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Sunday, April 19, 2009
[Back and forth...]
I've been planning to change the furniture in my room for a long time. Now that it's done, I'm planning to upgrade to a bigger monitor. I've been going back and forth on this one.
Because my display card died in the beginning of the year, I would need to get a display card as well. This is the tricky part. I am considering getting either the Raedon 4870 or 4890 1GB, or maybe the GeForce 275 GTX. Deciding on which card to get really isn't the problem...
First of all, power issues. I've never owned a display card that required external power before. I can't be bothered to open up my casing to check, so I searched for a review of my current PSU. My PSU is about three years old. It runs at 480w and while it does have two 6-pin PCIe connectors, I'm not sure if it would be powerful enough to run the Raedon cards (I don't know how many power connectors the 275 GTX requires). The two connectors are on the same power cable (coming out of the PSU) and I read somewhere that in this situation, the power supplied might not be sufficient.
Coupled with the fact that my PSU is plugged into my UPS which has a rated output of 300w, I don't know if everything would work, power-wise, if I get a new generation display card.
Power issues aside, I'm using an Asus M2NPV-VM and it's a pretty old motherboard. I can't find the definitive information anywhere, but I believe it supports only PCIe v1.0. Should not be a problem as the new generation PCIe v2.0 display cards are backwards compatible. But I've read reports of how the backwards compatibility from v2.0 to v1.0 might not be there in all cases. Several local users of the same motherboard have reported issues with using v2.0 display cards.
So I've been going back and forth all weekend. Should I just get the parts I want, plug them in and hope for the best? Or should I hold off, wait till the end of the year and do a major system upgrade? I prefer not to do a major system upgrade, because I'm happy and have no complaints with the other aspects of my system (why spend on things you don't really need?). But I don't want to end up in a situation whereby I get new components and they don't work and leave my system in a unserviceable condition.
Right now, I'm leaning towards holding off, and performing a major upgrade at the end of the year. Things will be slow then at work, so it's easy to take several days of leave and not have to worry about things in the office. And by that time, my system would be two years old. Reasonable time-frame for an upgrade I guess.
^^^ by Locksley @ 5:23 PM.
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