[Raine]

It's been a long long time since I bought a new computer. My current system is an 800 mhz AMD, 256 mb ram, recently upgraded to an 80 gb hdd... anyway it's old

I want something new that can handle a few of the more high end games out there. I'd like to be able to play half-life 2, Battlefield 2, Star Wars Empire at War, etc...

I also wanna use it to burn DVD's and the like. Now when I buy a system it's gotta last for a long time. I can't afford to be updating every other year. The one I have has lasted 6, and is still running strong, but my father is beginning to take a fancy to using it to read the international news and the like, and thus I need one that he won't touch. I've been debating over specs and I've narrowed it down to a list as follows. Let me know what you think would be the best option, and for you guys that deal with computers a lot, how much you think a set up like this would run.

(Processor) INTEL P4-540J 3.2GE (LGA775)
(motherboard) ASUS P5GPL 915PL 4DDR L775
(memory) Dual Chan 1024 (512MBx2) PC3200
(hard drive) 200GB SATA 8MB
(dvd burner) LG 4163 16X DVD+/-RW
(video card) ATI X600PRO 256MB 16x PCI Express

Or

(Processor) AMD64 939 3500+
(motherboard) GIGABYTE K8NF-9 NF4 1394 SATA RAID
(memory) DDR400 1024 (512MBx2) PC3200
(hard drive) 200GB SATA 8MB
(dvd burner) LG 4163B 16X DVD+/-RW
(video card) ATI RX300SE 256MB PCI Express

[scoobasteve]

AMD!!!! i'd change the card to a Geforce 6600gt though

[Raine]

scoobasteve,Jul 27 2005, 10:24 AM Wrote:AMD!!!! i'd change the card to a Geforce 6600gt though
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Really? Everyone I've talked to has said stick with ATI... I've got an ATI in my current system and it's great, no complaints. I haven't used an nvidia chipset since the old card in this computer died.

[scoobasteve]

AFAIK... it seems for mid grade cards the 6600gts are faster than the x600 ati's .... or the last time i checked. (christmas) lol

[scoobasteve]

http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=NzMzLDU=

[NOS2Go4Me]

Processor - 3200+ or 3500+ Venice core.

Motherboard - Either the Asus A8N-E http://www.ncix.com/products/index.php?sku...anufacture=ASUS or the DFI LanParty nF4-D http://www.ncix.com/products/index.php?sku...manufacture=DFI

STAY AWAY FROM THE K8T800PRO chipset. The last few BIOS revisions for most motherboard manufacturers have enabled support for the new dual-core and single-core processors at the expense of memory timings, lowering memory bandwidth. The nForce 4 chipsets are not plagued by these developments.

Heatsink - stock will do you fine. The revision E core S939 processors (Venice, Toledo, Manchester, etc) are all more energy-efficient than their Rev. D (Winchester) counterparts. They also include SSE3 instruction support.

Memory - http://www.ncix.com/products/index.php?sku...CZ%20Technology - I have this same RAM in my system. Bulletproof.

Video card - really depends on budget. The 6600GT is a great performer, but loses when image quality is cranked up due to the 128MB frame buffer. I'm getting a Asus X800XL 256MB card in a few weeks. http://www.ncix.com/products/index.php?sku...anufacture=ASUS

Actually, the X700 Pro 256MB can be had for around $270 CDN and is a much better gaming card than the X300, especially the SE models.

Hard Drive - Anything Maxtor. 8MB or 16MB cache. Seagate has some nice 16MB cache SATA-II stuff. I've got two Maxtor 80GB SATA-I HDs in RAID-0. Stupid fast.

DVD-burner - what you said. I have the earlier LG 4160B and love it over the NEC 3520A I had before.

I also wanna note that the Intel boxes use DDR2 memory at 533MHz speeds at best for most systems. That gives you a 1GB/sec memory bandwidth deficiency to overcome, on top of the Pentium 4's existing gaming defecit compared to the S939 AMD64 processors. This is because standard DDR2-533 has latencies in the range of CAS 4 4-4-9 or so, and yields MAYBE 4.7-5GB/sec of memory bandwidth. AMD's memory access is twice as fast on average when comparing latencies.

http://techreport.com/reviews/2005q2/athlo...57/index.x?pg=1 - a general overview of the latest tech from both processing houses.

http://techreport.com/reviews/2005q2/athlo...57/index.x?pg=3 - memory latencies shown

http://techreport.com/reviews/2005q2/athlo...7/index.x?pg=13 - power consumption, always a big-ticket item. Note the extreme power-saving of the new Rev. E AMD64s.

