cryogenic

Currently my rig is getting a bit long in the tooth... I have an Asus A7N8X-Deluxe mobo, 512MB Corsair XMS3200LL RAM, Radeon 9700 Pro, WD800JB & WD1200JB hard drives and a 17" monitor... I'm thinking about going to the A64, but it seems that AMD is about to make a switch to Dual Channel DDR + 939 pins even on the standard A64 line. So my question is do I make the jump now for an Abit KV8-MAX3 and A64 3000+ or do I wait and get a 939-pin dual channel A64 3400+ when they come out (considerably more money involved I'm sure) and associated motherboard (either from Asus or Abit, depending on features). I'd like to hear a few takes on both sides of the story as I'm sitting squarely on the fence. Either way I go, I'm going to purchase another 512MB stick of RAM for now simply because 512 isn't cutting it. So basically, throw out the RAM issue... buy 512MB more and wait for the 939-pin CPU's or buy 512 more and go ahead and make the A64 jump.

Sazar

obviously if money is no issue go with the 939's... the 754's are not bad either though...

just depends on your choice..

I highly recommend 1 gig of ram if possible... even if it means waiting a bit longer when the 939's come out... :thumbsup:

what cpu do you currently have btw? coz with a setup like yours you are still not too badly off if you have a barton...

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cryogenic

whoops.. I have an Athlon XP 2000+ old Palomino core, not even a t-bred... so it's definitely long in the tooth. I paid about $100 for it a year ago and now it's just not fast enough for UT2004 now. Maps take 8 years to load, and I know it's not my HD's because they're WD 7200rpm 8MB cache. And yeah, I know about the whole 1 gig thing... makes a huge difference and I can't deal with only having 512 MB any longer. I'll be curious to see what the pricing on the 939's is going to be... and what motherboards are going to be out there.

Lee

You call those specs long-in-the-tooth?

I tell you what i have, award motherboard, 1.53 ghz pent 4, nvidia tnt2 model 64/model pro graphics card, 133 512 meg ram, pinnacle cheap-o tv card, 28.6 gig hd, 1 extra fan, an exhaust, ricoh mp5125a dvd+rw/+r drive, no floppy, a 100 mb floppy disk drive, windows xp pro. I have got a maximum of 612 points at www.pcpitstop.com

So I guess I am a lower user here, still i configured my PC (not over clocked) to run very smoothly and has only crashed a few times due to dodgy graphics driver.

LeeJend

My system isn't as fast as yours for gaming. Had the same problem but with BF 1942. Maps load slooooow and tabing in and out took forever. I upgraded from the XP2100 to a Barton 3000 and it did not help the gaming much.

What did clear up the problem was going from 512 RAM to 768 RAM. Based on my experience I would upgrade the RAM to 1 MB right now to ease the game laoding. That would give you a chance to kick back and watch pricing on CPU and MBs after the 939 family comes out.

I would not recommend upgrading within the 32 Bit CPUs (like to a Barton 3200) unless it is one hell of a deal. (I got a NF2 Ultra MB and Barton 2600 for $100 so I went for it) It won't buy you much improvement for gaming (a few % maybe).

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Tuffgong4

I wish there would be price points for the 939's already cause I really want to upgrade!..either between 754 or 939 but don't know how much they'll be

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cryogenic

I see... the thing is... My roommate has an XP2400+ (266FSB) and the exact same HD and half the RAM and a much worse video card (radeon 9200)... and he loads maps nearly twice as fast. I think a CPU upgrade would help at least some... and probably the extra 512MB would make a rather large diff... I'm definitely buying the RAM ASAP, though.

toretto

i run what you see hear for ut2k4, and i have heard and read a lot of people are have problems with the game with only 512mb ram, they upgrade to 1gb and it runs smoother than a baby's ass. My systems all run flawlessly. i have one machine that only has 512mb ram, i just use that as the dedicated server, other than that, all my machine do awesome with the game.

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cryogenic

My other problem is that after about 2 hrs of playing, my HD just starts going crazy, which lags the absolute crap out of me. It seems like it's expanding my pagefile, and takes about 5 minutes to clear up. I'm hoping that another stick of RAM will cure that problem. Needless to say, the jump to the A64 i so tempting right now, but seeing that the 939 pin A64's are coming out fairly soon, the current crop of 754 pin A64's don't look quite as sweet anymore. I'm sure Doom3 and HL2 (if it ever comes out) will make good use of that extra memory bandwith. So yeah, I'm starting to get splinters from this fence under my rear-end.