Help me buy!

[Ch3tan]

Okie dokie, I've got some spare cash this month, so it's time to go the 64bit route.

top shuttle, the SN25p

AMD Athlon 64 3700+ San Diego 90nm (Socket 939) - Retail (ADA3700BNBOX) (CP-121-AM)
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/acatalog/Socket_939_cpus.html#acp_2d121_2da

I'll need a Hard drive, any suggestions on something fast? Been looking at the 10k rpm drives but not sure about the heat/noise.

Graphics card suggestions? RAM I can probably steal from my current system.

Anything to look out for around the corner, is the CPU any good? Comments, suggestions, ideas?

 

[Ch3tan]

ack, I'm not sure what happened with the fonts there, I apologise!

 

[Clown]

My WD isn't noisy when it's just idle. When it's writing it sounds like an old school hard drive though.

 

[Jonty]

Hey Ch3tan

There are always new things around the corner but I think that Shuttle and processor should do you well. One thing, though, AMD have recently unveiled their new 'Venice' Athlon 64, which features SSE3 support, a revised memory controller and others bits. TechReport and many other sites have reviews of the 3800+ version. I'm not sure about availability, but I'm guessing it would be worth the wait (although the improvements aren't revolutionary).

One other thing to note is that Intel have recently introduced their EM64T 64-bit technology to their latest 600 series (and 500 series, I think) Pentium 4 processors. Whilst the Athlon 64 seems to have the edge in terms of performance for price, Intel's 64-bit support is compatible with AMD's 64-bit design and Pentium chips are considered more overclockable (although in a Shuttle this perhaps isn't a consideration).

As for graphics, nVidia and ATI are set to launch their next generation G70 (GeForce 7800, probably) and R520 (Radeon x900, probably) chips in June, but if the availability of the last generation is anything to go by, it could be late summer or autumn before they hit the stores in major quantities. Both cards are expected to at least double performance of today's latest designs, and for ATI we'll see them jump on the Shader Model 3.0 bandwagon amongst other things. Whether it's worth waiting, I don't know. As a stop gap, he Radeon x800 XL is supposed to offer great performance for the price (<£200).

As for memory, AMD won't be supporting DDR2 RAM until later this year/early next year, but if you went with Intel you'll need DDR2 so as to work with their 9xx motherboard chipset designs.

Kind Regards

 

[Ch3tan]

The venice chips seem to stop at a lower clock speed, and san diego cores take over from there. They both are listed as new cores with sse3 on the overclockers site. Ebuyer dont seem to differentiate bewteen them.