What can't a 1.2Ghz machine do?

[Haervii]

1.2Ghz still seems pretty high to me, despite all the fuss over 2ghz toys. I'm upgrading my 700Mhz Duron to a 1.2Ghz duron and keeping the 256MB SDRAM and the Radeon DDR. What kinds of games CAN'T it play, or is this even a wise upograde decision? (BTW, I'm planning to do a major overhaul, replacing everything, next year, before I go to college)

 

[splice]

It will most likely be able to play most games out today with fairly high image quality and resolutions....It seems like a reasonable upgrade to me, with the newer Duron cores 1G+ you get SSE, which is a nice plus for games and app's that use it. Plus, by the time you are planning to upgrade next, the Hammer line should be in full swing.

 

[Maverick]

do it...it'll be worth it before the hammer.

 

[ledzepp98]

since you mentioned games, the cpu will handle any game fine but your video card would be your bottleneck. i'm not suggesting you replace the video card (unless you want to), but just pointing out that a 1.2ghz duron will not make any game unplayable. as far as what it can't do... it can't encode a divx movie AS FAST AS a 2+ ghz cpu, and it can't do other purely cpu intensive tasks as fast as faster cpu's... but i can't imagine that there is anything out there that will choke down a 1.2ghz duron and i'm sure the 500mhz jump in clock speed as well as the other enhancements of the >1ghz duron core will be noticed

 

[KillerCow]

If your board supports it, I'd go to an Athalon XP. The price difference between a Duron 1200 and XP 1600 is negligable. $35 in Canada. So, like 22$ in the US.

If your board doesn't support XP, the Duron 1200 will be a good stop-gap until you gan get a DDR rig. Realistically, it's your only upgrade path. Anything else will require a motherboard swap, in which case you will need new RAM and might as well get a better CPU too.

I think that a 1200Mhz box will be "good enough" for a little while more. One of my friends run a 800Mhz whith no complaints. He can play Diablo II, Quake III, Soldier of Fortune II without problems. He, of course, wants to put in an XP 1800 though. I have a 900 Duron that is still doing well, but I dont game heavily.

Your video card is likely going to become your new bottle-neck after you upgrade...

What are the requirements for Doom III? I think that will dictate what you need to do.

 

[CigarSmokedByClinton]

The problem with upgradeing is that you always have a new bottleneck. Unless you have the best of everything, and then thats only for 3 hours till the next best comes out.

 

[ElFenix]

smoke a 2.53GHz...

 

[Haervii]

Great, I'll do it. Is the new "Hammer" supposed to be Intel's death bell or something?

 

[paralazarguer]

Death Bell? No...it's more like AMD fans trying to kling to something as the ship rides low in the water. Around the time that the Hammer is released (looks to be early 2003 for consumers but that will likely get pushed back as chipsets are going to be late) Intel will release the P5. It will be based on the .09u process and have 1meg of L2 cache. It will feature hyperthreading and sit on a FSB of 666 which will be expanded to 800. According to the latest Tom's article it will also have an integrated memory controller. Did I mention that it will be in excess of 3Ghz?

 

[BD231]

Originally posted by: 7757524
Death Bell? No...it's more like AMD fans trying to kling to something as the ship rides low in the water. Around the time that the Hammer is released (looks to be early 2003 for consumers but that will likely get pushed back as chipsets are going to be late) Intel will release the P5. It will be based on the .09u process and have 1meg of L2 cache. It will feature hyperthreading and sit on a FSB of 666 which will be expanded to 800. According to the latest Tom's article it will also have an integrated memory controller. Did I mention that it will be in excess of 3Ghz?

Are the day's of Intel dominance coming back?

 

[Holmecollie]

AMD will be back I would think, The K6-2 and K6-3 were supposed to be intelkillers... Well we all know how that went then the Athlon came and beat intel to the Ghz and suddenly the Athlons were the perf. kings in most areas. Not to mention competitive prices.

We might nt see them taking the performance lead for a while but they'll keep good proccessors coming. Anyway most people even gamers don't need the newest proccessors. Today the XP 1600+ can handle anything in the home conumer market.

 

[socketman]

hey 7757..whatever...

Where did you get the idea that the chipset and/or mobos are gonna be late for hammer?

Last I heard they were gonna be early, not late. Besides, revising the Hammer this late is just a rumor. Though AMD would be smart to implement DDR2 support.

SO how about it, why you think they are gonna be late?

