What way do i choose

[tommy]

Hi guys looking to upgrade my pc soon and not too sure what to get...
I am going to upgrade mobo and cpu, been looking at amd 64's ( are they the way forward?)
mobo i have looked at is K8T800 Athlon64. ideally i would want a mobo that would last a while and for gaming but i want to just have to update my cpu nxt time so looking at maybe 2 years life or more.. £400-500 ish to spend.
also looked at the 3400+ 64 processor.
any help would be appreciated. 🙂

 

[chastity]

Well it would seem that is the why of the future ie the AMD 64. I would check Asus and MSI boards and see what they have in the area for the cpu your looking at. I would offer more help but I don't use AMD chips

 

[ming]

woo.. £500 would just about get you the CPU + mobo... maybe some lower ranged RAM too.
I'd say that AMD is the way forward, but you may want to wait that slight bit longer to see if they will release a new generation of cpu's and mobos cause I think the current range of mobos can only support up to a short limit on the CPU at the moment.

 

[chastity]

valid point ming which I did forgot also I've read they are going to be changing the number of pins on the chip in the near future so wait till after that as your upgrade path would be a little cheaper in the future

 

[Teddy]

What about the nforce3 boards?....

 

[LeeJend]

Just to make the choice harder...

Intel has announced their 64 bit x86 family of processors will be coming out fairly soon. And as said above, the current AMD 64 family does not seem to have much upgrade potential. So waiting to see what comes out this spring looks like a good plan. The PCI Express MB standard is coming too.

If nothing else when the new AMD and Intel families come out the existing family pricing may drop like a rock.

 

[Sazar]

the nf3 boards suck for performance for a64... and they have yet to resolve their slow ide performance from the nf2 set...

at the moment the two viable options are k8t800 (via) or the sis755 chipset... both of which are good performers and haven't got crippled hypertransport (like the nf3-150)

the nf3-250 will be a better board but I still can't see how nv would have managed to fix the ide issues...

most of the socket 754 via boards perform near the same.. I bought mine for cost/performance/feature set... @ the time of purchase it was the fastest k8t800 board and seems that it still is and it has all the features I need...

as for intel... prescott technically is capable of using a64 instruction set ( I call it a64 to give credit to amd for their work.. unlike some companies)

currently intel needs to work on major thermal issues not just with prescott but also tejas (their next processor) which is running @ last count 50% hotter at lower clocks... (check x-bit labs for the skinny)

 

[chastity]

as always Sazar great insight and good info

 

[MUYA]

as always Sazar great insight and good info

For a change 😉 Ya I agree with him, all athlon64 chipsets perform to within each other as the performance is all down to the on die memory controller. If you are taking the plunge now, the k8t800 boards are super at what they do.

I myself am waiting for socket 939 chipsets, ie the 2nd iteration/generation athlon64 chipsets that will correct what ever is the problem with current chipsets. Not there is many things wrong.

But I am waiting till end of march to see what the new socket 939 brings with the K8t800 Pro and nforce3 250 chipsets