"Andre said:
whit today's programs and games the p4c800e deluxe with a 3.2 extreme or
another high end asus board that I can use my 8 x agp video card an ati x800
se 256 and the new Intel 3.2 d or amd dual same speed thanks.I am doing a
new acrylic case and not sure to get new board and cpu or keep my 3.2
Prescott or could get a 3.2 extreme for it .
First off, here are some AGP and some PCI Express benchmarks. Not all
the current video cards are shown, with the newest Nvidia (7800)
and the just released ATI x1000 series missing. What this shows, is
that having a PCI Express motherboard allows newer faster video cards
to be used, while if you bought an AGP motherboard, you would be
"stuck" with the cards that are currently available for AGP.
http://www.graphics.tomshardware.com/graphic/20050705/vga-charts-pcie-02.html#3d_mark_2005
http://www.graphics.tomshardware.com/graphic/20050524/vga_charts-02.html#3d_mark_2005
Only so many LGA775 motherboards are dual core ready. The rest are
single core ready. On the AMD side, at least with S939, more of
the boards handle both. In my mind, dual cores are still a bit
too "forward looking", unless you are constantly running long
computations running at 100% while trying to do other work. It
will be a while before a lot of computer games will use both
cores of a dual core. And even the games that do use dual cores,
won't run both cores to 100% (threads handling different aspects
of the game, like video output and AI, will not likely load the
cores to the same extent). There may be other ways to slice the
workload, but I would not expect a doubling of output.
Tomshardware also has CPU charts. Select the various benchmarks,
to see how an Athlon64 compares to a P4 at various speeds.
http://www23.tomshardware.com
If you select "Farcry" as a benchmark, single core Athlon64
3700+ and up, beat anything Intel has to offer in a single core.
Gaming is the specialty of Athlon64.
If you select "Mainconcept Encoder", the Athlon64 4000+ does
about as well as a 3.4GHz Prescott, meaning the Athlon64 fell
behind by about 600MHz equivalent. You can see a similar trend
with "Media Encoder Streaming".
It means you really have to decide if your computer is for
"work" or for "play". Also, price will play a big part in
your decision, and you can take the performance numbers from
Tomshardware, plus pricing from a site like Newegg, to make
a "bang for the buck" chart for yourself. AMD 4000+ (2.4GHz) is
$368 US on the Newegg site. An FX-57 (2.8GHz) is $1011 US.
A P4 670 (3.8GHz/FSB800) is $636.
Now, the problem with the Intel side at Asus, is PCI Express
has replaced AGP on motherboards. If you go through the
list here (using this site as others don't have the list
any more):
http://nl.asus.com/products/mb/mbindex.htm
This motherboard has LGA775 socket and AGP video. It is similar
in vintage to your current motherboard, only has LGA775 instead
of S478.
http://nl.asus.com/products/mb/socket775/p5p800/overview.htm
The 915/925 and 945/955 generation boards are all PCI Express.
The only way to get a more recent board than the P5P800, is
to drop your AGP video card.
On the Athlon64 side, at least you have the A8V Deluxe for your
AGP card, and you get to reuse any DDR400 memory. If you plug
A8V Deluxe in here, you'll notice that it even supports dual
core S939 processors.
http://support.asus.com/cpusupport/cpusupport.aspx?SLanguage=en-us
At least for the time being, the A8V Deluxe is still a good
choice.
To have more choices for motherboard solutions, you'd likely
have to dump the AGP video card.
There is one other solution in the wings. There is a bridge
board, that converts a PCI Express x16 slot to an AGP slot.
The problem with this concept, is you can only plug low
profile AGP cards into the converter, and obviously any
decent AGP card worth keeping is going to be a full size
card. If you could cut a hole in the side of the computer
case, so the video card would have room, then an adapter
card like that would open up a lot more PCI Express motherboards
as solutions. (The adapter uses something like the Nvidia
HSI chip, but I've lost the URL I had to the announcement.)
Other than using an adapter like that, it is really time
to fork out more money for a new video card.
Paul