to 3200 or not

[Krazeh]

Well i've just got a fair whack of money to purchase a new pc to complete an IT course on, I'm fairly clear on what components I want mainly with just one or two grey areas.

It'll definitely be an Asus A7N8X deluxe motherboard with 2 120gb sata drives (either maxtor or seagate, both seem to be fast and are priced similarly) and 1GB of pc3200 ddr ram. Gonna scavenge cdrom and dvd from my current system and probably keep the case and monitor, may also take my soundblaster 5.1 or just stick with the onboard sound.

Now my questions are does anyone think it's worth paying the extra for the Athlon 3200 or just go with the 3000? Bearing in mind I will be watercooling and overclocking the system so won't be kept at stock speeds. And secondly i'm looking to put a GeforceFX 5900 Ultra in for graphics but they're a little on the pricey side, anyone have any recommendations of which supplier to go with or any other video cards to take a look at?

 

[lovedaddy]

I'm a tight git, so theres no way I'd pay an extra 150 quid (or whatever) for the top of the range CPU, not when the performance gains are 4-5% tops. The choice however, is yours.

Onboard sound is more than fine (nay, its excellent), so a SB isn't really needed.

Also I dont know how much extra you'll be able to squeeze out the top end AMDs. I think they are quite close to the core limit. If your after overclocking on an AMD, probably the best bet is the 2500XP. Otherwise, the best overclocker at the moment is the P4 2.4c. (some of them can be pushed upto 3.4+ gigs with a good water cooling solution and high quality ram).

An ATI 9800 Pro is much the same power, and are a bargin at about 270-290 quid from Microdirect (and others).

 

[Jonty]

Hi Krazeh

Personally, if you want to go with AMD, I'd go for the 3000+ Barton. I know it utilises the 333Mhz FSB, but the 3200+ really is pricey, and performance difference isn't that great, or so the reviews seem to indicate. Yes, the 3200+ is the only AMD chip to utilise the 400Mhz FSB, but other than that, I personally don't believe it's worth the money, but obviously it's your call (check some reviews ).

That said, if you're spending that kind of money, I would go for Intel. They have the greatest overclocking potential of any chip around (far more so than AMD) and can easily outperform AMD equivalent CPUs out of the box. The P4C 3.2Ghz is very expensive, with it being so new, but the P4C 3Ghz has fallen a lot in price and still performs extremely well (and comes with support for hyperthreading and the 800Mhz FSB).

As for the graphics card, the 5900 Ultra is undoubtedly 'the Daddy' at the moment, but you're right that they do cost an awful lot of money. The 128Mb Radeon 9800 Pro usually comes in quite a bit cheaper, and is only slightly behind in most of the benchmarks. Then again, the price of most cards depends on the manufacturer; and because the 5900 Ultra is the top of the range model, companies tend to play around with it quite a lot, so if you could find something without a huge bundle and specialist cooling solutions and such, then you may be able to save some money that way.

Kind Regards

 

[flownalk]

or just get the barton 2500xp add in the abit nforce2 mobo and clock it higher than the 3200xp... saving a ton of cash

 

[Sibanac]

I would actualy wait a bit and see what happens when the 64bit amd chips hit the market in a month or so


edit : oh and paying about 75% more for a 200XP rating more is insane if you ask me

 

[Krazeh]

Think i'm actually gonna go for a 2500xp or possibly stretch a little more and get a 3000xp, the 2500 alone should clock to 3200 speeds

 

[FatBusinessman]

Originally posted by lovedaddy
Onboard sound is more than fine (nay, its excellent), so a SB isn't really needed.

More than that, I think it's actually better than anything except a high-end Audigy soundcard (even better than that in some respects, such as being able to encode a SPDIF channel).