If this is your first visit, be sure to check out the FAQ by clicking the link above. You may have to register before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages, select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below. |
|
|
|
Thread Tools | Display Modes |
#1
|
|||
|
|||
Looking for advice for 64 bit system
Hi all,
I will be getting my annual bonus on Friday, and am strongly looking at going ahead and building a 64 bit system. I currently have an Athlon XP 2800+ Barton running at 3200+, ATI 9800 Pro 128 mb vid card, with an Asus A7N8X Deluxe ver 2.0 mb, and 1 gb of pc3200 Corsair matched LL ram. I am strongly considering socket 754. I know, it will not be as upgradeable as socket 939. However, I tend to upgrade my system on a regular basis though, and would not hesitate to move to a new mb /cpu in a couple of years. My thoughts are to go ahead and do the 754, to get some good bang for the buck for the next year or two. Keep the 9800 Pro, and upgrade to next generation when they come more available and down in price some. Should I wait for the Nforce4 boards for the 754, or go ahead and go with Nforce3? Is there a compelling reason I should really look at spending the extra money right now and go with socket 939? Or perhaps wait for socket 939 pci express boards? Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks, -- Don Burnette "When you decide something is impossible to do, try to stay out of the way of the man that's doing it." |
#2
|
|||
|
|||
On Wed, 12 Jan 2005 07:01:43 -0600, Don Burnette wrote:
Hi all, I will be getting my annual bonus on Friday, and am strongly looking at going ahead and building a 64 bit system. I currently have an Athlon XP 2800+ Barton running at 3200+, ATI 9800 Pro 128 mb vid card, with an Asus A7N8X Deluxe ver 2.0 mb, and 1 gb of pc3200 Corsair matched LL ram. I am strongly considering socket 754. I know, it will not be as upgradeable as socket 939. However, I tend to upgrade my system on a regular basis though, and would not hesitate to move to a new mb /cpu in a couple of years. My thoughts are to go ahead and do the 754, to get some good bang for the buck for the next year or two. Keep the 9800 Pro, and upgrade to next generation when they come more available and down in price some. Should I wait for the Nforce4 boards for the 754, or go ahead and go with Nforce3? Is there a compelling reason I should really look at spending the extra money right now and go with socket 939? Or perhaps wait for socket 939 pci express boards? Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks, The big advantage of the 939 pin part is that it will support twice as much memory. The 754s can only support two DIMMs at 400MHz, the 939s can support four DIMMs at 400MHz. The price difference between the two isn't that great, a 3500+ (939) is $251, a 3400+ (754) is $205 according to pricewatch so I think it make sense to go with a 939 on an MSI K8N Neo2 (Nforce 3 Ultra). There aren't any performance advantages for PCI Express at the moment unless you are planning on buying an SLI system with two top of the line graphics cards. The NForce 4 is new and PCI Express is new so I'd wait several more months before buying an Nforce 4 system so they have a chance to work the bugs out. The Nforce 3 has been out long enough that it should be as solid as it's ever going to get. |
#3
|
|||
|
|||
I'm probably in the same boat as you upgrading-wise. I've chosen the 754
with a k8tv800 and k8nsnxp boards - both using 3000+'s. I cant see a good enough reason to shell out more cash for 5% more performance on a 939 system. Doesnt make sense. The 754/939 chip price difference is almost negligable, but of course you have to get the right board which supports it - which is more cash. If youre one of these people who upgrades quite often, then the choice is obvious. Save some cash - 3-5% performance short-term bragging rights just arent smart. "Don Burnette" wrote in message ... Hi all, I will be getting my annual bonus on Friday, and am strongly looking at going ahead and building a 64 bit system. I currently have an Athlon XP 2800+ Barton running at 3200+, ATI 9800 Pro 128 mb vid card, with an Asus A7N8X Deluxe ver 2.0 mb, and 1 gb of pc3200 Corsair matched LL ram. I am strongly considering socket 754. I know, it will not be as upgradeable as socket 939. However, I tend to upgrade my system on a regular basis though, and would not hesitate to move to a new mb /cpu in a couple of years. My thoughts are to go ahead and do the 754, to get some good bang for the buck for the next year or two. Keep the 9800 Pro, and upgrade to next generation when they come more available and down in price some. Should I wait for the Nforce4 boards for the 754, or go ahead and go with Nforce3? Is there a compelling reason I should really look at spending the extra money right now and go with socket 939? Or perhaps wait for socket 939 pci express boards? Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks, -- Don Burnette "When you decide something is impossible to do, try to stay out of the way of the man that's doing it." |
#4
|
|||
|
|||
On Wed, 12 Jan 2005 07:01:43 -0600, Don Burnette wrote:
Should I wait for the Nforce4 boards for the 754, or go ahead and go with Nforce3? Is there a compelling reason I should really look at spending the extra money right now and go with socket 939? Or perhaps wait for socket 939 pci express boards? Any advice would be appreciated. The only reason to wait IMO would be for PCI-E. If you don't need that go ahead with any of the 754 boards that have a PCI lock. For a CPU, I'd choose the 3400+ simply because it runs at 2.4GHz and has a 12 multiplier and it's very cheap in comparison to other A64's running at that speed. It's performance at stock speed will outperform a 3500+ 939 simply because the 3500+ omly runs at 2.2GHz. And it will beat a 939 3800+ in benchmarks that don't need the extra bandwidth of dual channel, which is quite a few. And with a 12 multiplier, it'll be that much easier to overclock. Take note of the very first benchmark here. The socket 754 3400+ even beats the 939 4000+. Then go through all to see if this meets your needs. Remember that almost all benchmark charts tend to show small differences in speed as huge with the graphs when there's really very little difference. Look at the numbers, do the math. http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets...spx?i=2275&p=6 -- Abit KT7-Raid (KT133) Tbred B core CPU @2400MHz (24x100FSB) http://mysite.verizon.net/res0exft/cpu.htm |
