Question is : How much period correct you want to be ?
With PGA 478 and 6800 GT@Ultra it's almost perfect (Ageia PhysX is a nice touch 😀)
Drop Radeon 4670 tho, it's really not worth it (if you don't own one already).
BTW : 3850 512MB AGP is the fastest AGP card.

GTX 480 should support DSR (or Dynamic Super Resolution), I didn't checked if it works in Win XP tho.
Don't know if it matters to you... but power draw wise : PGA 478 >> LGA 775, that GTX 480 is a hog.

I would choose 775 definitely.
Immensely more powerful and efficent.
478 is crap, for performance, but if you are seeking at the period correct hardware and you like 478, that's another story (I love K6-III+, so I can't say anything more)
Keep in mind that your VGA works at 4x on the Asrock, if you can live with that you can play modern games also, maybe with a QX6700, that is compatible with your board.

agent_x007 wrote:

Question is : How much period correct you want to be ? With PGA 478 and 6800 GT@Ultra it's almost perfect (Ageia PhysX is a nice […]
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Question is : How much period correct you want to be ?
With PGA 478 and 6800 GT@Ultra it's almost perfect (Ageia PhysX is a nice touch 😀)
Drop Radeon 4670 tho, it's really not worth it (if you don't own one already).
BTW : 3850 512MB AGP is the fastest AGP card.

GTX 480 should support DSR (or Dynamic Super Resolution), I didn't checked if it works in Win XP tho.
Don't know if it matters to you... but power draw wise : PGA 478 >> LGA 775, that GTX 480 is a hog.

I have both the 4760 and 3850 in AGP versions. The 4760 have about the same performance, but is a bit cooler. The fan on the 3850 is noisy in my opinion. The 6800 will play all the games in above 60fps, but the 4670 have alot more performance to enable AA/AF. Yes the GTX480 should have DSR which is a big plus. Instead of the GTX480 I could also go with the GTX285. Also with the CPU and PCI-E running at 4x the GPU is not running at max, so the heat/noise/power is not that bad.

Mamba wrote:

I would choose 775 definitely. Immensely more powerful and efficent. 478 is crap, for performance, but if you are seeking at the […]
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I would choose 775 definitely.
Immensely more powerful and efficent.
478 is crap, for performance, but if you are seeking at the period correct hardware and you like 478, that's another story (I love K6-III+, so I can't say anything more)
Keep in mind that your VGA works at 4x on the Asrock, if you can live with that you can play modern games also, maybe with a QX6700, that is compatible with your board.

The 478 is pretty much maxed out (I could get a Extreme 3.4ghz or switch to the P4 550 which allows me to overclock past 4ghz) and yes, it's top notch for a 2003/2004 build. So it would match the case very well.

I'm aware of the PCI-E bottleneck, but it still gives enough performance. My board does not support 4core CPU's (you need the 4CoreDUAL boards for that). X6800 and E7600 is the fastest supported dual core CPUs.

Basically it seems this boils down to DSR & more performance support vs period correctness.

vetz wrote:

So the main goal with this build is to play DirectX 9 games with EAX sound capability.

Then choose the faster variant.

vetz wrote:

It more or less boils down to period correctness

When GTX 480 was released Core2 X6800 were not in shops already.

Core 2 Duo hands down 😀

I really like the GTX 285, the GTX 480 draws a LOT of power and runs quite hot. But the GTX 285 is also a massive card. Don't rule out cards like the 560 if you have one lying around.

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

Core 2 Duo hands down 😀

I really like the GTX 285, the GTX 480 draws a LOT of power and runs quite hot. But the GTX 285 is also a massive card. Don't rule out cards like the 560 if you have one lying around.

I unfortunately don't own a GTX 560, but that is an option for sure as it's more than enough powerful. The good thing about the GTX 400 series is that it still receives driver updates and supports Geforce Ready if I wanted to install Windows 7/10 on the system. With the PCI-E bottleneck the card is not running at full speed, meaning I don't notice much to the heat/noise problems. Performance and heat/noise wise it's very similar to my GTX285. The main difference being driver support and noticeable better PhysX compute power.

For what your doing the Core 2 for sure. I really like the board with both AGP and PCI-E as well it would make a really good benchmarking machine.

If you were building a Windows 98 machine I'd say go with the S478 system because the Core 2 would be overkill assuming you could get it to run stable.

I'm aware of the PCI-E bottleneck, but it still gives enough performance. My board does not support 4core CPU's (you need the 4CoreDUAL boards for that). X6800 and E7600 is the fastest supported dual core CPUs.

I have the exact same motherboard of yours, happily running a Q6600 and a Qx6700 from time to time for bench...

It does support quads (heck... Even the Conroe865 worked with a QX6700 of mine)

4coreDual boards have only better support AND you can boot 45nm quads chips as well, although not officially.

Q : Could you overclock PCI-e by 10% (to 110MHz) ?
I'm interested in how much you could gain from it performance wise...

I have the exact same motherboard of yours, happily running a Q6600 and a Qx6700 from time to time for bench...

It does support quads (heck... Even the Conroe865 worked with a QX6700 of mine)

4coreDual boards have only better support AND you can boot 45nm quads chips as well, although not officially.

That's really interesting and something I have to test! Thanks for the info.

agent_x007 wrote:

Q : Could you overclock PCI-e by 10% (to 110MHz) ?
I'm interested in how much you could gain from it performance wise...

From the motherboard thread:

By overclocking the PCI Express bus from 100mhz to 108mhz I increased the 3DMark 2006 score by around 1000points, from 12800 to 13800!

+1000pkt with... what GPU ?
GTX 480 ?

agent_x007 wrote:

+1000pkt with... what GPU ?
GTX 480 ?

Yes 😀

Interesting comment about the 480 nor getting fully loaded. That could come in handy with many cards...

I have two GTX480s in my system flashed to Quadro 6000s for GPU passthrough in Xen. They run hot and power hungry, but the noise isn't bad - it's a pleasant white noise. Obviously once they're loaded they're a bit more noisy, but one of them is running at PCI-e 1.0 1x (chipset limitation..), and the other is running at PCI-e 1.0 4x (4x slot), so there's a bit of a limit how fast they can go.

agent_x007 wrote:

Q : Could you overclock PCI-e by 10% (to 110MHz) ?
I'm interested in how much you could gain from it performance wise...

This trick works even though I haven't done it in ages, can go a little higher I think but I don't know where the common limit is before things start acting up. I may have done 115mhz or so back when I was running two 7600 gs in sli.