Wait or play?

[RearAdmiral]

Here are my 2 options,
1)I can get the following:

1)Abit Ic7-Max3 or Asus P4C800-E Deluxe, Probably Abit, i hear Asus has voltage problems.
2)P4 2.8e or 3.2e, I hear the 2.8 is better for Oc'ing, which I plan on doing, any suggestions on best oc'ing processor would be great, hoping to hit 4ghz.
3)Geforce 6800 or x800xt, which ever is faster.
4)Corsair Twinx1024-4400 Ram(1 gig at DDR 550)
5)Waterchill-KT12A-L30, minus northbridge cooler if I go with Abit board, I believe they have a small fan on the northbridge.
6)Sound Blaster Audigy 2
7)Enermax power supply, around 600w
8)Burner, HDD,case, etc.

All this stuff basically costs less than $2,000
or do you think I should wait for the change to socket 775 and the D0 prescotts which I dont think are out. Im thinking if I wait, I will be paying 3,000+, I want to spend 2,000 or less. Any suggestions or comments would be great. I think if I can get the system up to or close to a stable 4Ghz, it will be plenty for me. Thanks

 

[pjordan]

About your processor, you should not get a Presscott. If you go Intel you should get the 2.8C. You should also look at the Athlon-Mobile and the Athlon 64. About your memory, if you go Intel the 4200 EL by OCZ performed better according to Anandtech.com. If you go AMD you should probably get 3500 memory. It is pretty optimistic I think to get a computer stable at 4 ghz. The rest looks good

 

[P4Man]

Just to put this in perspective. You want to overclock. Why ? Just for the heck of it, or to get cheap gaming performance ? (I assume you are building a gaming rig considering the GPU)

The same budget would allow you to buy an Ahtlon 64 3400+ with money to spare if you don't use ultra expensive overclockable RAM, nor watercooling or a ultrahigh end PSU, none of which you'd really need with the A64 anyhow.

I ran some numbers on THG benchmarks to see how high you'd have to overclock a P4C to catch a Athlon 64 in gaming. note I used linear regression through the datapoints (3, 3.2, 3.4 GHz), in reality scaling will never be that good. Note I used P4C numbers, not P4E which are generally worse in gaming.

I only used a few game benches that werent all that GPU limited:

Wolfenstein ET: 3.6 GHz
Serious Sam : 3.8 GHz
UT 2004 : 4.0 GHz
Splinter Cell : 4.5 GHz
X2 : 4.0 GHz

So for roughly the same money, you would get similar or better performance to your 4 GHz overclocked P4.. running STOCK speed with no heat or stability issues, reduced life expectancy (both MB and CPU), lost warranty,.. Cool&Quiet, NX, AMD64 will come for free as well.

Of course you'll still have the possibility to overclock the A64 if you want to to get into 5+ GHz P4 performance territory. Anand managed to overclock the 2 GHz A64 3200+ to almost 2.5 GHz using stock voltage. It would probably take a 4.5-5 GHz P4 to keep up.

In short: if its just for gaming, buying a cheap P4 to overclock it through the roof doesnt make any sense.

= The views stated herein are my personal views, and not necessarily the views of my wife. =

 

[Coop]

I agree with the 2 postings above me.
Buying P4(surtenly Prescott) aint a smart move, unless you are a diehard Intel Fanboy, go ahead )



Toms Hardware Site is a joke !

 

[RearAdmiral]

I've never had a big experience in overclocking and I just wanted to see what I could do, and also make an awesome machine, but I will take a look at the Athlon 64's, for some reason I havent paid much attention to them. Any recommendations for Athlon 64 boards? Memory? Anything?

 

[RearAdmiral]

I definitely plan on OC'ing either way,but with the Athlon, do you think I should get memory faster than 3500? possibly 3700 or even 4000? The new nvidia 250 seems to be the best board too.

 

[pjordan]

You should probably wait until a couple nvidia 250 boards come out and get which ever one <A HREF="http:// anandtech.com " target="_new">http:// anandtech.com </A> likes best for overclockers. Then probably the OCZ 3700 Gold rev.2 would be the memory I would pick. Or possibly the new OCZ 3500EB. Any other ideas?