need help on all this new stuff..

[peonyu]

Hi, i have a few questions concerning the new boards and cpus that came out within the last two years..i used to be 'ontop' of everything like most of you are and knew what to get, and the last system i built was around two years ago and is a athlon 64 3000/s765 oc'd to 2600mhz.

Now im mainly a gamer, so i think this system will last another year for myself however my brother now needs a new system since its very long in the tooth [2500xp@3000xp speeds ie- garbage].

OK then, so i went to the net looking for what to get for him thinking id be familiar with this stuff but that wasnt so. X2? AM2? Conroe..all chinese to me. And the lack of single core amd benchmarks vs X2's etc didnt help. Anywho from what ive gathered the new intel chips are the best.

So my questions are these-

Would buying a socket 754 or 939 and getting a very oc'able chip be good enough to last 3 years for most new games- say reaching 2.7ghz or so on a single core A64 [the cheap route which i did before with xp chip for him], or would going with a new X2/AM2 or conroe be the best...

Keep in mind im looking for a value kind of chip like what i got with my system, ie- not the most expensive in the family at the time, but with a good cooler able to OC to above and beyond the best. for cheap. $200-300 dollar spent on cpu and board. So with that in mind, what would be the best value X2/AM2 or conroe chip to get to oc the hell out of, or A64 chip if its still suitable.

 

[GuitarDaddy]

Core 2 duo (Conroe) is the performance king right now, if you want the best available thats it, but be prepared to pay out the nose for a good motherboard and ram. A cheaper alternative would be an AMD X2 dualcore (either AM2 or socket 939), there is not much performance difference between the two, but S939 parts are beginning to get hard to find, and the AM2 platform is much more future friendly because it uses DDR2 ram, If you have some DDR1 ram you can reuse S939 would be a cheaper route.

At this very moment there isn't much advantage going dual core for gaming because the vast majority of games are single threaded and can only utilize one core, but this is begining to change rapidly. I don't think many would recommend a single core at this point because pretty much all games developed from this point will utilize mult-cores and a single core system will be obsolete fairly quickly, plus since the intro of Conroe the AMD X2's have become pretty cheap. You can pick up a low end X2 for less than $200 and overclock it to match AMD's top chips pretty easily. I just picked up an X2 3800+ on ebay for $140 and overclocked it to 2.6ghz for my wifes rig and it rocks.

Also remember that gaming is still very GPU dependent and this won't change for the forseeable future, in other words go cheap on the CPU and spend the bulk of your money on a highend graphics card (thats where the performance is at). The main reason I see for you to upgrade is to make the leap from AGP to PCI-e graphics, as all the newer tech GPU's are coming out on PCI-e and AGP is pretty much dead at this point

 

[peonyu]

Well, looks like im going to go with a X2 setup for him then since he has a gig and a half of ddr1 ram to use. And i kinda figured the cpu price of some of the new [lower end/e6300 i think] intel chips was to good to be true...the new boards with that kind of tech is usually the killer as it turned out to be.


Anyways thanks alot, thats exactly the info i was looking for.

 

[Markfw]

well, you can get a e6300 ($170), and S3 board ($116) amd some 5400 or 6400 memory (one gig) for $140 or less. Thats about the bottom end. Get a $40 HSF and OC to 2.6-2.8, and it will spank that X2 badly, even at the same speed.

And there is one ECS board that doesn;t OC well, but its like $50, uses agp and DDR1 or 2, and you can replace the board later. P4B800M I think or something > had 2 of them.