 

[Haervii]

Hmm....3Ghz.. It seems to me that people will start to realize they don't need to buy computers anymore. Your average Joe doesn't need 3Ghz. Most people buy computers for AOL and printing. You can do that effectively on a 300Mhz machine, 10 times less than what is soon coming out.

 

[paralazarguer]

Not talking about revisiting the Hammer. I'm talking about chipset makers other than AMD not making chipsets for hammer en masse until 2003. It's common knowledge that the hammer may be available in late 2002 but that's only to major OEMs. It will not be made available to consumers until 2003. I'm not going ot spend half an hour going to all the tech sites trying to find the article I read about third party chipsets being late but it's out there to find. 2003 by AMD's own estimates is when the Hammer will be available for you and me but you and I both know that every single AMD CPU launch has been late by at least three months. I bet we see Hammer in April, 03 if we're lucky. The Thoroughbred was supposed to come out in March according to AMD, remember? Anyway, this isn't a intel/amd debate. Fact is, that with its projected (by AMD) 1600 mhz launch, it's giong to be tough to keep up with intel's 3-4ghz. By AMD's own estimate the Hammer will be 20-30% more efficient per clock than the athlon XP. That means that a 1600mhz-2000mhz Hammer has NO chance of of keeping up with a P5 clock at 3-4Ghz. Intel has prototypes clocked right now at 4ghz. The fastest AMD has is 800Mhz. Even the craziest AMD nutcase has to admit that they're way behind. They can't even get .13 right while Intel is perfecting .09.
Here are some things for you to see:


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[paralazarguer]

4ghz is the prototype. You have a point about people not needing that speed-sort of. Even with a high end athlon XP it's still going to take you half a day to rip a DVD with all the settings cranked. With TiVo boxes becoming more and more popular and the convergance of consumer electronic and PCs I think that we'll soon find our current processing horsepower grossly insufficient. Think back. When the pentium first came out with its integrated floating point processor people were saying exactly the same thing you are. "No one needs a pentium. All you need to play Xwing and word process is a 486 DX4-100. Anything else is crazy!" Man were they wacked!

 

[Zugzwang152]

1.2 Ghz? yeah. I have a 1 gig athlon, with 512 SDRAM, and a gf2. I WAS planning on upgrading to a gf4 + a t-bred, but due to recent money-draining activities, i'm planning on waiting for hammer or later..speaking of hammer, i heard from a friend that hammer heatsinks are gonna require like twice as much pressure to install than all others? wtf?

 

[Booster]

What can't a 1.2Ghz machine do?

Your system is still nice. And the Radeon DDR is still a great gaming card, full of features. BTW, if you're running AMD, you have a VIA chipset, right? I heard Radeons did't like VIA chipsets. Is that true or is it just another false rumour about VIA?

 

[joohang]

If HyperThreading provides the smoothness of a SMP machine, I'm going to be a die-hard Intel zealot.

 

[Booster]

Originally posted by: joohang
If HyperThreading provides the smoothness of a SMP machine, I'm going to be a die-hard Intel zealot.

All these new CPUs are just for making us spend more.

 

[Haervii]

Yeah , if ATI and VIA are incompatible, that would explain a lot. I've gotten low framerates in a lot of 3d games.
Plus, One of the biggest reasons I bought it is because of the incredible things I heard about a Radeon in 32bit. Well, it doesn't WORK in 32bit. If only I had known....

Well, AMD has really incredible deals, but a year from now, it sounds like AMD will be struggling to keep up with Intel, and they (AMD) have always had all kinds of compatability problems. An intel box could be in my future, as much as I hate to admit it...

 

[mastertech01]

Some of you people should be carefull what you wish for... the day AMD dies, we will become slaves to a monopoly like Microsoft. Competition is good.

 

[lubetek]

BAH...Intel....my money is on AMD.

 

[lubetek]

P.S. I have a Intel rig also, so im not just AMD gungHO.

 

[McCarthy]

My Radeon 32DDR and this Iwill KK266-R (VIA KT133A chipset) worked beautifully. Replaced it with a GF2 (with TVin and Out, thought I was going to use them, long story) and have had more problems if anything. Can't alt-tab out of D3D games anymore, for me that's a major PITA compared to my Radeon which did it just fine.

Even on a VIA board.

--Mc

 

[BFG10K]

What can't a 1.2Ghz machine do?

I had a 1.333 GHz TBird and it was definitely slow in newer games like RTCW. Modern games are showing a definite trend of being very CPU intensive and I'd hate to be playing games like SOF2, JK2 and MOHAA on a 1.333 GHz Tbird. After I upgraded to a 2.2 GHz Northwood the difference was amazing and everything was much smootber.