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The Athlon 64 3000+, A Budget Gamer's Perspective
VL contributes a link to Viperlair's budget-conscious and game-oriented review of an AMD processor that's not on the bleeding edge, but makes a good showing for the money: "For the price of the Socket-939, you can pick up an A64 3000+, K8T800 based motherboard, and a decent mid-range video card. For gamers on a budget, I think the choice is obvious."
The benchmark screenshots that they post show the chip being outpaced by a 3.2Ghz Pentium 4??
Yawn.
You recall quite incorrectly: 754 is going to be the budget socket for a while, 939 is going to be the future of amd's desktop line, and 940 is going to remain the server socket for amd opteron-type processors.
Yup, I was pricing a system recently and Newegg has the socket 939 3500+ at 352$. The next step up, the 3800+, is almost double the price at 643$ - I figure when I'm ready to buy in a few months the price will drop enough to be worthwhile.
And the ability to upgrade without needing to buy a new motherboard definately makes it worth my wait right now!
Looking for hardware (Currently need: Large Etch-a-Sketch) Have one? See my journal!
While CPU speeds may not be going up as fast as they used to, prices just seem to keep falling. You can now build yourself a socket 752 system with a decent video card for $1000, minus monitor.
My last build, a T-bird 1.4ghz, was in 2001. It cost $1200, yet the thing was built with a lot of the cheapest parts - the case, the mobo, the drives. It overheated constantly because of the poor airflow in thge case, which I eventually fixed through a crude expansion to the existing front intake in the bezel, and by moving the case fan from the side to the back.
My next one, to be ordered sometime this month, is going be smaller(using the Antec Aria and an m-ATX), faster(A64 2800+), quieter(better PSU, fans and heatsinks), and cheaper($950 including all-new cards and peripherals, unlike the previous one, which stripped whatever it could from the one that came before it).
XP 2500 ($80), FX5700 or Radeon 9800 ($200), SB Live 4.1 ($30), 1 gig DDR ($200), 160 gig Seagate SATA ($120), ASUS MATX MoBo ($100), CD-RW/DVD Combo drive ($75) and a nice case ($75).
This comes in at just under $700. It's a very nice system that can play any game out there. Really who needs more than that for your current gaming needs? Sure you can shell out another grand for the bleeding edge but I would rather spend another 700 in two years and kick my old box down to the wife.
stuff nvidia motherboards.
They are a huge pain in the butt and the sound drivers are not any better then any other budget on board sound.
As a Linux user (after all why are you buying a 64bit motherboard to go with your 64bit CPU if all you can run is 32bit MS-based software?) get VIA.
Via is a much better solution, and they've contributed GPL'd drivers and support to the kernel developers. This makes their hardware much easier to deal with.
Let brainless cretins sheeple line up and buy Nvidia boards. They are the only good video card for Linux, so I'm whiling to put up with their inferior propriatory drivers, but DON'T buy their motherboards since you have a much better solution.
And as far as avoiding crappy boards? Just don't buy the cheapest fucking possible board. If you have a choice between the 40 dollar, 70 dollar, and 100 dollar board check out the reviews and don't get sucked into the features. 5 times out of 7 you are justified by getting the nicer board.
Buy quality boards from manufactures that buy quality chipsets from quality chipset makers like Via that support Linux properly.
Put your money were your mouth is! Support Linux, by supporting the companies that support Linux!
Buy Athlon 64 3000+ rather than 3200+. Save $64. Get a socket 939 motherboard thats upgradable as socket 754 will be for AMD budget chips. Overclock the 3000+ and get better performance than the 3200+ not overclocked (duh), or leave it stock and stay within 10% on high resolution in most games.
Interesting,
Far Cry benchmarks at 1024:
Athlon 64 3200+ - 36.26 FPS
Athlon 64 3000+ - 33.21 FPS
Quake 3 benchmarks at 1024 (why do they still bench it?):
Athlon 64 3200+ - 322.7 FPS
Athlon 64 3000+ - 321.8 FPS
a 3 frame lead makes a difference when your only in the 30 FPS ballpark, nothing a few graphics settings cant fix, but when we talk about 322 vs 321 FPS I'm blown away that anyone would care.
Im dreaming ofa big bndwdth, That can resist the
Ya know, people say this a lot, but I've yet to see it happen in practice. Most motherboards have limits on the speed they'll support, so you'll only see maybe a 300-400mhz bump. And at that point, it's not worth the money
If you mean Soundstorm....they got rid of it for the Nforce3. They'll bring it back for the Nforce4.
Which (unfortunately) is still an uncorfirmed rumor.
There seem to be conflicting messages. The Inquirer has had two articles ([1], [2]) where they claim there will be a "SoundStorm 2" / SP-10 onboard.
However it has not been corfirmed by nVidia. In fact a "guy" from nVidia has said:"There may be some truth in there, but none of it has anything to do with audio. Makes me wonder how old this guy's data is.". [source].
