MaximumPC 2008 06

$500 PC Pre-Upgrade Post-Upgrade % Change

ProShow (sec) 2,528 6,745 1,297 420%

PCMark05 Overall 4,785 4,235 8,786 107%

PCMark05 CPU 4,635 2,643 8,060 205%

PCMark05 RAM 3,966 3,591 5,684 58%

PCMark05 GPU 3,750 7,731 14,830 92%

PCMark05 HDD 5,877 8,244 8,250 0%

UT3 Omicron Bot (fps) 18 38 101 166%

Some Upgrades Are Just Plain Stupid

JUST SAY NO

Tempting as it might be to upgrade, it’s not always prudent.

PENTIUM III: It’s dead, Jim. Really. It’s really, really, re-

ally dead. You could shoot a P3 onto the Genesis planet and

the only possible result would be that you wasted a photon-

torpedo casing. Just give up.

ATHLON XP: Instead of throwing good money into an Athlon

XP box, just send us the cash. At least then somebody would be

happy when all is said and done.

RAMBUS: There’s a surprising number of Direct RDRAM

boxes in service. If you have an RDRAM machine, don’t even

bother cracking it open. Unless you can afford to spend a

million bucks on memory, you’ll never see more than 1GB

of RDRAM. RDRAM also limits you to a 533MHz FSB CPU, so

there ain’t no way you’ll ever drop in that 3.4GHz Pentium 4

Extreme Edition.

http://www.maximumpc.com | JUN 08 | MAXIMUMPC | 33

That’s a performance increase of more

than 400 percent.

GPU

This one’s easy, right? Just drop the origi-

nal GeForce 7900 GTX into the upgraded

Alienware, buy a second 7900 GTX, and

SLI the two, right? Wrong. First, almost no

one sells the GeForce 7900 GTX anymore

and those who have them want beau-

coup bucks. Newegg, for example, had

an open-box MSI GeForce 7900 GTX card

available—for $300. On eBay, prices for

the cards ranged from $300 to $350. Holy

GPU, Batman! Computer components

are supposed to get cheaper as time goes

by, aren’t they? Not when you’re talking

about high-end parts, apparently. Still,

isn’t it better to pay for a second card

rather than buy a single newer part? Not

necessarily. Performance might be close

in some situations, but generally, a single

top-end modern card will outperform

cards of an earlier generation, even if

they run in SLI mode. What’s more, SLI

7900 GTX still doesn’t give you DX10. And

from what we can tell, the drivers aren’t a

priority either.

Thus, for this upgrade, we decided to

remove the 7900 GTX card and replace it

with a brand-spanking-new GeForce 9800

GTX. While the 9800 GTX costs $350, we

could probably sell our used 7900 GTX for

$250 and end up paying just $100 for the

GPU upgrade.

The switch certainly pays off. We went

from 38 frames per second in Unreal Tour-

nament 3 to 101fps, or the equivalent of a

166 percent increase in frame rates. That’s

at a standard 1280x1024 resolution, too. If

we cranked the res up to 1920x1200, the

gap between the 7900 GTX and 9800 GTX

would be far wider, as the 7900 GTX would

undoubtedly run out of steam while the

9800 GTX would keep sailing along.

HARD DRIVE AND SOUNDCARD

As with the CyberPower, we performed a

couple upgrades on this rig mostly for livabil-

ity. We added an F1 1TB Samsung hard drive

to the machine as well as a Sound Blaster X-Fi

XtremeGamer soundcard and called it a day.

Corsair Dominator modules are pricey but give us

low latency and full EPP support for our nForce

board.

Nvidia’s new GeForce 9800 GTX is the top single-

core card in town today.

It didn’t make fi scal sense to keep the Asus

Socket 939 board, so we swapped it for an MSI

nForce 750i SLI board.

BENCHMARKS

Best scores are bolded.