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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."
I don't know about the US, but comparing the boxed Athlon64 3000+ against a 3.2GHz P4 I see that the P4 is ~50% more expensive.
Not to mention, it doesn't run 64-bit software.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
Benchmark and real world are two different places.
From the article:
Although there is no official 64-bit version of Windows, the chip can run 32-bit code natively. For those who are anti-Microsoft, there are some 64-bit versions of Linux, but if you're feeling adventurous, you can always pick up a beta of Windows XP 64-Bit Edition.
Since when was running Linux an anti-Microsoft thing? This is the kind of crap the OSS community needs to stomp out in order to give Linux the reputation it deserves and broaden its adoption, especially on the desktop.
On a more constructive note, since UT2003/4, Quake3, Doom3, and a handfull of other badass games are supported by Linux why isnt there a Linux-Gamers distro. Even if it were just a bootable knoppix CD that could take advantage of the Athlon 64 and play these games off your harddrive it would really help get linux on the desktop in the gamers croud. I can just hear the taunts coming from the LAN dude playing Doom3 on Linux in 64 bit, "You wanna piece of me, you cant handle my BFG! I got 64 bits with your name on it", etc...
Or was it just me?
Im dreaming ofa big bndwdth, That can resist the
Yes, that's what the article says: AMD is pretty much committed to the Socket-939 platform for the foreseeable future, and truth be told, an upgrade to a Socket-754 CPU is going to limit your motherboard or CPU options, which is an important factor since our theme today is budget gaming.
Their point is - the A64 3000+ and a 754 mainboard are so "cheap", it's worth giving up the upgradability of not going with a 939 board.
In a limited way, I tend to agree: don't put too much faith into being able to keep your mainboard for the next upgrade, chances are you'll upgrade it anyway.
However, all of this totally depends on how often you upgrade. If you intent to upgrade within another year, yeah, you'll be able to keep your mainboard if you bought "smart". But if you're going to wait say, 2 years, until your next major overhaul, your current mainboard will be obsolete, even though you bought a "future-proof" mainboard such as the 939 today. Even if Socket 939 is still in use by then, chances are more recent mainboards will run at a higher FSB, support different periphery, different RAM, and so on and so on.
What's more: calling that article a budget gamers guide is a stretch. The definition of what kind of a budget qualifies for a budget gamer is subjective, of course, but I doubt an A64 3000+ is the best bang for the buck right now. Socket-A boards are cheaper, as are Athlon XP (or Sempron, if you will) CPUs, and they aren't a lot slower, at least not compared to a an A64 3000+. And since you're a budget gamer, you're not likely to upgrade within a year, so you're going to toss your mainboard when you upgrade next time, and there's really no reason to buy an Athlon XP mainboard if you don't already have one.
I mean, I'm not saying he's insane for buying an Athlon 64 3000+, I suppose it's a lot better value for the money than going the Socket 939 route, but it's still a high-end choice, for seemingly no other reason than being high end. Considering the author of the story bought a A64 3000+, it kind of seems like he's trying to justify his investment.
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
Cheaper isn't always better.
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.
If I had a dime for every time I had a peice of hardware or software be just wildly incompatible on my Asus Via Athlon PC I could buy you lunch.
Magically when I moved over to an Asus Intel P4 platform everything worked. Perfectly. The first time.
Yes, I'm paying more. But it *works*
And, of course, getting the 939 helps your computer be more future-proof. It's always nice to just be able to drop in a new processor rather than having to buy a new motherboard and transfer everything over.
Just ask all those people that bought slot Athlons how much they wish they would have gotten socket!
A cheap AMD cpu isn't so cheap once you add in the cost of a more costly motherboard and a seperate video card.
(I know, that's not really a problem now, but it wasn't always.)
What is the difference between a small revolutionary change and a large evolutionary change?
Except AMD's roadmaps has shown that they'll continue supporting Socket 754 for the immediate future. By time it's discontinued, you'd probably be looking at a new motherboard to keep up with "modern" features anyway.
And really, since nVidia stepped in with the nForce series of chips, bringing the unified driver system from their video cards over, upgrading isn't much of an issue anymore. A friend of mine recently upgraded from an nForce2 based Athlon system to an nForce3 based Athlon 64 and it didn't require so much as a reload. Swapped the board and CPU, plugged in his drives and that was it.