> dual-core "Toledo" chip ... that's pretty much guaranteed to work
This is mostly fan talk. There's no guarantee the dualcore chips will work in existing motherboards.
I once was an Athlon fan. I owned a few. But I had to make the switch. Why? Not because of anything that AMD ever did, but because I got *really* tired of unstable VIA chipsets.
Just for shit and giggles, I highlighted that and used the "search web for" function in Firefox. 839 hits...please don't trash the AMD platform just because of one shoddy chipset manufacturer...
They could have mentioned that, too. It's really nice to see my 3000+ stay below 30 degrees C(at 800MHz) most of the time I'm using it(and no case fans or anything, just what came in the box), and not even always going full-speed when gaming... Fairly quiet, too, even with my really cheap and quite loud case.
:)
Wouldn't help much in comparison with 3200+, but it's still a nice bonus on all Athlon64s, especially when over half of your time is spent on normal workstation tasks, with the rest being gaming
(200mhz more than the 3000+)
The ignorance... it's too much! You must realize that the 3000+ and 3200+ numbers are just AMD's performance numbers. Both processors actually have the same clock speed of 2GHz. The only difference is that the 3200+ has twice the L2 cache - 1MB of it, and therefore has a higher performance number. Get it right, eh?
GET THEM INSIDE THE VAULT!
Someone is already working on that, its called Linux Live Game Project, a live CD that is orientated around gaming, the home page is at http://tuxgamers.altervista.org.
A site I run with a friend currently mirror their distro over BitTorrent, check it out at The Linux Mirror Project
She's built like a steak house, but she handles like a bistro....
I think you're confusing the APIC with ACPI. The latter involves suspending, hibernating and standing-by your computer. An APIC is the Advanced Programmable Interrupt Controller and is the replacement for the standard PIC. APIC allows your system to have more than 16 IRQs. It offers a performance advantage over a standard PIC, although to what extent, I am not sure -- probably not mind-blowing by any means.
Searching for unstable+VIA+chipsets garners 6,490 hits.
unstable+intel+chipsets gives 6550 hits
Just FYI
I have built many nForce2 PC for myself and friends too and it is fairly stable... in Windows XP. In Linux it's a different story... nForce2 chipset powered motherboards have been plagued with APIC related problems. Do a Google on "nForec2 APIC problems" and you will see what I mean. This problem basically causes the PC to lock up intermittently... a work around is to add "nolapic noapic" on the bootloader which minimizes but not entirely eliminates the lockup problems.
Some motherboard manufacturers have released updated BIOSes to fix this and I read somewhere that Linux Kernel 2.6.7 addresses this issue with nForce2 chipsets. However, the last PC I built, I decided to go use an Intel chipset (D865)... stable as a rock both in Linux and XP.
Where exactly is it you get your (mis)information? A P4 Extreme will NEVER be $100, especially since it has a 2 meg cache. Memory prices are too high to allow this, and prices for memory are going UP not down. This is why certain CPUs have raised in price, not lowered. And the athlon 64 3000+ is neck in neck with a 3.2 p4ee anyways, and 64bitness isn't just about memory, it's about more registers, the ability to manipulate larger amounts of data (larger registers) and in general all around goodness... Disclaimer: I am not an AMD fanboy. I buy what gives me the most bang for my buck. For the past few years that has been AMD.
It helps a lot if you're using it for 3D rendering (eg. Mental Ray) or running a local copy of SQL Server...
Otherwise, not too helpful on a day-to-day basis.
>This was about two years ago. I did say "the last time"..
>and that doesn't necessarily mean last month.
That's fine, but "the last time" could mean anywhere from a minute ago to 1999. And yes, two years ago a lot of Athlon motherboards did kinda suck, though I think if you'd shopped online you could have found a board that came with Firewire. My old Compaq (ugh) Athlon 600 system from 1999 had a network connection and onboard Firewire, though the audio was still on a card at that time, IIRC. Boards with all three were certainly around two years ago at reasonable prices, although frankly at that time few users had any use for Firewire.
>Buy online, and you generally have to service it yourself.
>With a good local shop, at least a buyer can get
>diagnostic help should the need arise, hassle free
>returns, etc.
That's all well and good, but your original post was making price comparisons between the Athlon and Pentium motherboards. Using one sample - at a local shop, no less - as the source of that comparison isn't particularly valid. All it might show is that your local shop offered sucky deals - for whatever reason - on Athlon motherboards.
But, in this case, it's pointless: there's no stable 64-bit version of windows.
800mhz FSB and CPU has direct access to RAM. You don't need a 64bit OS to take immediate advantage of the insane memory bandwidth offered by AMD64.
All I can say is you got lucky, and the chipsets must have been similar. I work in a PC repair shop and most of the time a motherboard swap with XP means a repair install. Not bashing, just saying your situation is not the norm.
About a month ago I bought this chip with an ASUS mobo for about $300 dollars at my local fries. I was upgrading from an Athalon 1800+, and the speed incresese is definetly noticesable. This is a great chip, and you can get it for great prices.
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