I dont' know what to do...advice please

[mangled]

I've been away for awhile and am not sure what the latest is, or what is coming.

So currently, I have an Epox 8kha+ with Athlon XP 1600 and Crucial 512mb pc2100 RAM with WinXP.

I'm thinking upgrade.

What's the fastest processor I can put in my moboard today? If you had the money to upgrade to any moboard and AMD cpu what would you do? Wait a few months or upgrade now? Is something coming I should hold off for? Maybe just drop in a faster cpu for now and hold off for a bit longer?

Any advice is greatly appreciated. Thanks!

 

[mechBgon]

What's your motivation for the upgrade? If you want more gaming performance in first-person-shooter games that are coming out, it looks like the video card is going to be the #1 thing to upgrade for smooth performance in Doom 3 and such. If you have CPU-intensive tasks and need more CPU power on a sustained basis, then I think you should wait to see how nForce2 does... should be some reviews of it within the next couple weeks. At this point it's probably going to be the top performer in the AMD scene, and ready for all past and future SocketA CPUs.

AMD is eventually going to have a couple of evolutionary improvements: 333MHz-bus CPUs starting with the 2700+, and ones with 512kb of L2 cache (aka "Barton" core). So far the fastest AMD CPU is the 2400+ and it's scarce, and expensive at $220 (as of now). The 2100+ is about half that price.

 

[mangled]

Motivation, gaming. I already have a 128mb Geforce 4 ti 4600 card. Not needing to upgrade that for awhile.

Yes, first person shooter are my fave...but not the only kind. UT2k3 runs pretty good...but I think mostly I'm just itching for a quick upgrade.

When can you expect to see the 2700? I just read the hammer is still slated for q1 2003 but I'd like an interim upgrade. So I guess I'm looking for a short term upgrade until hammer releases....it's not really about the money as I can afford to do something for the time being.

 

[mechBgon]

AMD has moved the desktop Hammer back to late 2003! If you're looking for an interim solution that will carry you all the way through the end of the SocketA era, you might want to try an EPoX or Gigabyte KT400 board, or nForce2 when it comes. You can start by trying to overclock your 1600+ from the 133MHz bus to the 166MHz bus on any of those boards... my 1600+ does 166MHz great (lucky me, I have PC2100 but it runs at the PC2700 speed fine).

At the rate things are going, I'd guess the 2700+ would arrive on the scene around mid-December.

 

[mangled]

Originally posted by: mechBgon
AMD has moved the desktop Hammer back to late 2003! If you're looking for an interim solution that will carry you all the way through the end of the SocketA era, you might want to try an EPoX or Gigabyte KT400 board, or nForce2 when it comes. You can start by trying to overclock your 1600+ from the 133MHz bus to the 166MHz bus on any of those boards... my 1600+ does 166MHz great (lucky me, I have PC2100 but it runs at the PC2700 speed fine).

At the rate things are going, I'd guess the 2700+ would arrive on the scene around mid-December.

hmm, ok. But this article says the hammer is still on for q1 '03...

I could wait a bit longer for the 2700...but is there an overall updated amd cpu benchmark? I'd like to know how much performance I can expect going from a 1600 up to a 2100 or more cpu.

 

[mechBgon]

Tell you what, let me take a few minutes to do the UT2003 Demo benchmark at 640 x 480, so my video card is as little of a bottleneck as possible (it's a lowly GeForce2 GTS-V). I'll run one at 1600+ default speed and one at the 166MHz overclock. The "botmatch" benchmark is where I'd expect to see a difference, since it involves a lot of weapons fire and such. Stay tuned...

 

[mechBgon]

Heh... I guess my own system illustrates my point about the video card. Let me add that I equate the 1600+ at 1750MHz to approximately a 2100+ stock CPU.

UT2003 Demo botmatch, 640 x 480
1600+ at stock 1400MHz, 133MHz FSB and memory: 40.6fps
1600+ at 1750MHz, 166MHz FSB and memory: 42.8fps, a negligible improvement

Conclusion: my video card is holding up the show even at 640 x 480. Nothin' to see here, folks... move along



I also did another test where I copy the contents of Unreal Tournament Disc 1, including hidden files, to a folder on the hard drive, then compress it at Maximum compression using WinZip 8.1.

WinZip 8.1 compression times
1600+ at stock 1400MHz, 133MHz FSB and memory: 3 minutes 50 seconds
1600+ at 1750MHz, 166MHz FSB and memory: 3 minutes 15 seconds, a 14% improvement resulting from a 24% improvement in CPU/RAM speed

Conclusion: the boost in CPU/RAM speed is a help, but there are other factors at work too (hard drive might be holding up the CPU somewhat)



Finally, I did a test where I render a scene in Caligari trueSpace 4.3, with twelve rather polygon-intensive hourglasses that make for a lot of heavy CPU calculation. This test is video-card-independent, the CPU does all the work (render speed is the same with anything from a Cirrus Logic PCI to a Ti4600)

?Hourglass overload? render job
1600+ at stock 1400MHz, 133MHz FSB and memory: 92 seconds
1600+ at 1750MHz, 166MHz FSB and memory: 75 seconds, a 23% improvement resulting from a 24% improvement in CPU/RAM speed

Conclusion: here we see a task that?s completely dependent on the CPU/RAM speed. Hope all of this is of some use

 

[mangled]

very interesting, thanks!