[Oscar The Grouch]

NOS2Go4Me,Jul 27 2005, 12:01 PM Wrote:Processor - 3200+ or 3500+ Venice core.

Motherboard - Either the Asus A8N-E http://www.ncix.com/products/index.php?sku...anufacture=ASUS or the DFI LanParty nF4-D http://www.ncix.com/products/index.php?sku...manufacture=DFI

STAY AWAY FROM THE K8T800PRO chipset. The last few BIOS revisions for most motherboard manufacturers have enabled support for the new dual-core and single-core processors at the expense of memory timings, lowering memory bandwidth. The nForce 4 chipsets are not plagued by these developments.

Heatsink - stock will do you fine. The revision E core S939 processors (Venice, Toledo, Manchester, etc) are all more energy-efficient than their Rev. D (Winchester) counterparts. They also include SSE3 instruction support.

Memory - http://www.ncix.com/products/index.php?sku...CZ%20Technology - I have this same RAM in my system. Bulletproof.

Video card - really depends on budget. The 6600GT is a great performer, but loses when image quality is cranked up due to the 128MB frame buffer. I'm getting a Asus X800XL 256MB card in a few weeks. http://www.ncix.com/products/index.php?sku...anufacture=ASUS

Actually, the X700 Pro 256MB can be had for around $270 CDN and is a much better gaming card than the X300, especially the SE models.

Hard Drive - Anything Maxtor. 8MB or 16MB cache. Seagate has some nice 16MB cache SATA-II stuff. I've got two Maxtor 80GB SATA-I HDs in RAID-0. Stupid fast.

DVD-burner - what you said. I have the earlier LG 4160B and love it over the NEC 3520A I had before.

I also wanna note that the Intel boxes use DDR2 memory at 533MHz speeds at best for most systems. That gives you a 1GB/sec memory bandwidth deficiency to overcome, on top of the Pentium 4's existing gaming defecit compared to the S939 AMD64 processors. This is because standard DDR2-533 has latencies in the range of CAS 4 4-4-9 or so, and yields MAYBE 4.7-5GB/sec of memory bandwidth. AMD's memory access is twice as fast on average when comparing latencies.

http://techreport.com/reviews/2005q2/athlo...57/index.x?pg=1 - a general overview of the latest tech from both processing houses.

http://techreport.com/reviews/2005q2/athlo...57/index.x?pg=3 - memory latencies shown

http://techreport.com/reviews/2005q2/athlo...7/index.x?pg=13 - power consumption, always a big-ticket item. Note the extreme power-saving of the new Rev. E AMD64s.
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Pretty much all Adam just said, but go with a Seagate Barracuda SATA w/NCQ. I've had both but I like the Seagate cause it can handle the heat in my sealed enclosure

[Raine]

The hdd in either instance would be either a Maxtor or Western Digital

[adam]

Someone I was talking to last week mentioned that the 200G drives are having higher than normal failure rates in general. He was going to get a could and RAID them so get large capacity with a bit of comfort; though that may be more geek than youre willing to do.

[NOS2Go4Me]

The only RAID that non-supergeek users should run is a RAID-1. Everything else is too risky / too much of a hassle.

I'd say have a non-RAID SATA install of Windows XP, and then a second SATA/PATA drive as a scratch / page volume and backup repository. Also, another drive in an external enclosure or another computer on your home network makes a smart backup choice.

[Raine]

So as far as processors go, what's the general concensus? AMD or Intel?

Added a poll

[NOS2Go4Me]

I tried to vote PPC, but it told me off and flipped me the bird... so I voted AMD :lol:

[Phantom]

amd by far, cheaper and faster than it's intel counterpart

[scoobasteve]

Get a Cyrix!

[NefCanuck]

Here's my two cents, take it for exactly what its worth ;)

I prefer Intel simply because in all my years I've never had an issue regarding heat/power consumption issues when using Intel and their MB's.

Too often AMD gets their speed at the expense of those two issues (heat/power) and I've been called in to baby AMD systems that skated that wedge and fell off. I mean AMD on their own practically invented the extra cooling gear craze as people cranked their CPU's to insane levels to get that last bit of CPU processing speed they could so they could best Intel. Raw speed is nice & all, but I want a system that I can depend on to boot up when I hit the big button.

