Upgrading Current Rig ** Help me out please!

[sheemone00]

Let me thank everyone for taking their time to read this post... thanks!

Well recently I bought a XP 2500+ (Mobile) and Abit NF7-s hoping to have some fun overclocking, but I grew tired of the loud fans and the high temperatures. I'm sure there were other things I could've done to make it run cooler, but I just didnt want to take the time or spend extra money. So after selling that rig I've been using my mom's P4 2.8c for a bit and i've been quite pleased w/ it. Quiet and speedy, two important factors for me.

Time has come for me to build myself another rig and I was wondering if I should stick w/ pentium or AMD. I know this forum is heavily AMD favored, but i would appreciate it if you guys can give some balanced opinions. My budget is ~200-250 for both processor and mobo. I will not be overclocking and I will be using this mostly for gaming since i just bought a laptop to do all my school work and other junk.

I was deciding between a AMD 64 2800 or P4... something. I have read that the AMD64s will perform a lot better w/ gaming and I have seen all the benchmarks, but one of my questions was regarding whether the 1MB L2 cahce on the P4 prescotts will perform along w/ the AMD64s (512K L2 cahce).

Thanks again for reading folks! have yourself a wonderful day/night/evening/afternoon

 

[Fern]

I like your original rig. But no need recommending that to you. I can only guess the "loudness" was due to your choice of the cpu HS+F, cuz the mobiles don't run hot. Quite the opposite.

I like the AMD 64 bit cpu's (especially for gaming). Don't know if you can find a combo (cpu+mobo) in your budget though.

 

[Nickel020]

Considering your budget I would get a mobile Athlon XP again and this time get a quality heatsink with a good fan. I've got 2800+ Barton running at 3200+ and my hsf is barely audible. A mobile at ~2.5GHz won't generate more heat than my CPU, so your noise problem was not due to a hot CPU but a hsf that sucked.
I would either get a Zalman 7000 AlCU for about $30 or better, a Thermalright SI-97 for about $35 and a good fan for about $5-10.

 

[newParadigm]

Wait for nForce4

the Vanilla nForfce 4 boards will be around 50-80$.

Then throw a A643000+ Mobila at it, not only will it OC better if you change your mind, but it has a total of 1mb of L2 Cache.

 

[Comparisonman]

Personally, I think that the 1mb Prescott processors run too hot and the performance is just not up to par with the AMD64s. Your best bet is to go with AMD.