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General Upgrade Questions

W

wharp

Junior Member
I've been reading reviews and such here at AnandTech for a while. I haven't kept up with the hardware scene lately and I'm fixing to upgrade. With all the choices of different cpu types and motherboards, I'm realizing that I'm in a bit over my head.

Things I plan on doing with my computer include some gaming and a good bit of video editing. I'm also going to be using my computer as a pvr. Additionally, I want USB2.0 (not that much comes without this now), SATA raid, and I'd like to have Firewire.

My current setup is as follows:

750mhz Tbird
ECS K7S5A
2 Crucial 184 Pin 512MB DDR PC-2700
ATI AIW Radeon

I was planning on upgrading my mobo and processor with the following 2 components:

ABIT "NF7-S" nForce2 Chipset Motherboard for AMD Socket A
AMD Athlon XP 2500+ "Barton", 333 FSB, 512K Cache Processor

After some more research, I'm also thinking about these two:

AMD Athlon 64 2800+, 512KB L2 Cache, 64-bit Processor
DFI "LANPARTY UT nF3 250Gb" NVIDIA nForce3 250GB Chipset Motherboard For AMD Socket 754 CPU

The DFI got a pretty good review, but its a bit more than I'd really like to spend, same goes for the Athlon 64 pricewise.

I guess what I want to know is which would make more sense? Will I see any real benefit from using the Athlon 64? Will that function as 2 32bit cpu's and make things like video encoding easier? Also, are there other products I should be looking at? If I could find a good (meaning cheaper) alternative to the DFI I'd really like to get the Athlon 64.

Any input would be very much appreciated!

Oh, I forgot to mention that Linux compatibility for the mobo would also be a plus!
 
i bought the asus k8n-e deluxe and love it...i beleive there is a cheper board very similair made by asus with less features...there is also the chaintech vnf3 250 board that is fairly cheap 80 i think and i see people use that for a budget board a lot...u can get a s 754 sempron if u dont want to buy the atlon 64 but i think i heard somehwhere that there is a deal with the chaintech and the athlon 64 2800+

might wanna check the hot deals forum for that deal
 
Whether you will be able to use either one of the two variations of AMD/ nForce that you are interested in as long as you have held onto the PC you have now (it's roughly a four-year-old age, plus, in technology), is going to depend on how you plan to use the system.

I suspect that you don't push your PC's very hard, in which case either of the two will probably take you just about as far down the line toward where 750 to 2800 reaches something similar to a 2800 vs 10,000 or so. Hard core game-player folks keep on upgrading a lot more often, in comparison.

The AMD processors and/or nVidia haven't yet encompassed DDR2 RAM Management, although the 64's are ahead in the 64-Bit arena. Besides DDR2, the change to PCI-e and beyond that, to the BTX , are still mostly out in the future, but PCI-e is much closer to catching on. Which would discourage a gamer from investing a lot right now, not wanting to be stuck with anything soon to be obsoleted.

For a lot of other folks, and I'm guessing you'll be among them, this is a good time to find bargains in the older technologies that will work fine for you for a good long time. Get the names of a few more nF2 and nF3 motherboards, and run some Googles to get at copies of reviews. Don't stop with any one review, get more opinions. Decide how you will use the system, and if you think some of the hardware wizards here know enough to help, why just describe your proposed usage and ask away.

😎
 
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