Upgrade Opinions: $750

[BigLance]

I will hopefully have $450 in the next few weeks from selling a computer.

Here is the deal, I can sell my Mobo/CPU/Mem or another $300 to get a total of $750 when the time comes. What I'm wondering is if I should hold off buying new parts for a while, if something really superb is coming out ? Or should I go ahead and dig in now and go for it ?

I don't want AMD options, have one now, its good, but I have my reasons 🙂

So what do you think, Dual is option, single, P3, P4 ? DDR or RD RAM ?

Basically I just need some opinions on whether I should WAIT or BUY NOW ?

Let me know, thanks.

 

[BigLance]

NE1 ?

 

[Noriaki]

I wouldn't get a P4, Rambus and Mobo even if you could fit it into your $750. You'd probably need a new case and PSU as well. The P4 is overpriced for it's perfomrance still, and besdies which it will be dead before long, the next revision P4 will have a different Socket.

Right now AMD is the best choice....their next generation will also be socketA so you can probably get up to like 2Ghz on current boards.....with Intel Socket370 won't be getting any new chips, and Socket423 will be replaced within a year....but if you don't want AMD I can respect that.

I'd get an MSi i815EPro or an Asus CUSL2 (aslo i815e) and a fast P3. 933 or 1Ghz or something like that, and I'd probably max out with 512MB of Mushkin Rev1.5 PC133 2-2-2 (go for rev2 or rev3 if you want to OC...but I'm not big into that game..)
You might want to consider dual...but for most things Dual isn't very helpful right now. What are you planning ot use it for? If you do want dual you could try the MSi 694D Via Apollo Pro 133A Dual Socket370 board. Dual can be pretty sweet in the right circumstances, but in others it can be totally useless. Again what do you want the machine for?

 

[BigLance]

Hey. Thanks for the great response !

I use my machine for mostly:

Gaming a lot.
Internet
Burning CD's/ MP3's
DVD's
Loading software fast 🙂
A little TV Capture, some graphics work...

What do you think ? Dual 866's w/ 384 or should I stay single (cpu) and forget Win2000 (Already have copy, dont worry about that) ?

Thanks !

 

[Noriaki]

Yeah most gaming won't benefit from Dual CPUs. Quake3's engine is SMP capable but the graphics core still only uses one CPU, so the other CPU just does input, and sound processing and network stuff...not very much really....for gaming one faster CPU is a better option than Dual.

Internet, Burning CDs and MP3ing won't matter either way. DVDs need a CPU at about 400Mhz or so then they are fine 😉

Graphics work would benefit from Dual CPUs, photoshop definately would. 3Dstudio max type stuff would have a massive improvement as well. But another concern there is disk speed if the files you are working with.

TV Capture and A/V editing tend to use huge files so disk speed is important. You might want to consider trying to get a SCSI disk in there?
I'm not sure how much TV Capture would benefit from Dual CPUs, I think it's more Disk limited than CPU though.

How fast programs load is almost totally disk speed dependant.

So if you do quite a bit of the Graphics/Capture stuff you might want to consider the Duals, like if Graphics Design is your job it's probably a good idea. But if it's more like a hobby or something that you spend an hour or two at a week then it's probably not worth the extra cost. From the gaming side a single faster CPU is definately better than dual slower ones.

Maybe you want to consider like an 866 with 384MB of RAM and try and get an 18Ggig SCSI drive in there? Not sure excatly how much SCSI drives cost...but if you want a good SCSI card look at the Tekram DC-390U2W or U3W (80MB/s or 160MB/s respectively) they are as good as Adaptec and much much less pricey.

 

[BigLance]

Ok, I guess I am going to stay single.
Probably 866 or 933 CPU, 384MB Corsair, maybe new Disk...

Thanks a lot !