Is It Worth It?

[megame255]

I currently am running an xp 2800 and a 6600gt with a 200 gb seagate and one 60 gb wd which are both IDE. I am building a new system based on this:

ASUS A8N-E Socket 939 NVIDIA nForce4 Ultra ATX

eVGA 256-P2-N564-AX Geforce 7900GT KO 256MB

AMD Athlon 64 3800+ Venice 2000MHz

Antec TRUEPOWERII TPII-430 ATX12V 430W Power Supply

Upgrading this system, I am reusing an old antec case along with 1 gb of pc 3200 ram. Now looking at at what I'm recycling, would it really have been worth it to go SATA and AM2?

 

[mcgruff]

Would you get any significant extra performance? Simple answer: no.

You would be able to re-use the IDE drives of course so it's just a question of whether you're sentimentally attached to that 1gb RAM. AM2 ought to offer more options for the next upgrade but 939 could still be a good choice.

 

[Stevemeister]

I'd agree with the other post. Right now there is little if no real world performance benefit to be had between 939 & AM2 but it probably won't stay that way for long and while newer CPU's will be developed for the new platform, you can pretty well be assured that old one (939) has got as good as it will get. You would be able to use your PC3200 on a 939 but would have to buy new RAM for an AM2 board. YOu can reuse your drives. I have both and IDE and SATA in my 939 AMD4000+ rig and both work fine but I also have 2 GB of OCZ EL3200 Platinum RAM so that minimizes disk accessing time.

I build my rig 6 months ago but if I wer doing it today I'd build based on AM2 rather than 939 - that motherboarsds and chiops are about the same price - sell off you old stuff, spend a bit more $ and go with the latest - it will have the longest useful life.