Daylight Savings Time, is it really Necessary? 972 Posts 3/04
Posted - Jul 21 2004 : 3:57AM
Since I'm building a new computer (sold my other one) I decided to go with a AMD chipset. Now this computer is being built mainly for 3d gaming so I want something that will really rock. The price for this thing is like 700 bucks so for that price I want to be sure it'll kick ass. The 64 3400 looks good and is a lot cheaper so just how good is the fx 53? Also looking at ram I am thinking on going with Corsair PC4400 550 MHZ Dual Channel DDR and again wondered if the price for this is justified for the performance?
It kinda depends, the FX does perform better, but do you actually need that extra performance? since the are about twice the prize I would be wary. Probably more cost effective to buy the "regular" 64 and upgrade that in a year or so. Only thing to keep in mind is to get a motherboard/cpu with the 939 socket as thats the one that will be supported in the future.
Ram is a tricky question. Generally I find that more ram does a bigger difference in performance than fast ram. But again, its a matter of cost. If you can get 1024MB "slow" ram instead of 512MB "fast" ram I´d go with 1024 "slow".
Unless ofcourse you actually need the "peak" performance.
Still, AMD64 3400 on a good mobo with 1024MB decent ram is gonna perform pretty darn good compared to almost any rig out there. Throw in a couple of WD Raptors and a Geforce6800 and you got yourself a decent comp ;)
Daylight Savings Time, is it really Necessary? 972 Posts 3/04
Posted - Jul 21 2004 : 7:57PM
Thanks for your opinion on this ever changing topic. Indeed there are a lot of simularities between the fx and the 64 the fx does seem to provied better performance during gameplay however when waying in the cost it's a big difference. From what I have seen after reading a few reviews of the chips it might be a good idea to wait till the end of the year or begining of next year to dig in and build. Especially since Pentium will be going to the 64 bit soon. It's a on going thing! LOL..
i'd say grab an axp64 3400 and spend the money on the raptors and card just mentioned.
the fx series needs registered memory-a gig of corsair is 400ish. i just checked newegg for 940-series motherboards and they have 2 in stock-both asus(which is a good brand). there are probably about 5-7 total boards to choose from, with some very good manufacturers not bothering to put one out. that's a huge negative to me--having a choice of several tried-and-true motherboards with the kinks worked out is huge. plugging in the psu, cpu, ram, cd/hds and video and having it work the first time and for its lifetime is underrated until you're clearing the cmos all the time with a non-mature platform.
the 3200 and up 64's are close in clockspeed, don't need registered memory, and have tons of boards for less than 180 bucks to choose from. they've also got the 1mb cache unlike the 2800-3000. the basic rule for buying stuff is see what's the best in any product line-then pick 2 steps below it--right now that's about the pentium 3.2 northwood or a64 3200--both damn good chips less than half the cost of the fx. you can realistically throw together a functional computer for another room or as a crashbox for what you save .
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Spew Deactivated User
Bend over for the rod and staff of Jesus! 334 Posts 7/04
Daylight Savings Time, is it really Necessary? 972 Posts 3/04
Posted - Jul 22 2004 : 2:12AM
And why is this?
jamesboston-
Thanks for your input. As I have seen from many reviews of the chip and the motherboard MSI MS-6702E I have to say that this chip (the 939) out performs all other chips and the P4 EE in gaming performance which is what I want. After overclocking the chip even performs better. Though I know that there are always going to be better things to come along this is indeed a great gaming chip. The 3400 is not a bad chip but when it comes to gaming I don't think it will give me the goods I want.
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Spew Deactivated User
Bend over for the rod and staff of Jesus! 334 Posts 7/04
Posted - Jul 22 2004 : 6:11AM
P4 Proc w/ HT Tech Extreme Edition 3.40GHz (800 FSB) is much better, but the thing is even between the amd the diff is really small GFX wise
Edited by - I spew on my face on 7/22/2004 6:11:53 AM
First of, a P4EE costs 2-3 times what a Athlon64 does. And for gaming it doesnt perform better. If you were gonna use it for video encoding and such and had no budget limitations then it MIGHT be the way to go. But in any other scenario AMD64 will give you way more bang/buck than a P4.
uh,ispew the fx-53 is a faster chip than the 3.4EE, overclocked, upside-down, etc. btw, you're wrong. prestonia has leakage issues, thermal issues, tejas is dead, northwood and 875 are better than what they're selling---intel's struggling, check last q's stats/downgrading by morganstanley, etc. no bias, i'm running both, you're just making no sense.
i was able to get the 3.2EE for the same price as the 3.4c a few months ago---it flies through a/v encoding, but for anything else, go with the fx or 2 opterons(well, the fx is essentially an opteron). for a bit under 500, i got a reasonable speed increase from the 2.8c i was running, nothing life-changing. and the extremes get hot.
what kind of gaming are you doing that a 3400 is too slow for?? honestly, get the best card you can, msi is hit/miss, you won't be able to re-use the memory, and it's not that much faster than a 3400 or the 3500-7000s and you can't put pci-express on it in 6 months.