As to the video card issue, I fell off ATI's bandwagon when they couldn't release a stable video card driver to save their lives :ph34r: nVidia cards have gotten power hungry but that seems to be the price of admission for high end graphics these days :rolleyes:

As to HD's I'm running WD currently no issues, ran Seagate years ago no issues, just outgrew that drive. Maxtor is sketchy, you either get a drive that lives for ever or it starts rattling like BB's in a tin can after a few years.

NefCanuck

[Oscar The Grouch]

NefCanuck,Jul 27 2005, 07:51 PM Wrote:Here's my two cents, take it for exactly what its worth  ;)

I prefer Intel simply because in all my years I've never had an issue regarding heat/power consumption issues when using Intel and their MB's. 

Too often AMD gets their speed at the expense of those two issues (heat/power) and I've been called in to baby AMD systems that skated that wedge and fell off.  I mean AMD on their own practically invented the extra cooling gear craze as people cranked their CPU's to insane levels to get that last bit of CPU processing speed they could so they could best Intel.  Raw speed is nice & all, but I want a system that I can depend on to boot up when I hit the big button.


NefCanuck
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I soo don't want to get in a flame war today. Raine, it would probably be best if you cruise on Tomshardware.com, anandtech.com, slashdot.org, or any other site that has independent testing and do a little bit of research.

Essentially it goes like this:

AMD = good for gaming
Intel = good for audio/video rendering

They're both pretty good for office and net surfing.

[NOS2Go4Me]

NefCanuck,Jul 27 2005, 07:51 PM Wrote:Here's my two cents, take it for exactly what its worth  ;)

I prefer Intel simply because in all my years I've never had an issue regarding heat/power consumption issues when using Intel and their MB's. 

Too often AMD gets their speed at the expense of those two issues (heat/power) and I've been called in to baby AMD systems that skated that wedge and fell off.  I mean AMD on their own practically invented the extra cooling gear craze as people cranked their CPU's to insane levels to get that last bit of CPU processing speed they could so they could best Intel.  Raw speed is nice & all, but I want a system that I can depend on to boot up when I hit the big button.

As to the video card issue, I fell off ATI's bandwagon when they couldn't release a stable video card driver to save their lives  :ph34r:  nVidia cards have gotten power hungry but that seems to be the price of admission for high end graphics these days  :rolleyes:

As to HD's I'm running WD currently no issues, ran Seagate years ago no issues, just outgrew that drive.  Maxtor is sketchy, you either get a drive that lives for ever or it starts rattling like BB's in a tin can after a few years.

NefCanuck
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I respect you immensely, so I'll address your points as non-fanboyish as possible:

AMD heat - 4 years ago, the tables were indeed reversed. AMD made heat and was struggling to keep up. Intel had processors that ran fairly cool and did a fair amount of work for the clock speed. AMD's problem was the 180nm process was killing them, they were dissipating an UNGODLY amount of heat due to the low overall die surface area and the fact the T'bird and Palomino were pushing 1.85-1.9 volts through the core. Add in the fact that most of the best coolers of the day were lightweight aluminum with unfinished bases and you had a recipe for 55C+ idle temperatures. Overclocking made it quite worse, obviously. Heck, rewind a year before that and the Tualatin core P-III was THE processor to own. Even I wanted one.

Nowadays, it's the complete inverse of the above story. It started not long after the Palomino 180nm chips, with the 130nm Thoroughbred Rev A and B chips. The B cores especially scaled nicely on .2 less voltage than their Palomino cousins, and did it on a core process shrink while dissipating less heat (130nm). Then the Barton came along with 512K L2 cache, same core voltage, and increased multipliers (which allows for a variety of RAM options, from value to performance). As the Barton matured, the Athlon 64 desktop chips appeared, and the game was over for Intel. Integrated memory controllers meant lower memory access latencies, which means overall computer responsiveness improved dramatically and memory bandwidth was closer to the theoretical limit of the chips. Surprisingly the L1 cache sizes didn't change (twin 64K for data and instruction) but they didn't need to because of the overall efficiency increase of the K8 architecture. The chip flat out does more per clock cycle, commonly referred to as IPC (Instructions Per Clock cycle).

