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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."
now and I can aford 3 or 4 and make my super computer... all I need is some homemade duct-tape.
- Your stupidity got you into this mess, why can't it get you out? -Will Rogers
....in Police Quest IV?
And it's a 64! :)
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.
What part of "budget" didnt you understrand?
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
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.
This review claims that the cheapest socket 939 processor is $450. With the recent price drops, you can get a retail 3500+ for about $350, compared to $220 for a 3200+ or $175 for 3000+. Also, the review would have been much more useful had it shown results for both versions of the 3200+, so that you can compare the impact of clock speed and cache.
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.
used to be the lazy man's way to make sure you got a good mobo. You could always just buy an Intel branded board and you'd be good to go. With AMD, you had to navigate through several choices to avoid a crappy board (yes, I know those choices where there for Intel too, but they were so easy to avoid).
:).
Whelp, Nvidia came along and changed that. Now I recommend AMD/Nforce to everyone I talk too, if only for the kick-@$$ sound on the higher end boards
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
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).
a link to [a] 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 gamers on a budget, I think the choice is obvious."
So, if you're on a budget you shouldn't buy bleeding edge? Wow, thanks for that amazing bit of insight. I'll file it next to "the Pope might be Catholic" and "day is warmer than night" in my mental list of secret bits of info that might come in handy sometime.
Seriously though, doesn't it seem like we're constantly being told this by Slashdot every six months? I wouldn't mind, but even if it wasn't so bloody obvious then it's the kind of thing that the average Slashdot reader would have learnt years ago.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
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.
The sweet spot for me mostly lies around the bottom range of hardware that is sold new. A couple of times better than what you have, brandnew, with warranty, and relatively affordable.
For single components, ignore the component-only specs, always consider how they improve your full setup. A CPU that's twice as fast, won't make your entire system twice as fast.
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
I've just upgraded two of my boxes to the 3500+ and 3800+ S939 chips and couldn't be happier with the results. Both Linux (FC2 x86_64 on the 3500+) and Windows (XP on the 3800+) motor along far faster than I was expecting, and I have that dual core upgrade to fall back on when games require that much grunt. As far as I'm concerned it's "Intel Inside" alright - "Inside the store, covered in dust on the shelf". :)
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
And all the machines shipping with PCI-E are slow & overpriced right now. Puts one in a bit of a rough spot...
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].
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
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....
Those screenshots are the relatively useless SiSoft Sandra 2004 Memory scores. In addition, the Athlon 64 3000+ is only using a single channel of DDR memory, compaired to the dual channel P4 system. If you actually look at benchmarks of the Athlon 64 3000+, you will see how well it performs.
Here is a review that has more useful benchmarks to compare P4's and A64's.
Heh. When I think gaming people I think windows. But, in this case, it's pointless: there's no stable 64-bit version of windows.
Now, if we start talking linux, then yes, this is great. At least with an nvidia card (note: ATI still has not come out with 64 bit drivers for linux).
And no, I didn't RTFA.
-- Note: If you don't agree with me, don't bother replying. I won't read it.
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.
With Doom 3 coming out in, oh, 2 days, maybe I'll be able to run it on 640x480 (with an nVidia GeForce 6800 Ultra) with all settings on low, but it's definitely a big maybe. Anyone got some deals on 2 GB packs of Corsair DDR400 RAM? Or perhaps my own personal Japanese guy to tweak my computer to run Doom 3 a little higher?
'Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'
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.
When I want a new computer, I see what Fry's has. They usually have a decent Athlon cpu + cheap MB for $80-$100 at any given time. Lately it's been Athlon XP 2700 or 2800's -- which are really quite fast. The MB is cheap, but I've had generally good results with them.
You could get a system that will play Doom reasonably well for something like $400. If you have $1000 to spend, sure, you can get something that's a bit better, but not that much better.
I've got one word for you, HyperTransport.
The P4 isn't even in the same ballpark when it comes to bus bandwidth.
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.
In the beginning the universe was created. This made a lot of people very angry and is widely considered as a bad move.
"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