Daylight Savings Time, is it really Necessary? 972 Posts 3/04
Posted - Jul 22 2004 : 6:17PM
Well I have never used a 64 3400 so yes I admit I sort of just BS'd it. After looking at the specs of the chip (havn't seen it overclocked) it falls rather short on the 53 while gaming and if memory serves a P4 did better (the one under the EE). I'd have to look again. I mainly play first person shooters such as Raven Shield, Doom 3 and on. While playing Raven shield in my older computer I had all of the graphic settings on high and things looked great. I had a ati 9700 pro 128 with a P4 chip. Amd is something I haven't used before but since I want a gaming computer I figured why not go for it. Besides it performed well on other applications as well. Though while playing the Doom 3 demo I had to lower some settings. I think it was my ram (since I have 512 RD)/processor and I know it wasn't the card.As for the msi I have never used them before. I mentioned it because all the tests I saw had it with the 53. I usually go with Asus. Are the MSI's not all that great?
el's suggestion will indeed fly--you still might wanna look into a 6800gt or something, for games a top-of-the line graphics card and almost-top-of the line cpu are usually the better option vs. the best cpu and keeping the 9700(which is a great card, btw).resist the urge to run raid-o though, the raptors are plenty fast and worth keeping alive.
supposedly msi makes decent a64 boards, but i still wouldn't consider it a first-tier manufacturer. asus, abit, and to some extent gigabyte just have the better track record compared to them, dfi, and some others that are recently popular but come from a history of making really junky stuff. abits are known for overclocking, asus is close and gives you goodies like the wireless-b card that doesn't take up a pci slot for free(there's probably g out by now)
el's suggestion will indeed fly--you still might wanna look into a 6800gt or something, for games a top-of-the line graphics card and almost-top-of the line cpu are usually the better option vs. the best cpu and keeping the 9700(which is a great card, btw).resist the urge to run raid-o though, the raptors are plenty fast and worth keeping alive.
supposedly msi makes decent a64 boards, but i still wouldn't consider it a first-tier manufacturer. asus, abit, and to some extent gigabyte just have the better track record compared to them, dfi, and some others that are recently popular but come from a history of making really junky stuff. abits are known for overclocking, asus is close and gives you goodies like the wireless-b card that doesn't take up a pci slot for free(there's probably g out by now)
Daylight Savings Time, is it really Necessary? 972 Posts 3/04
Posted - Jul 23 2004 : 9:56PM
I've taken a look at the 6800 pro from reviews and it's a mixed bag. The ATI (I think x800 pro or xt) does better in one area while the 6800 does better in the other.. It's a paradox!!!! The whole new PCI thing is coming and that might be really good but time will tell on that. When you said "resist the urge to run rad-o" what did you mean by that?
raid-0 with raptors will kill the drives/install so don't do it with raptors. Don't know if the newer ones have the same problem but plan to just get one big raptor. I heard you can install xp in less than 9minutes with that install.
it's not just western digital/raptors you shouldn't run raid-o on--it looks good on benchmarks in ideal situations that you rarely encounter. the problem is it markedly increases your chances of magnetic storage failure(you lose EVERYTHING). the drives without raid-0 still fly, and my guess is most people run operations where raid has benefits less than 10% of the time.
from a recent article on anandtech "The main downside to RAID-0, other than cost, is reliability. The size of a RAID-0 array is the sum of all of its members; so, two 100GB drives in a RAID-0 array will give you one array with a 200GB total capacity. Unfortunately, if you lose any one of the drives in the array, all of your data is lost and isn't recoverable. Since two drives are working in tandem and are both necessary to hold your data, you effectively halve the mean time between failure by moving to a two-drive RAID-0 array." and "If you haven't gotten the hint by now, we'll spell it out for you: there is no place, and no need for a RAID-0 array on a desktop computer. The real world performance increases are negligible at best and the reduction in reliability, thanks to a halving of the mean time between failure, makes RAID-0 far from worth it on the desktop."
Daylight Savings Time, is it really Necessary? 972 Posts 3/04
Posted - Jul 24 2004 : 9:33PM
Thanks you guys! Some good info that I didn't know.
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vernon Deactivated User
7 Posts 7/04
Posted - Jul 29 2004 : 12:55AM
I usually don't buy the newest processor when they first come out. As a rule of thumb I wait a couple of months, now if you're rich and wealthy I don't see why not getting the latest technology.
The Athlon 64 FX doesn't offer that much of a performance increase over the standard A64, especially the newer Socket 939 versions. The FX line is more for the hardcore overclocker crowd, as it's CPU multiplier comes unlocked out fo the box - you can set it as high as you dare to see how fast it can run (I'm waiting for someone to take an FX53 to 3 Ghz via cryogenic cooling - I know it'll happen someday).
