Advice Needed!!!! :-)
 

Looking at chopping and changing my PC gubbins, can anyone "In the know" shed some light on the what is the difference between the following in real world terms:

AMD 64 Bit
AMD Athlon XP "Barton"

I am looking at upgrading together with a x800pro ATI card (oc'd to XT speeds and all 16 pipes).

I basically want a system that will handle anything I throw at it (games wise) in the maximum detail available.

Any suggestions on CPU type and speed (money is not free for all, so I don't want to buy the best ever, if I am not going to take advantage of it).

Regards,
Shaun.

Shaun

I'm no expert by any stretch of the imagination but feedback i've had from customers suggets the new '64' chips have difficulties running current games and there are very few games available that take advantage of the new 64 technology.

Personally, i've found the best mod for a PC is RAM, RAM and more RAM. A couple of 1gb sticks yielded huge perfomance gains for me (heavy video editing), best £150 i ever spent on a machine.


Paul

Shaun, I would wait a month or two.
PCI Express offers the abiltity, certainly for Nvidia's 6800 series cards to do SLI(like the old voodoo2's). So you can buy one 6800 now and add a second later, when that starts to look slow.

I'd go for Intel P4 extreme series, which I think will be around the 3.8Ghz mark by Oct/Nov

At least a Gb of Cosair memory(466Mhz pref) and the ability to RAID sata drives would finish things off nicely.

Morning,

From the benchmarking thread you can see that adding more memory beyond 512 does not make a big difference in Doom3. Of course video editing is another matter.

From the behchmarking results so far I would say that the *800 series Radeon cards don't quite make the grade.

I take my shooters very seriously and less than 40 fps really isn't good enough IMO. I'm having to put up with 37 with my Radeon 9800pro and quite a lot of the eye candy is turned off, which was not part of the plan when I bought it.

Your choice of card should perform better, but I would say its not going to serve you for very long. Wait and see what demands Half-life2 make on the GPU. but I would go for one of the newer Nvidia cards now if I had the cash. A good compromise might be the new 6600 series but I haven't seen a review of a production model yet.

Cheers

According to benchmarks on the net (which admittadley do not tell the whole story), the x800 series of ATI cards are blowing everything out of the water. I know someone else with a 9800PRO (which is OK but doesnt quite deliver what was expected) and have been informed that the later spec x800 cards really are a quantum leap in video processing technology.

The x800PRO can be modded (which is what I am intending to do) to turn it in to the latest x800XT (which is the daddy of daddies, but has not been released on general yet).

Thanks for the pointer on the A64 processor.

Regards,
Shaun.

Just for info...

I have now found several resources dictating that the A64 is the best gaming platform out..... no one mentioned that is was causing problems.

Regards,
Shaun.

with regards to the doom3 bench results. . .

It is an nvidia sponsored game - nvidia cards will beat ATI cards.

Processor didn't make that much of a difference - if it was over 2500.
Memory didn't make much difference - if it was over 512

It was all down to graphics card

Mr webmaster, what's your budget?

Not a billion dollars i'm afraid! :D

I think I may look at the following though:

AMD 64 3800+
ASUS A8V delux MB
1GB OCZ PC3500ED Dual channel Ram
ATI x800Pro Modded to 16 pipelines (as per x800XT)
Artic Cooling VGA Silencer
Vantec Copper BGA Ramsinks
(To ramp the speed up to XT levels)
Hitachi Deskstar 200GB HD

Regards,
Shaun.

Looks like a good system.

As you are buying new (and fast) kit I personally wouldn't bother with overclocking.

Who will do the modding of GFX? Is it a softmod or hardware?

Hitachi = IBM > wouldn't touch em with a bargepole

Get 2 x 160 gig SATA Maxtor's and RAID0 them - much faster - about the same price.

Deskstar codename is Deathstar... do not buy if you value your data in 6-12 months...

OCZ ram, wouldnt touch em with a bargepole, have some atm and i have to under clock to get my pc to run :(

I would suggest Corsair XMS2 or GeIL Ultra's, also go for 2gb... I am quite often topping out with 1gb as it is :(

Knights drive config is good

Rest of the kit looks sweet

Jules

OCZ is picky on what it runs (could be down to MOBO), when it runs it works very well.

I'm a crucial boy here - but that's mainly because i'm tight and go for value & stability rather than performance & stability

Although Doom3 isnt the be all and end all of benchmarks, the attached seems to reflect current gfx card performance quite well IMO

http://www20.graphics.tomshardware.c.../doom3-03.html

:)

The Deskstar of old is not the Deskstar of present. They had a lot of bad press some time ago but are as good as the rest (and generally perform very well). I have always had Deskstar's and never had issues.

OCZ Ram performs very well and is matched to the MB so no problem there.

As with most PC bits, unless it is matched you will never get the best performance from the MB and bits.

I have heard a number of issues recently with reliability/speed issues of S-ATA drives, so I am sticking with P-IDE for the time being.

Regards,
Shaun.

I've been running 2 maxtor 160 gig SATA drives for a 8 months and have has no issues (touch wood) - haven't raid'ed them tho.

They out perform all 133 IDE disks.

Thats interesting because all the places I have looked at (and we are talking manfacturers websites as well) state that the drives will not outperform current P-IDE drives, but will be more efficient in power overheads and heat outputs.

Any more feedback from anyone (as I did think the same as you have said until I did some research)?

Regards,
Shaun.

On the matter of hard drive performance....

The latest hard disc technology to affect performance is "command queueing" where the drive decides (within certain limits) what order in which to do a series of actions.

This has no effect on maximum theoretical transfer rates but has the potential to improve efficiency considerably - particularly in completion of a large number of small reads/writes.

Whether you can access this new technology will depend on you mobo and hard drive.

I've seen one bad review of the maxtor SATA - and it was really bad -indicating a hardware / configuration problem.

SATA 150 is more of an evolution rather than revolution.

http://www.avault.com/hardware/getre...l01m250&page=1

http://www.explosivelabs.com/reviews...maxplus9_sata/

http://www.intelforums.net/viewtopic.php?t=989

http://modtown.co.uk/mt/review2.php?...tor200sata&p=3

http://www.gamershell.com/reviews/Ma...Plus9160.shtml

http://www.vr-zone.com/reviews/Maxtor/DMPlus9/

With regard to IDE disks I would still go with WDC or Seagate.