Okay here is the situation. I have never built a pc, but have upgraded at
some point every piece of hardware except mobo, power supply, or cpu. So the
question is should I buy a pc or build? I am a gamer and have ruled out
upgrading my current PC as it uses rdram and would have to take out a loan
just to upgrade the memory. I looked at Dell, but am leery of there quality
of late. Voodoo, Vicious, Alienware, etc seem a little extreme in pricing.
The main problem I have is I really don't know any thing about what are good
mobo's and have this vision of totally frying the cpu and mobo the first
time I hook them up.
I am leaning towards AMD as that seems to be less
expensive. I have read a few articles that say the P4 is a better CPU for
gaming is this the general consensus? Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Consistently good mobos are Asus. That said, Abit and others often
produce gems too. Moving successively down in price, MSI, EPoX and
Shuttle seems to be doing well.
I've also seen Soltek, in budget sector, occasionally get praised in
reviews. Friend of mine has a Soltek. Nothing to complain about. 100%
flawless operation for some 20 months. Soltek get's citicized for poor
ergonomics though. Inconvenient component placement, makes CPU-cooler,
AGP and RAM slots interfere with each other. My friend has not said a
word about that though, and closeness could be an aspect of good
engineering in other terms, I suppose.
Good chipsets for AMD are nForce. That said, it seems hard to find
people speaking bad about SIS (as well as hard to find SIS chipsets
), and even VIA occasionally produce something that may usable ;-).
And at least currently, they seem to have the best AMD64 chipset out,
KT800. Though I remain unconvinced it's fit for use, :-/. ...Let's say
I'm not exactly embracing all things VIA immediatly... In all
fairness, they (KT800) seem to work, and, bios&driver updates will
probably eventually fix any encountered problem.
Good chipsets for P4 are Intel.
"P4 better for gaming" is real BS. There's no truth in such a
statement. It's the other way around. Since the introduction of the
K7, AMD has mostly been the best choice for gaming. It's even more so,
if you consider the cost of the CPU. There may have been brief
periods, such as when the 3.2GHz@800MHz FSB P4 was released, when some
PC rags and websites may have made a lot of noises about the P4. But
that's just temporary fluctuations.
And perhaps also relies on the way most game benchmarks are
constructed. Typical game benchmarks plays a fix 3D 'video'. This only
measures 3D-engine performance and DX 3D-hardware pipeline. Both the
3D-engine and DX are exactly the type of code that can be (and is)
vectorized-optimized for the P4. - And _ONLY_ under such circumstances
(and/or hyperthreading), can the P4 hope to match or exceed AMDs K7 &
K8 cores.
I don't know how big impact other things in games are going to affect
real game performance. I'm dying for finding out. It might not prove
to be much, but on code like AI and pathfinding, corresponding AMD
cores are twice as fast as the P4. So there is some possibility of
current game benchmarking being misleading. On the other hand, the
P4's better bandwidth should pick up the edge some of the time.
My rule of thumb is: For games, AMD(K7) XP ratings falls in between
533fsb and 800fsb MHz-clocks for the P4. And I think I'll continue to
stick to that for now. (Meaning: 2.4GHz P4@533 < XP 2400+ < 2.4GHz
P4@800). But actually, it depends on what benchmark you're looking at,
so there's no exact answer.
K8 (Athlon64) ratings are a different issue, since even the lowest
3000+ is definitly superiour to any&all existing P4s.
My recommendations are either the sub $90 AthlonXP 2500+, the $210
Athlon64 3000+ or the $460 Athlon64 3400+, depending on your budget.
Though as I said, I'm a bit wary of A64 mobos as of yet. There's a
couple of new chipsets due, nForce3-250 and SIS755.
If you do insist in getting a P4 anyway, try get a HT and 800MHz FSB,
(or at least 533FSB version), DDR400 and mobo to match (My own P4s are
older, but people I trust recommend Asus P4C800). Just drop down in
clockrate if you think you can't afford 800FSB. The faster FSB really
puts a spark of life into the P4. The 2.6 and 2.8 P4C looks good to
me. I'm sure HT is going to be increasingly useful as well.
- Do not, repeat, absolutely not, under any circumstances, ever buy a
Celeron! If there were a 4GHz Celeron available, your 1.5 P4 would
probably still be faster. No smilie here, because I'm not joking, and
I don't think Intels ongoing Celeron scam is particularly funny
either!
If you choose the AthlonXP or P4 you'll be stuck with 32-bit. That's
no big deal, because you can make it so cheap, you save the money to
upgrade later. That's why I strongly recommend avoiding highend 32-bit
solutions like XP3200+, 3.0 and 3.2GHz P4s. They're more expensive,
but not much faster. If you really want to spend money, spend it on
the videocard.
If you pick DDR400 ram (PC3200 CL2.5) to run on DDR333 in sync with a
333FSB AthlonXP, try if it works on CAS latency 2.0 instead of 2.5.
Mine did (XP3000+), and it picks up a bit of speed.
Don't use anything else than 1 or 2 similar ram modules in either an
AthlonXP or P4. If you do, bandwidth will suffer for the Athlon.
Funnily, this doesn't affect performance much, except in some cases.
The P4 is more seriously affected. You will get increased latency and
a constant overall decrease in performance, as much as 30%.
My suggestion is a single 512MB stick, to eventually be complemented
by another similar 512MB stick.
A good videocard is extremely important. The recommended stuff right
now is entire ATI Radeon9600 family (currently 4 chipset versions,
9600SE, 9600, 9600pro, 9600XT, in increasing performance&cost),
nVidias FX5700 (particularly recommended for OpenGL users) and
downrated budget versions of Radeon9800 (SE) and FX5900 (XT). The most
clueless thing I know, is saving on the videocard to put the money in
the cpu instead. Particularly for gaming, that's a real mistake!
I'm a complete idiot when it comes to CPU-coolers and PSUs, so
somebody else have to help you and me there.
My current PC is:
P4 1.5
256 mb rdram
60 gig HD
DVD
CDRW
geforce2 32 mb
RDRAM! - Wow! Except for that, I have an old 512mb, similar 1.5 P4. I
think it's dreadfully slow.
A XP2500+, nForce2, DDR333, 9600pro will blow your socks off.
Good luck!
ancra
