Recommended upgrades for running Celestia

[Mutos]

Hi everybody,


I'm currently running Celestia on an Asus P5A mobo fitted w/ AMD K6-2 420 MHz, 256 MB RAM & a 3DFX Voodo3 350 MHz w/ 16 MB RAM. It reacts OK when over from any textured object, but the close view is real nightmarish :(((

So I'm thinking on minimal upgrades, got only $100 or so to invest into it. I'm investigating the proc & graph card upgrades.

For proc, i need a Socket 7 evolution. Do anybody have tested K6-2+ ? It's said in some sites that this K6-2 evolution increases perfs by 30% same frequ. W/ my P5A, I can easily go up to 600 MHz so I could double proc speed. Other important question, do anybody know where to find a K6-2+ 600 MHz ????? In France particularily ^-^

For GC, can anybody tell me what improvement is likely to result from replacing my Voodoo3 w/ a GeForce2 MX, all on AGP bus ?


Thanks in advance if s/o has any idea...

[Sum0]

A Geforce 2 MX will handle Celestia fine, and you can get it for about ?30 second-hand. If you can, get 64Mb memory, but it's not essential. The problem is your proccessor, even if you upgraded it to 600MHz, is still a bit slow for Celestia. I'm not sure if 600Mhz might be a bottleneck, slowing down your Geforce. Anyone got any experience?

[Mutos]

Thanks Sum0.


The fact is i don't have the bucks just now to change mobo, so I have to stay in Socket7. But my mobo supports 100+ MHz main freq w/ x6 mult. So for now i'll first settle for a second-hand GeForce 2 MX, then try to find a K6-2+ w/ max freq... This should remove the 2 bottlenecks i've identified.

As for the proc being bottleneck, I think so because of the constant 100% CPU displayed when under Celestia, the celestia.exe process being constantly from 85% to 95% ^-^.

Any comment appreciated. I'll tell u the results.

[Axel]

Hi,

I guess you identified your probs. I had the same some 1,5 years ago. Please remember you probably can't use any texture larger than 256x256 pixel with your Voodoo in a speedy fashion.

(OU splits the textures and creates it's spheres out of rectangles which each might be loaded on runtime. So you could use large textures without perf hit. But with new cards these probs are not so important anymore.)

So the suggestion to buy a GeForce is good.

However, Celestia.exe always tries to grab 100% of your cpu time, if I remember well.


Take care,
Axel

[Mutos]

Hi everybody,


Just changed my GC for Leadtek's GeForce2 Pro w/ 64 MB DDR for €93, it's nearly the same than $. I checked a number of other boards btw €60 & €120 & this particular one, which i bought second-hand, was by far the fastest on specs.

Celestia is now just as fluid as I dreamed of & I did not even tweak the least Hz out of any setting ^-^ Now for the proc & HD in a few months !


Thanks everybody for all the hints that led me to that card :))

[Guest]

I'm not 100% sure, but I don't think AMD made a 600MHz K6-2+, I think they stopped at the 550MHz, and those were rare. ( I used to assemble them for a living in the US. )

Anyway, prices have come down quite a bit on thier Duron and Athlon parts. You can probably get a new motherboard and a 1GHz Duron for about $150 us.

Hope this helps.

[D.Edwards]

I have seen AMD motherboard and CPU combos going for as low as $89.99 at local superstores. Not to mension what you can find if you hunt around the net for. Many of these combos offer dual memory support. So you can still use your PC100 RAM and then upgrade to DDRAM latter. Please give the AMD K6 the boot. You need to move on to 686 class proccessor if you really want to do any serious 3D. Not to mession the floating point units on the high end K6s could be beat by Pentium 233MMXs.
Its time for you to upgrade.

[Mutos]

Hi everybody,


I'm just OK for now w/ new GC, in about 3 months I'll settle for a K6-2+, which'll be enough to get me going for another year, then i'll get a new mobo & a 2 GHz proc. For now it's all a question of bucks ^-^


Thanks for all the hints !

[Sum0]

Careful. You can spend however much on a 2GHz proccessor, but link it up to a ?20 motherboard and you won't notice anything different to a 700Mhz processor in a ?100 motherboard. Just remember that clock speed isn't everything.