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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."
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!
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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.
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
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
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.
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.