That's my perspective on it anyway. Right now the price differential between Socket 754 and 939 just isn't worth it, especially given that once 939 becomes the normal commodity part, you'd probably be able to upgrade the CPU and mainboard for *less* than the price differential you'd pay now, and come out with more modern equipment.
What do Intel motherboards have that AMD ones don't?
And what serious Intel user would use a crappy onboard video chip?
Puh-leaase.
uh, no. Asus, Abit and others have been making high quality motherboards for many years now, of generally better quality than intel.
You mean the same warranty program AMD offers on their processors?
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.
Some of us have been realy burned. As the grandparent has stated, VIA has had some really sh!tty chipsets and drivers in the past. I had to go through 3 VIA-based motherboards during the AMD T'Bird era to get a good one. VIA has pretty much lost a customer in me. I'm sure they're better now, but once burned, twice shy.
It was so bad that I went to Intel for my next rig (which I really didn't want to do). The last thing I wanted to deal with when using my main rig for work was crappy chipsets and crashes. My Intel rig has been rock solid.
My next rig will probably be whatever AMD CPU is out there with an nVidia chipset. If I had to choose now, I'd probably go for an nVidia-based motherboard with a socket 939 chipset (I don't mind shelling out the extra money). However, I probably won't be in the market until I can get a 4GHz CPU for around $300 USD or less. My rig is more than adequate for what I need, and will own whatever game I throw at it.
And all the machines shipping with PCI-E are slow & overpriced right now. Puts one in a bit of a rough spot...
Ya well Via has a past and Nvidia has a current.
It's the actual mobo manufacturer that you've been burned by the the Via chipsets.
If you want something that works out of the box and is community supported then buy Via chipset-based motherboards.
If you want to spend your time messing around with downloading propriatory drivers and living with the resulting crappiness caused by these drivers, go ahead and buy Nvidia.
Personally I stopped using Windows because it was such a pain in but all the time, I don't want Linux to end up the same way because people who should know better don't care enough to even do a little bit of research.
You've underestimated by a factor of nearly 8 the number of complaints. Searching for unstable+VIA+chipsets garners 6,490 hits.
And, of course, getting the 939 helps your computer be more future-proof. It's always nice to just be able to drop in a new processor rather than having to buy a new motherboard and transfer everything over.
I used to think that way, but not anymore.
Think back to 3 years ago, when I bought my previous motherboard and cpu. My motherboard doesn't have SATA, or USB 2.0, or firewire. It doesn't have gigabit ethernet. I just bought a motherboard last week that has all of that for $105.
Spending more than $100 extra to be "future proof" doesn't make sense to me because by the time I want to upgrade my cpu, a new motherboard with all the bells and whistles that weren't available 3 years ago can be had for a pittance.
If I bought a new CPU every year, then it might be worth it, but I wait 2-3 years between upgrades.
Still is, depending on your definition. If by 'good' you mean stable and solid as basalt and the almost certain development target of most proprietary business software, the core Intel manufactured MB is still the way to go for me. It's all we spec at work. On the other hand, I'm picking up a 939 & 3500+ 64 for my gaming rig next Tuesday.
The accepted term for what you say is "marketing".
>Granted, this was at a local shop.
Well, there's half of your problem right there. If you don't price compare online, you're going to have no idea if the local shop is ripping you off or not. That simply wasn't a valid sample of prices.
>The kicker at the time was that the Intel chipset
>board included sound, a couple Firewire ports and
>a network jack all onboard. Even the shop's best
>Athlon boards didn't have all three
Then this was either a couple of years or more ago, or the shop's "best" Athlon boards were crap. A quick search at newegg.com reveals a slew of high-end Athlon boards that support all three, along with Serial ATA and a host of additional features.
Sounds like less of a problem with the Athlon platform and more of a problem with your local shop.
"Linux's development model pales in comparison, stability-wise to FreeBSD's,"
Trollbait.
" Linux is a great starter if you want to learn unix."
More Trollbait. Yep its a great "starter" OS but once you learn it you can move up to a real *nix like say *BSD...
"That leaves us with linux. linux tries to do everything for everyone but does all of it at a level lower than all of the systems listed above."
So Linux is Jack of all Trades Master of none?
He does say Linux is good for some things to his credit but sadly he just has to get in those "BSD is superior to Linux" jabs. Read between the lines people, the negative comments cancel out the positive ones.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch