Build on the best - AMD? Intel?

There are a lot of positives and negatives. I try to stay out of the Intel vs. AMD wars, but I'll tell you what I'd buy for each side.

Intel: Abit TH7II (expensive), and corresponding Socket 478 CPU (highest you can afford at the end). Make sure you get Socket 478, NOT 423.

AMD: Probably an SiS 735 board. The Leadtek looks good on paper, but I haven't heard any reports on it. Then an XP, again, the best you can get for what cash you have at the end.


I say "at the end" because the video card is more important than the CPU for games, and it'd suck to get a 5400 RPM hard drive just so you can get a 100MHz higher processor, for example.

Anyhow, hope that helps at all. Feel free to PM or email me if you have any more specific questions.

<font color=orange>Quarter</font color=orange> <font color=blue>Pounder</font color=blue> <font color=orange>Inside</font color=orange>

>A 2ghz system 'sounds' a lot better than an 1800 or
>whatever.

Yeah.. but have a look at the Duron 1200 article on this sire, and see what a 1.6 Ghz cpu (Athlon XP1900+) can do compared to a "faster sounding" 2Ghz P4. And if you know its even cheaper, its a no brainer I'd say.

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

On Budget: 1. Dual 1.2 ghz MP w a geforce 3 or geforce 2 ultra and lots of ddr (1 gig, 2 512 modules)
2. Athlon XP 1600 or whatever you can afford w a geforce 3 or a geforce 2 ultra and lots of ddr

No Budget: For OpenGL mainly games, i recommend the p4, for directx mainly games i would recommend an athlon.
1. Dual Athlon XP MP 1800+ w a geforce 3 ti500 w a tyan mobo

Sound card and everything else, you can prolly pick urself

Gaming mostly has to do with the vid card, so if he has a vid card and a pretty good cpu, he should get good quality. And so that he gets fast speeds, a dual setup would be nice.

FatBurger, I tend to agree with you, at least on the "money no issue" P4 suggestion. :-)

By the way, have you all seen the benchmarks on my Abit TH7-II RAID ? The mobo is kinda expensive, but the P4 1700 MHz is not so exorbitantly priced. You'll have to overclock it though in order to get some decent performance.


--------------------- P4 1700 MHz ---------------------

Overcloked 1700 MHz P4 Willamette Socket 478 with stock cooling benchmarked using SiSoft Sandra. "Crippled" by a generic Antec 300W power-supply.

CPU Arithmetic.
Dhrystone ALU: 4039
Whetstone FPU/SSE2: 1097/2571 MFLOPS

Multi-Media:
Integer iSSE2: 8304 it/s
Floating-Point iSSE2: 10109 it/s

Memory Bandwidth:
RAM Int MMX: 1950 MB/s
RAM Float FPU: 1957 MB/s

But whats wrong with a 1.
4 boxed?


<font color=orange>Beam</font color=orange><font color=red> me</font color=red><font color=green> up</font color=green><font color=blue> Scotty</font color=blue>

AMD_Man wrote: "Um, how is an Antec PSU generic?"


It's not, excuse me, wrong word. I have just observed that especially the 12V supply is far from stable when the juice is needed.