#5
|
|||
|
|||
Wes Newell wrote:
On Wed, 12 Jan 2005 07:01:43 -0600, Don Burnette wrote: Should I wait for the Nforce4 boards for the 754, or go ahead and go with Nforce3? Is there a compelling reason I should really look at spending the extra money right now and go with socket 939? Or perhaps wait for socket 939 pci express boards? Any advice would be appreciated. The only reason to wait IMO would be for PCI-E. If you don't need that go ahead with any of the 754 boards that have a PCI lock. For a CPU, I'd choose the 3400+ simply because it runs at 2.4GHz and has a 12 multiplier and it's very cheap in comparison to other A64's running at that speed. It's performance at stock speed will outperform a 3500+ 939 simply because the 3500+ omly runs at 2.2GHz. And it will beat a 939 3800+ in benchmarks that don't need the extra bandwidth of dual channel, which is quite a few. And with a 12 multiplier, it'll be that much easier to overclock. Take note of the very first benchmark here. The socket 754 3400+ even beats the 939 4000+. Then go through all to see if this meets your needs. Remember that almost all benchmark charts tend to show small differences in speed as huge with the graphs when there's really very little difference. Look at the numbers, do the math. http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets...spx?i=2275&p=6 Great advice, and thanks to all! I shall go ahead and order the 3400+ 754 socket. I can use my current vid card, sound card, ram, with no problems, and throwing a new mb/cpu in will be a piece of cake. Hopefully a gig of ram will still be good for a little while. Btw, is MSI the way to go for the Nforce3 mb? Better than Asus? I really like my current Asus board, have never had a MSI. -- Don Burnette "When you decide something is impossible to do, try to stay out of the way of the man that's doing it." |
#6
|
|||
|
|||
I was just reading (on THG) SLI doesn't work with all games, and unless
the game is added to the video driver for SLI you can't run the game in SLI mode. Is that true? Ed Since nVIDIA is still writing and improving the drivers for SLI, this is true for the most part. The SLI mode kicks in for a given game only if a profile for that game is written into the video driver. If a game profile isn't there it is either in the works and will be there in a later driver or the game won't benefit from operating in SLI mode so they won't write a profile for it. DougH |
#7
|
|||
|
|||
On Wed, 12 Jan 2005 21:10:47 -0600, Don Burnette wrote:
I shall go ahead and order the 3400+ 754 socket. I can use my current vid card, sound card, ram, with no problems, and throwing a new mb/cpu in will be a piece of cake. Hopefully a gig of ram will still be good for a little while. Well, my first computer started out with 4K, so I would hope a gig is good for a while since I only have 512Meg now and don't even use half of that. [wes@wes2 wes]$ free total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 516040 499832 16208 0 122072 161236 -/+ buffers/cache: 216524 299516 Swap: 811240 0 811240 Btw, is MSI the way to go for the Nforce3 mb? Better than Asus? I really like my current Asus board, have never had a MSI. One good board from a company doesn't mean the next will be good, nor does one bad one mean the next will be bad. So I'd just look for one with the chipset and most of all, features i wanted. -- Abit KT7-Raid (KT133) Tbred B core CPU @2400MHz (24x100FSB) http://mysite.verizon.net/res0exft/cpu.htm |
#8
|
|||
|
|||
"General Schvantzkoph" wrote in message news The big advantage of the 939 pin part is that it will support twice as much memory. The 754s can only support two DIMMs at 400MHz, the 939s can support four DIMMs at 400MHz. Interesting... What kind of limitation is that just out of curiosity? I ask because I'm actually using 3 DIMMS @ 400MHz in my Chaintech NF3-250 motherboard. Carlo |
#9
|
|||
|
|||
On Thu, 13 Jan 2005 20:28:17 -0500, Carlo Razzeto wrote:
"General Schvantzkoph" wrote in message news The big advantage of the 939 pin part is that it will support twice as much memory. The 754s can only support two DIMMs at 400MHz, the 939s can support four DIMMs at 400MHz. Interesting... What kind of limitation is that just out of curiosity? I ask because I'm actually using 3 DIMMS @ 400MHz in my Chaintech NF3-250 motherboard. Carlo The board specs that I've seen have a two DIMM at 400MHz limitation, perhaps the Chaintech is different or maybe it's really running your DIMMs at 333MHz. |
#10
|
|||
|
|||
"Ed" wrote in message ... On Thu, 13 Jan 2005 20:42:34 -0500, General Schvantzkoph I tried 3 sticks in my VNF3-250 with BIOS 1.0, it said DDR400 on boot, but there was clearly a performance drop with 3 sticks in it... Sandra 2004 memory scores 2*256 = 3094/3094 3*256 = 2746/2746 Ed -- Chaintech VNF3-250/BIOS 4.0 3200+ Newcastle Perhaps it is running the DIMMs at a slit\ly lower timing? Carlo |
|
Thread Tools | |
Display Modes | |
|
|
Similar Threads | ||||
Thread | Thread Starter | Forum | Replies | Last Post |
On the brink of madness... | I.C. Koets | General | 18 | January 31st 05 10:49 PM |
The P4 system problem from hell (long) | Lou Grinzo | General | 6 | November 30th 04 02:13 PM |
Updrade PC | Guy Smith | General | 22 | August 15th 04 01:57 AM |
Dual processor system vs Single processor system | HawkEye_42 | General | 3 | January 27th 04 11:01 AM |
Multi-boot Windows XP without special software | Timothy Daniels | General | 11 | December 12th 03 05:38 AM |