Time to upgrade, need help.

So with Starcraft 2 starting to grab my interest I'm thinking about finally moving past Warcraft 3 and I'll need to do some upgrading, I don't think my old pci mx440 is going to cut it anymore.

A friend gave me a ATI Radeon X850 Pro that he's upgraded past a few times, so I'm trying to build an okay machine around it. I also should be getting a free 3.0 P4 so if I can use that, that'd be nice, but I don't care if I have to buy something else to fit the motherboard thats going to fit my video card.

I've searched several forums and google, but all the threads I find on the X850 pro are several years old, I'm just wondering, first off, if theres a good motherboard I can buy that will play SC2 fine, and still be cheap as possible. The forums have overhealmed me a bit. Is it possible to get an AM2 board with an AGP slot? What about buying an ASrock with their AGI version of an AGP slot?

I need some help lol. I'm on a budget and need to keep this cheap as possible. I don't care about buying something that is going to play games for years to come, as long as it plays Starcraft 2.

Yes... But asrock has stop selling the agp versions of AM2 boards but you're still in luck.

I have the same board but with Sata Ver. 1.0 it's 4CoreDual-VSTA.

This one is ASRock 4CoreDual-SATA2

It uses socket 775 and Intel Processors

It has native AGP and Pci-e 16x slot but the electrical on Pci-e is 4x. It's a bit picky about what ATI cards go in pci-e.

It has 2 slots for DDR memory up to pc3200 or DDR 400 and 2 slots for DDR2 up to 667 totaling 4, but you can not use both sets at the same time and it only supports up to 2GB of ram. Be sure to buy compatible memory for a ddr2 setup, it's abit picky about running 667, I'm running mine at 533.

You will need a 775 Processor, and this board does not overclock very well unless you have 800/533MHZ FSB Processor then you can OC to 1066. Don't buy the newer core 2 duo that runs 1333mhz FSB or higher this board will not support it.

I run a Core2duo E6320 with 2gigs of Corsair ddr2 667 @ 533 an EVGA GTX 260 Core 216 on Enermax Liberty 500 watts and Three hard-drives Two 320 WD sata and one 80 WD IDE.

I can play Grand Theft Auto 4 on high and have decent performance considering how buggy and demanding the game was when they released it.

Before the GTX260 I had a BFGtech 7800GS AGP ver. It worked well until GTA4 brought it to it's knees. LOL

I've been pretty happy with my board.

$60 for the Asrock Board, you could probably get away with a Pentium E5200 Wolfdale 2.5GHz 2MB for $69 since it's only one of the few wolfdale's that are supported, or buy a Core 2 Duo E7400 Wolfdale 2.8GHz for $120

Personally I would take the e5200 because you can OC it to 1066 when you need the free performance and that ati x850 will be your bottleneck in Starcraft 2. But... you can always buy a gtx 260 considering I was a bit worry when I bought mine, but it works and I was relieved.

You're other choice and the more perfered option would be to dump that x850 spend quite bit of good money on a new video card and buy a decently cheap motherboard that supports wider range of CPU's and memory and use a full PCI-e 16x 2.0 slot.

Stang will chime in and give you the low down on the x850 and whether it has the power to run starcraft 2.

~MP

Blizzard tend to be very good about optimizing their games to allow systems of every class to get playable performance, but this is very difficult in the RTS games given the number of units you will have on screen acting independently and all the fancy effects that go along with them. From what confirmed information I have, StartCraft II will be DX9 and DX10 compliant, and although there are no "recommended specs" from Blizzard, I really would expect to see the x800 series listed as a minimum rather than a recommended graphics card.

Even though you may have this card for free, I wouldnt suggest spending any real amount of money on backing it because a PCI Express performance equivalent wont be hard to find, and you wont be spending more than $50 to get it. For example, if you look here you can compare the HD 4650 to the X850 Pro and see that not only will that $50 HD 4650 out perform the x850 Pro, but you will get the DX10 features that SC2 will push. Though its unclear what DX10 mode will offer, you'll be hard pressed to find a newer card that doesnt support it.

So around this $50 video card, you can pair a nice $55 motherboard, a solid $65 Athlon64 X2 7750 processor, and add another $27 for 2GB DDR2 800, and you have yourself a very capable gaming platform for under $200 that will not only play SC2 significantly faster than anything you could get from a Pentium 4 and X850, but you'll see that performance without having to turn down any graphics settings. This is really as cheap as possible for something thats going to be well worth the money. But remember that even the cheapest $40 Intel Celeron or AMD Athlon64 (both single core chips) are going to be on par or faster than the Pentium 4 processors as technology has come a LONG way.

But you may also want to consider simply waiting for SC2 to hit the shelves before you think about upgrading. If Blizzard still intends to release this game at the end of the year, there is still time for newer products to launch and you may see even more performance coming from new products at the same price, or better prices on components like those listed above. The SC2 beta is set to being sometime this summer, and you will be seeing a lot of little birds leaking performance figures and we'll be able to see just what is required to run this game on low/medium/high graphics settings, and really what kinda hardware is needed a the least to get a "playable" experience.

I would strongly advise against sticking with AGP if you want to look towards newer and better games. The $60 ASRock that Mad Professor has suggested is not a bad option as it will give you a decent middle ground, instead of a full jump over to PCI Express/DDR2, but you will get better performance and support from newer products. I would suggest selling that X850 for what ever you can get for it, and putting that money towards your upgrade.

Wow, Thanks you guys! That's awesome info there, and I think I will look into the options you've suggested, Stang.

I probably would have ended up trying to build around the x850 and spending as much money!

Thanks both of you!

Month old thread but just happened by and saw it. Good info by Stang.

Also, dunno if the guy checks this thread anymore but Blizzard has announced that SC2 will not be released this year but they're pushing for before the mid point of next year.

Blizzard is pretty good at optimizing stuff to let a wide range of computers play their games but with such a large unit count game like Starcraft (as opposed to the 100 unit cap in WC3)... might be good to invest in a decent computer.

I do actually keep checking this, and I do appreciate all the help everyone has been giving.

I went to newegg and just created and saved a modern PC wishlist, and I'm hoping when SC2 comes out, I'll be able to afford all of those parts.