SysCold said:
First of all, sorry for crossposting...
What would you suggest between Athlon 64 3200+ and Dual Athlon XP
2800+? I mean, which will be more usable in real life (Video
processing, games, and other high-processor-dependent)?
I'll buy it next week so any comment is welcome.....
Are you going to be doing all of the above at once, or do the things that
you're planning to do support SMP? If so, the duallie. If not, then the A64.
For example, I can (my machine is a dual MP2600 rquavalent) be doing
raytracing with POVRay and also be having a game of Battlefield with
essentially no slowdown in either. Give POVRay both CPUs and there's not
uniprocessor machine short of an Itanium that can touch it. However, since
the only dual Socket-A chipset only does AGP4x, and maxes out at below a
150MHz FSB (single-channel memory), the performance I get in games is far
from what you'd get if I ran the CPU at the same speed in a dual-channel,
PC3200, AGP8x motherboard. There's also not much point in getting anything
above low-latency PC2700 (and depending on pricing, a single stick may be
cheaper than two of half the size).
Secondly, if you're wanting to run a duallie, you've got a few options. The
XP2800's run on a high FSB and are multiplier-locked, so you'll have to
mobilise them and enable SMP, and then use them in one of the boards that
supports mobiles in SMP. The Asus is one, and I've made a patched BIOS for
the K7D which works more or less, but still has a couple of minor issues
(warm restarts don't work). An alternative is to buy a couple of mobiles,
and run them in one of the afore mentioned boards. Some people have been
unable to get mobile chips stable in SMP, even when the 3rd L5 is broken, so
this route is not recommended unless you want to be tweaking things for a
while. The final option is just to go and buy two MP2800s. These should drop
straight into any duallie board and work flawlessly.
Aside from that, the rest of configuration will be:
DUAL RAM, 512 MB, DDR, PC-3500, 433 MHz, KINGMAX
DUAL HDD MAXTOR 160 GB, serial ATA, 7200 o/min., 8 MB cache
VGA SAPPHIRE ATI Radeon 9600XT 128 bit, 500 MHz, 256 MB, with tv out
& DVI
What do you think about rest of configuration?
Looks good to me. You'll have to get a SATA card (I recommend a 64-bit,
66MHz PCI one if you can find one) to run the SATA drives on a K7 duallie.
Unless you're going S939, see if it's cheaper to go one-stick or two sticks
as non-S939 (and the K7 dualle boards) only run in single-channel mode.
