that the drive sells for as little as
$250. Our second drop-in was a Creative Labs
X-Fi XtremeGamer card. An $80 upgrade, this
greatly improves the gaming audio experience
on our machine.At $350, the EVGA GeForce 9800 GTX is a hell of
a deal and outperforms the original X1950 XTX
card.Call us fools, but we still like good audio in
games, which you get in spades from Creative
Labs’s X-Fi XtremeGamer.Don’t believe you can use 1TB of hard drive
space? Someone once said the same about 5MB of
storage, buddy.OPERATION UPGRADE
Our CyberPower Upgrades
TOTAL
UPGRADE
COST:
$
920CyberPower PC $500 PC Pre-Upgrade Post-Upgrade % Change
ProShow (sec) 2,528 1,594 1,176 36%
PCMark05 Overall 4,785 7,045 8,110 15%
PCMark05 CPU 4,635 6,819 7,734 13%
PCMark05 RAM 3,966 5,477 5,313 -3%
PCMark05 GPU 3,750 7,668 14,691 92%
PCMark05 HDD 5,877 5,280 5,228 -1%
UT3 Omicron Bot (fps) 18 61 105 72%BENCHMARKSBest scores are bolded.