r600 and amd athlon 6000 worth it

No, save your money for a k10 cpu instead, that, or just get a 5200 and overclock taht for the 2mb cache or a simple 3600 for a cheap am2 dual core 8)

I have a better idea - buy an E4200 when it comes out in a week for 100$.

Why, that would be stupid to buy the e4200 when the allendales don't hit as high fsb and it has an 8 mult, you would get no where with that, perhaps just over 3ghz if you were lucky. Getting a cheap 5200 or even a cheaper 3600 would be the smart move to hold someone off until the k10 cpus which will demolish the current conroes, so he'd be kicking himself when he has to buy a new motherboard too

The smartest move would be to wait for the amd 790 mobos to come out and grab one of those with a k10 cpu since the 790 boards will be as future proof as it gets with pci_e 2.0 and ht3, you won't find anything else that future proof for a while unless amd will turn to nvidia for a chipset again

I've never heard of an e4200. An e4300 at a reasonable 2.8GHz would be faster than just about any current AMD chip. It's possible you could get OC a 6000+ or top Opteron quicker, though they're more expensive. That isn't exactly "nowhere".

Link?

If you've got a 4000+ and it's single core not X2 and you want something faster, I'd say go with something like a X2 5600+, it's under $200 and only 200MHz slower than a 6000+.

edit: though, if you're mostly just gaming, do you really need something faster yet? the 4000+ I thought was around 2.4 or 2.6GHz, a 6000+ or 5600+ wouldn't be a whole lot better in single threaded applications like most games.

I guess we'll know more, when, the 23rd? AMD better pull something big off, for all of our sakes. By big, I mean the k10 better outperform the C2D by at least 20% clock-to-clock, if not more, considering its low initial clock.

OP, the 6000 is a great deal right now, I don't think you'd regret its purchase. It's less likely than the other CPU's that have been mentioned to bottleneck the R600. ATI has been good in the past at not allowing CPU bottlenecking as a result of efficient driver implementation on their part, but with no data it's impossible to know if this will be an issue with R600 or not. Anything above a 5000 should be fine, but again, it's hard to tell with no real data.

Unfortunately words on AMD's marketing press releases don't prove performance. Nor do hopes. Only benchmarks are proof, and they've been suspiciously absent so far. I wouldn't count on K10 being anything special. I'd like it to be, for sure, but I wouldn't bet a bread crust on it.

Still, it's probably wise to wait a couple weeks for the supposed K10 demo and Intel's price drops if you decide on a major upgrade instead of a 5600/6000.

Its specs make do look like it has potential, but so did Netburst's. CPUs are so complicated it's impossible to tell how it'll perform before benchmarks no matter what details they list. I know what their specifications mean as I'm a software engineering student, but that isn't enough information to judge how well it'll actually perform. And yeah the clockspeed issue is worrisome, I was hoping their 65nm would get them farther than it did.

Still, there's always hope. Maybe they weren't releasing benchmarks because they couldn't get a decent clock out of it, and now they've got it. But let's not turn this into another K10 arch discussion lol, there's too many of those already.

But the 65nm won't do you any good at all except drop your temps, that's something that people failed to realize. Going to 65nm just allows amd to produce cheaper and cooler running cpus, when your cpus are architecture limited when it comes to clockspeed, die shrinks won't make any difference, especially when you are dealing with an arch designed for 130nm, so you'd be surprised how good of a job they did that they weren't given credit for by not loosing tons of performance compared to the original 1.3um athlons

lordpope: Do you ever shut up about amd, first you start making fun of intel, then you start making fun of amd, then you start saying amd has no hope what so ever and that's not helping them get market share. Do amd a favor and just let them slowly get their business back

currently, they aren't, but if you go back in the netburst days, amd cpus absolutely demolished the intel cpus at gaming. It isn't just gaming that amd cpus aren't the top dog for, it's everything overall, you have to understand that before you make these types of comments, it's about which cpu is faster, not anything else really except a few other things that I won't get into. While amd has always directed it cpus more towards the server market since it makes more money there, its cpus are still fine for gaming, if you remember currectly the fx-60 consistantly outbenched the 965presler in gaming tests even though it clocked far lower, so it's mainly about the raw cpu power

I get the joke.

To be honest, you may find the 8800GTX to be a better option. I doubt it, but we just don't know. It's best to wait and read lots of trustworthy reviews that test your games.

Anyway, if we assume the R600 is about equal to an 8800GTX, there is no reason why you couldn't pair it with a X2 6000+. Most games are more GPU limited than CPU limited. There are definate exceptions where the CPU will hold performance back, but in general the reason for buying a card such as the R600 or 8800GTX is to get amazing visuals (as in high resolution, max details, and FSAA and AF) and smooth performance in your games. The thing to remember is all current CPU's including the C2 extreme 6800 could lower framerates over what these cards could potentially put out. But that doesn't mean it will impact your gameplay or change your max playable settings. Sure there are limits. For example, I wouldn't pair an R600 with a 1.8GHz A64 or anything slower for a long term solution anyway. But you won't need the highest clocked quad core to justify buying the R600 either.

That's why I suggested the 5200 as a hold over, because if you really must have the cpu power, you could just oc that a few hundred mzh which is pretty easy on all cpus except the fx models and the 5600 and above, then it gets tricky because of the architecture's limit. I personally think to the least k10 will be a k8 killer, so we can at least expect good results compared to the current 6000, but we can't say compared to conroe just yet, but look at the signs, intel is afraid, they wouldn't be pushing out so many products and price cuts if they knew amd didn't have something that could seriously cause them damage, that would be the only reason why they would suffer their own profits in order to stop amd's funds completely to prevent them from doing any more research

Thats the stupidest thing ive ever heard. "I_Love_Tacos and AMD, sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G.

Seriously, the E4200 cant overclock? What are u on?? I defy u to prove that any Core 2 Duo cant get to 500Mhz FSB. And i want REAL proof, not ur Christian/Fanboy fake proof.