advice greatly appreciated

[DevinKell]

Hi all!

I'm looking to upgrade my P4 2.8 to something more powerful. Currently I have 512mg ram, with a Geforce 5700LE 256mb AGP. Spyware/virus/background program free, of course... I just don't seem to be loading games very quickly, especially everquest. The problem is I don't know what CPU to upgrade to.
Sempron AM2 3400
http://www.tigerdirect.ca/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=2207337&CatId=0

Athalon 64 3200
http://www.tigerdirect.ca/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=1366608&CatId=1949

Sempron 64 3300
http://www.tigerdirect.ca/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=1531107&CatId=1951

I really want something that can totally out-perform my p4... but which cpu will do a better job of it?

Thanks a lot!

 

[BushLin]

I've only ever bought AMD but I'm afraid to say your best bet is to wait 2 weeks and buy a new Intel Core 2 which wipes the floor with everything out at the moment, if you don't want Intel I'd still wait 2 weeks as the prices for all current CPUs will go down considerably.

 

[DevinKell]

Prices going down? Alright! :d Boy would I have been red if I had bought something just before prices drop... thanks. I'll wait to see what the prices are.. but, which cpu there is the better deal?

 

[BushLin]

Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 2.4GHz Socket LGA775, 4MB, BOXED w/fan
£215.00
http://www.komplett.co.uk/k/ki.asp?sku=322633

Intel Core 2 Duo E6400 2.13GHz Socket LGA775, 2MB, BOXED w/fan
£150.00
http://www.komplett.co.uk/k/ki.asp?sku=322632

Both of these represent very good value for money considering that the E6600 will beat the Athlon 64 FX-62 in most disciplines, if both of those prices seem too high for your budget I'd wait until the prices drop on everything else which they will do very soon.

 

[Alyarbank]

BushLin:
Both of these represent very good value for money considering that the E6600 will beat the Athlon 64 FX-62 in most disciplines, if both of those prices seem too high for your budget I'd wait until the prices drop on everything else which they will do very soon.

BushLin is right, I would wait for prices to settle down after the introduction of Conroe before buying a CPU, BTW you may be able to load games faster with a faster drive too. Most of the time you wait is to copy files from the disc into RAM. A faster drive will improve your load times, and 1GB of RAM would help out too with over-all system response.
Could be enough bang for less bucks. Even the fastest chip will wait in line for data from a slower drive. I have a P4 2.8 in my laptop, I added a 7200RPM drive and boosted the RAM to 1GB and it gave me some more pep loading Quake3 and Half-Life2, the old one was a 4200RPM and used 512MB RAM. Anyhow just a thought. Good Luck

 

[DevinKell]

Wow... an intel chip for 150 (closer to 200 for me, I'm Canadian) that can compete with the FX which sells at 4x that!! Alright! I can't wait! In the mean time I wouldn't mind buying a SATA drive...but I'm a little worried about which drive exactly. My IDE Maxtor 40gb writes at 55mb/sec... but a friend just bought a maxtor80gb SATA150 which only gets 40mb/sec max... How do I know which drive will perform better than my current one? thanks!

the drive he bought:
http://www.tigerdirect.ca/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?Sku=TSD-80M%20R

 

[BushLin]

SATA is the bus, it can HANDLE 150MB per second, it says nothing about the drive attached to it. There is no drive which will use all of that on it's own even when reading sequential data, the drive's cache may be able to utilise all the bandwidth but as cache is very small this happens rarely. I'd take a look around Tom's reviews to see which drives are the fastest but you can't go far wrong with Seagate drives in my experience.

 

[badge]

Hi all!

I'm looking to upgrade my P4 2.8 to something more powerful. Currently I have 512mg ram, with a Geforce 5700LE 256mb AGP. Spyware/virus/background program free, of course... I just don't seem to be loading games very quickly, especially everquest. The problem is I don't know what CPU to upgrade to.
Sempron AM2 3400
http://www.tigerdirect.ca/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=2207337&CatId=0

Athalon 64 3200
http://www.tigerdirect.ca/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=1366608&CatId=1949

Sempron 64 3300
http://www.tigerdirect.ca/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=1531107&CatId=1951

I really want something that can totally out-perform my p4... but which cpu will do a better job of it?

Thanks a lot!

You will need a motherboard to go with those AMD processors.