Upgrading on a budget - good overclocking needed

[tiger131]

I've been doing a lot of research on the Semprons, and they can easily clock to 2.5-2.8 (seen 2.5 on stock cooling - albeit high temps).
My system right now
Athlon xp 2500+ @ 2.2ghz
1gb valueram
asus a7n-x nforce 2
Radeon 9500Pro

I'm looking for something to just tide me over until I can completely overhaul my whole system, so I want something cheap. I was looking at socket 754 semprons, those procs run $80-90, and can clock very high (beating out athlon 64 3500+ and 3700+). I know what everyone is going to say, dont get 754, or get 939 or wait till the conroe and all that, but I just need something that will suffice until I can completely build a new computer for around $1500. I play FEAR on tv resolution, and I want something that can play new games at 1024x768 at med/high settings. I need suggestions on a motherboard, and some good ram (depending on the motherboard, and price of everything, DDR500 would be nice). Im planning on getting the Radeon x850xt (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16814102688) for $160, $140 after MIR. The motherboard needs a divider with as many settings as possible for the ram, and locks for the PCI-X bus. Any suggestions/help would be much appreciated. Oh, and I'm looking at a $400-500 budget, I will need a case, ram, cpu, proc, and m/b, and possibly a DVD-RW. Selling my computer now and reusing some of the parts (replacing some parts with older parts to sell).

 

[falsterbo]

First of all, don´t buy a Sempron... They may get high clocks but you don´t have any cache memory on them so it won´t matter.

CPU, go for one of these:
s939, AMD64 3200+ 2,0GHz 0,5Mb cache (200x10MHz) [Can be clocked to about ~2,6-3,0GHz]
s939, AMD Opteron 144 1,8GHz 1Mb cache (200x9MHz) [Can be clocked to about ~2,9GHz or higher]
s775, Intel Pentium D 805 2.66GHz 2Mb cache (133x20MHz) [http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/05/10/dual_41_ghz_cores]


Motherboard, go for one of these:
s939, Asus A8N5X with nForce4 (or any card with nForce4...)
s775, Asus P5ND2-SLI with nForce4 SLI Intel

Graphicscard, go for one of these:
ATI X850XT or Geforce 7900GT depending on how much money you´ve got. (7900GT is much faster...)

Ram-memory:
Atleast 1,5Gb ram or recommended 2Gb for games like Battlefield2...

Harddrives: If you want some faster perfomance overall, then buy 2x SATA2 harddrives and put them into RAID0. This will give a lot more perfomance when loading windows, programs and for example maps in Battlefield2...

Remmeber to have atleast 450W power supply...

 

[The_Prophecy]

save your money.... live with what you have for now and get either a Conroe based system, or if you're an AMD person, go the AM2 route when AM2 performance surpasses its 939 equivalent.

 

[1Tanker]

save your money.... live with what you have for now and get either a Conroe based system, or if you're an AMD person, go the AM2 route when AM2 performance surpasses its 939 equivalent.

That's not what he wanted to hear.

Quote : I know what everyone is going to say, dont get 754, or get 939 or wait till the conroe and all that, but I just need something that will suffice until I can completely build a new computer for around $1500. Unquote.

I would wait til a week or two after Conroe comes out, so ~ first-second week of August, and AMD s939,s754, and AM2 CPU prices will drop some. I think you will be able to get a s754 Sempron for a very sweet price.

GL

 

[Tacoboy]

As AMD & Intel are going to be doing price drops over the next few months.
you might want to wait 2 months before upgrading.
I just spent $233 on the Intel D 805 and Asus P5P800SE
and $125 on a new AGP card.
Now i wish I had held out for 2 months and and bought a 900 series Intel.
And a PCI-Express motherboard and graphics card
& DDR2 memory