Which Upgrade

g00ndp00l

Howdi!!
I'm upgrading my pc soon but cant decide if i should go with a P4 3.4 or a AMD Athlon3400..

i decided to head for the serial ATA side of storage and it'll probably be the barracuda 160GB,

i have a decent enough AGP card (FX5600) which will do for what i need it for!!

i have a GB of DDR Pc3200 ram waiting for the upgrade to happen what do you guys think i should go for, Board and Chip wise??

Thanks fer yer ideas in advance

Mutant_Fruit

gaming: AMD64
DivX encoding: Intel
Everything else: Pretty much even, with the AMD64 taking a slight advantage imo, but only a slight one.

Get one of those cool new Nforce boards (are they the nforce 250 brand?) with AGP/PCI lock, so you can overclock the AMD64 as much as you can.

For intel, i don't know too much.

g00ndp00l

i was strongly thinking of going for the AMD64 with the ABIT KV8 Max3 board.

I've always had an AMD and have never had any trouble with them,

I'll consider the nforce board now too coz i wanna clock the mofo up to about 2600.
Cheers buddy.

Col_Loki

Definetly a Nforce3 250 chipset motherboard if your going to overclock and going with an AMD64.

Have a look at the MSI K8N Neo , or the Epox variety. Have a quick look at the link in sig as there are a few tips on the whole thing.....

Make sure to get a decent cooler like a Zalman7000alcu if your overclocking.


Or if you have a big budget have a look at Socket939 AMD64 with dual DDR and a much longer upgrade lifeline CPU wise.

Dempsey

If getting a P4 the only two brands to be considering is Abit or Asus. Abit's best is the IC7-G MAX3, Asus's is the PC800E-Deluxe or something.

Poor selection of boards available for the A64 IMO but I'd go with the Abit ABIT KV8 Max3 over MSI K8N Neo because MSI aren't noted for making high end boards for any platform, i dont think they have changed with this board.

BKtje

Unless your gonan really do heavy duty overclocking on the p4 the amd 64 is the way to go. (heavy duty as in attempt to reach 3.6 speeds)

Have a look at the MSI K8N Neo

While this board is very very good its also quite temperamental (new bios needed i think). Took a bi of work to get mine workin the way i wanted and tm the memory divider aint working which will need a new BIOS.

The 757 socket wont be here for too long but if your on a budget you cant go wrong with them. As ive said elsewhere a 2ghz (3200 clawhammer) a gig of ram and a 9700 pro can run ut2k4 with all maxed out (aint tried aa/af yet tho) at over 200 fps with a 9700pro.

Dunno how it will run doom yet but ill let ya know when its here

939 would be even better but they gonna cost ya.

i dont rate the p4 at all against these chips. (without heavy duty overclocking but the amd64 can be overclocked too without much hastle, especially on the msi k8n neo plat)

unklerosco

I have a 2.8p4 and got it to 3.3GHZ before I killed my mobo, that was stable with the stock hsf. Have WC now and waiting for a new mobo. Hope to get 3.6+ out of it...

Why pay over the price of a 2.8/3ghz P4??? Use the money u save on better ram r somfin... Thats my two cents.

Mind u, with all these new sockets n chips comin out its prob best to hold off for a few months if u can.