The Pentium's fall from grace has been because of two main reasons - a failed roadmap relating to clockspeed, and outdated architecture. The P-III 1.26GHz Tualatin was the fastest processor of its day. It could do far more work than the newly introduced P4 1.3-1.6GHz Willamette core processors. Yet, because AMD was "keeping up" in the clockspeed and horsepower wars thus far Intel felt they needed an edge. The Netburst architecture was introduced and deviated from several years of really good processor development. It introduced higher clock speeds (GHz) at the expense of work done per cycle. This is because the pipeline within the processor itself was over two times "longer" than its predecessor. It's easier for the processor to "stall" if it runs out of work, which contributes to its lower efficiency.

How do you fix that inadequacy? Write specialized instruction sets that cater to the Pentium's special microcode and crank up the clock speed to fill the pipeline. That worked for a couple of years with the Northwood processors. They were fairly fast, but they excelled at video encoding simply because all encoding programmers loved the SSE/SSE2 instruction set as the specialized instructions allowed for more work to be done "on-die" and then transferred out to memory. There was also one more ace up Intel's sleeve, and it's ultimately something they wish most tech-savvy people would just ignore. It's called Hyper-Threading and it's their biggest folly to-date. Hyper-Threading exists in every single Northwood processor ever made, but was only enabled in about 45% of them. Intel to this day either denies it or claims that the tech wouldn't help the lower-clocked processors, depending on which PR rep you talk to. Basically over half of the world's Northwood P4 users were cheated out of 30% of their chip's performance, with no apology from Intel or rationalization.

In a nutshell, Intel out-accelerated themselves and caused more grief by running their processors "too fast". The die was too small to adequately dissipate all the heat as efficiently as they would have liked, and their heat problems increased. To this day, every single Intel P4 running idles and runs hotter than its competing AMD rival by up to and exceeding 20C. Check the thermal dissipation page from the latest Tech Report article, and then cross-reference with any Tech site of your choosing.

The only smart path left is the Intel P6 project, which is the desktop equivalent of the Pentium-M processor. It is proven to be basically on-par with the AMD64 single-core series of processors as far as raw horsepower, and it doesn't need insane clock speeds or Hyper-Threading to accomplish that. Incredible.

ATI's drivers have been great over the last year or so... and while Nvidia's drivers are never really bad... they've been caught being "overly optimized" more than once in the last 1 1/2 years in an attempt to distance themselves from ATI inthe framerate wars. I'll stick with ATI.

I've got a plethora of Maxtors around the house, and the only drive to go south for me in the last 2 years was a WD. All three big names are good by me.

[NefCanuck]

NOS2Go4Me

I'm intrigued by your assessment of the AMD vs. Intel wars, you sound as though you have your hands buried in the guts of a PC far more than I do even on my worst day ;) I wonder whether now with the world focusing on the energy consumption of every appliance in the home, whether both major chip makers will be under the gun even more to get the heat/power issues down (I still think that multi-processor cores won't come into their own as a useful thing for a few years yet myself, besides M$ will just use one core for drawing the pretty graphics behind Windows Vista :rolleyes:).

As to the ATI vs. Nvidia, ATI too was caught with their hands in the cookie jar of "benchmark friendly coding" for their drivers more than once. It's all a giant game of "flag waving" (PG term) As long as my games run at a decent resolution and framerate I'm happy, I hardly need the "k3wl3st" graphics board out there (Still running an ASUS card based on an Nvidia 4200 Ti chipset)

As to HD's, again, purely anecdotal on my part, HD's are by their nature going to fail, its just a matter of what fails first :ph34r:

NefCanuck

[darkpuppet]

the pentium M and pentium 6 project are basically upscale pentium 3's.. .Even intel knows that netburst is dead.

[NOS2Go4Me]

Yup... which means the entire 5 years of horror with P4 was a complete pipedream, but a wildly profitable one.

Just the fact that Moerom / Conroe is P3/6 architecture shows that they shafted consumers for years, and just now are putting performance back into the picture.

I just read two corroborating articles that Intel is releasing a Xeon dual-core processor, 32-bit only, with a projected sales lifecycle of 6 MONTHS. Give me a break.

The processor's name is Sossaman, if anyone's interested. Just another reason to NOT buy Intel.

It's true that AMD is moving to a new Socket for their top-tier offerings, but they won't stop supporting S939 for at least another 2 years.