Originally posted by: Cookie Monster
Originally posted by: fr0mat
Should the pentium d 8xx series out perform the amd athlon 64 3500+? I like a lot of the hardware you listed LW07, but if I could get a dual core for cheap would that be a better route?
My suggestion sounds to good to miss aye?
Although the PD 830 is slower than the AMD 3500 in gaming in CPU limited games, i do think the PD 830 will do you good (i should tell you to leave the gaming framerates to the GPU though). The reason Hyper threading was good to P4 chips was that it made things smoother. So i do think, it will greatly improve multitasking and computing in general if you decide to grab the PD 830.
You could possibly listen to itunes, play a game while doing some other aplication just fine.
Save some money and then buy core2 duo 4300 around April/May when it takes a price cut to $113 dollars. Since asrock support core 2 duo processors.
Not to mention release of mid range 8600/8300 series around that time. (PCI-e lane on the Asrock 775Dual-VSTA is only at x4 not x16 but wont really affect the performance as long as you are buying a mid/low range PCI-e video card.)
So i think your all set. By june you could well have a core 2 duo machine with a DX10 GPU easily out performing your current rig for very little money.
Note - asrock 775dual-VSTA board works best with either DDR400 PC3200 or DDR2 533 PC4200 memory. Gives you top performance.