Is this upgrade worth it?

I have Athalon 64 3400+ on a Asus A8V (939 socket) MB, 3G of cheap ram, and a NVidia Quadro 3000 (AGP) that I bought for $200 off ebay not to long ago.
I'm doing 3d CAD odeling and while working with assemblies, I experienced freezes and long lags. I noticed it was my processor not keeping up.

My question is this: Do I invest in an Opteron 180 or 185 ($200 or $270 respectively). My MB will accept it. To make the decision, I need to weigh:

1. how much more performance will I get?
2. Getting a new MB+CPU+DDR2 ram+ graphics card -- how good is the video card I have now compared to the newer cheaper cards?
3. Maybe I can overclock with what I have--but I never liked doing that crap
3. 180 or 185?

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

Tough call. Your video card will still be bottlenecking on that CPU I think, but you will see some pretty good pickup none-the-less. I'm sorry I can't speculate how much more performance, from the 3400 to a Opteron(they are dualcore right?) should be at least 30%. How that will affect CAD work - no idea. However much cpu affects CAD.

Don't overclock if you are not "gung ho".

Since it's single core to Dual core it could get you some pretty good dividends and at least eliminate if other apps are hogging some resources and getting in the way(like virus scanner etc). It probably would be close to not bottlenecking the video card, how old is that video card??

You can always get a new computer and that will always work. I'd try just the CPU in your shoes, that is a fairly easy quick and cheap upgrade and you would notice some difference.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

I just read a review of the 180, and they said the 180 performs like the Athlon x2 4800...which are about $125 cheaper. FYI

The AGP slot is really going to bottleneck your system. We get alot of those Quadro cards where I work, and they have a pretty high failure rate. I know with CAD, you have different needs than gamers, but I would think a pci-e 2.0 card would just smoke your agp.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

Like the X2 4800? That's fast (faster than Intel core duo E6320). And the OPteron 185 is even faster. I know about AGP limitation, also I'm with DDR ram ( I just spent $80 to add 2Gig). It may be worth $200 Since this system is good for at least another couple of years.

 

I think a new CPU will just move the bottleneck to the video card. You'll get some performance increase out of it, though it's hard to say how much.

Most newer CAD programs will make use of multiple cores, so the AMD X2 or Intel Duo/Quad will probably end up being faster than an Opteron. If you don't want to upgrade the rest of the machine then I'd say look for an Athlon X2, they're pretty cheap by now. The video card could be replaced with a Radeon X1950 Pro AGP. They're also pretty cheap now (if you can find a place that still sells them) and the performance boost should be pretty high.