Archived from groups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.chips (
More info?)
On Tue, 28 Dec 2004 02:40:13 -0500, Tony Hill <hilla_nospam_20@yahoo.ca>
wrote:
>On Thu, 23 Dec 2004 15:56:08 GMT, Eric <111@telus.net> wrote:
>
>>-Hi there, I'm hoping some might be kind enough to help me out as I
>>know nothing about computers anymore and would rather not do 20+ hours
>>of research...
>>
>>What I do:
>>Surf and play poker on-line: Not power intensive.
>>
>>What I would like to do:
>>Play newer shoot'em up games: Very power intensive.
>>
>>While I like to play games I care far more about the game play and
>>less about the graphics. I want to play on line against others so I
>>need it to be smooth but I don't care about the graphics that have to
>>do with ambience like reflections and how light and shadow is cast. I
>>would just like it to be smooth, not choppy and no lagging or bogging
>>down.
>>
>>I would like suggestions for components that will work well together.
>>I definitely want AMD and can't afford top of the line so would like
>>to have a motherboard that will likely be able to take a good upgrade
>>cpu in 9-12 months.
>
>Uhh.. good luck on that one. It's VERY difficult to buy a motherboard
>today expecting a good CPU upgrade more than about 6-months down the
>line. That being said, a Socket 939 Athlon64 is probably your best
>bet here.
>
>>Motherboard?
>
>As mentioned above, Socket 939 Athlon64 board. Ideally I would
>recommend an nForce4 chipset, though unfortunately these are still a
>bit few and far between. I see on www.newegg.com that they offer a
>Chaintech board, the VNF4/Ultra, using the nForce4 Ultra chipset and
>selling for a decent price ($129). They also have an Asus A8N-SLI
>board using the nForce4 SLI chipset (allows for multiple video cards
>to be used together, really not worth much of anything IMO unless
>you've got more money than brains). Unfortunately that board sells
>for a somewhat less than decent price of $269.
They also have a Gigabyte nForce4 but like the other two you mention, it is
also out of stock. The five new MSI PCIe boards, 2 ATI and 3 nForce4
should be coming out soon too.
>While I normally try to stick to one of the big name motherboard
>manufacturers (mostly MSI), I did recently purchase a dirt-cheap
>Chaintech board for my system the last time I needed a new board and I
>was very pleasantly surprised. I actually also now have a Chaintech
>sound card and video card, both of which work quite well, so I'm at
>least semi-confident in tossing in a recommendation for that Chaintech
>motherboard.
>
>>CPU?
>
>Athlon64 in socket 939. Which one you get depends on your budget.
>Newegg sells an OEM Athlon64 3000+ for only $165, or you could jump up
>to a retail box 3200+ for $240. The 3500+ is listed at both $274 and
>$369 at the moment, and I'm guessing that one of those is a mistake.
>Anything higher than that is likely to rather quickly reduce your
>bang/buck ratio.
Nope, that's the current price premium over a 130nm for a 90nm 3500+, which
I got for $295. end of Nov.; the MSI K8N Neo2 Plat. has also gone up by
$13. and is also out of stock. Hey, I feel lucky.
Makes you wonder what is going on with the 90nm Athlon64s, especially the
3500+ which goes out of stock very quickly - maybe some big OEM gobbling
them up? I wonder who?
>>RAM?
>
>The CPU and motherboard combo require dual-channel memory, so you'll
>need 2 of whatever you get. Probably either 2 x 256MB or 2 x 512MB,
>depending on your budget. Either way it'll be DDR400 / PC3200 memory,
>and ideally from a list of known-good memory for your board.
>Chaintech has a link for recommended memory for the above-mentioned
>motherboard, but at the moment it's blank. You might want keep an eye
>on the spec page though:
>
>http://www.chaintechusa.com/tw/eng/product_spec.asp?MPSNo=13&PISNo=318
>
>The list for the Asus board is available at this following link:
>
>http://usa.asus.com/products/mb/qvl/A8N-QVL.pdf
>
>
>Newegg lists 2 x 256MB of Kingston ValueSelect memory (on Asus' list)
>for $73, or 2 x 512MB of similar stuff for $139.
With the MSI K8N Neo2 I have two 512MB Crucial PC3200 DIMMs w. 512Mb chips
designated at www.newegg.com as 8T in the part number. They will not run
at tighter timings than 3-3-3-8 but they *do* work at 1T command rate...
which seems to be the key to Sandra giving 5.8GB/s on buffered bandwidth.
Plus, if I need to add memory I won't get into the AMD spec'd limit of
DDR333 with >2 ranks of memory per channel.
>>HD?
>
>See www.storagereview.com for the latest and greatest info on hard
>drives and the like. Personally though I would probably opt for a
>Seagate SATA 120GB hard drive with 8MB of cache, which Newegg has
>listed at $100. Of course, if you need a larger (or smaller) hard
>drive that is also available. Other manufacturers are fine as well,
>though I like the low-noise aspect of Seagate drives and they seem to
>be doing fairly well on the reliability front these days (though hard
>drives die on a fairly regular basis regardless of who makes them, so
>always back up your important data!).
The new Seagates are not as quiet as the ones from a few months ago -
Seagate got held up for licensing on the head-positioning noise reduction
patents and just dropped the feature. They are still relatively quiet
though and still my choice.
>>Video Card?
>
>If you can afford one, a PCI-Express card using the nVidia GeForce
>6600GT chipset seems to be the best bet for good price/performance in
>the mid-range of things. They start at $186 for a Gigabyte or XFX
>card. A slightly cheaper option is the non-GT version of the GeForce
>6600 which starts at $119. Word of warning on that one though, some
>of the 6600 cards are apparently using 64-bit memory buses, which will
>rather dramatically reduce your performance.
Agree on the video card and note that the XFX 6600GT is a dual DVI model
and seems to come with two VGA adapters - nice flexibility. Since the AGP
8x 6600GTs seem to be going for ~$30. more than the equivalent PCIe
version, any extra money here is better spent for a PCIe mbrd.
Rgds, George Macdonald
"Just because they're paranoid doesn't mean you're not psychotic" - Who, me??
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