Undecided on which CPU to go with

[lowdownshame]

im ready to build my new gaming machine:

what i have so far:

Asus A8N32-SLI Deluxe
Cosair 3500LLPRO
Western Digital Raptor 74GB
BFG 7800 GTX
Ultra X-Finity 600W Power Supply

based on my research, one would figure that the best cpu to compliment this would be the athlon64 fx-55 or 57 but i think i could get similar gaming performance with a cpu far less expensive (i.e. athlon64 x2 4000+) - any ideas?

 

[richardrds]

Yes, going dual core is good idea, but i would go with the X2 3800+ (2.0Ghz per core) to save more money and just OC (overclock) it to opteron X2 4600 speeds (2.4Ghz per core). You are almost quaranteed that much of a OC with the X2 3800's as long as you have a decent mobo.

If your mobo is cable of stable 300Mhz HTT speeds then the Dual core Opteron 165 (1.8Ghz per core) is another option, about same price as X2 3800+ but actually OC's better with high end mobo then the X2 3800+ because the chip is server grade quality.

Running your game on core 1 while allowing core 2 to do all other backround processing (ie.. anti virus monitoring, trojan monitoring, all the windows XP processes that automatically start up) will more then make up for the differance in top end cpu speed that an FX 57 would give you, plus if the app you are running is desighned to work with multi processors (ie... video encoding) then you will really see greater benifits at a fraction of the cost of a FX57.

 

[TecHNooB]

Definitely get a dual core opteron. Allow me to repeat the reasons. They are cheap. They OC like crazy. They're essentially high quality X2's (Opterons also use Toledo cores). Although the FX-57 is fast, it is expensive like you mentioned and ATI/NVidia have released drivers to increase dual-core performance in games. So a slower but dual core cpu would run faster than a faster single core cpu.

Check this thread out: http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview...atid=28&threadid=1732211&enterthread=y
Don't go to the "official" thread, there's a lot more results on the unofficial one.