New Setup

[schuy1]

Hello to all, I am going to be building a new rig in about 6-8months, and wanted some input on a good proc/board combo

I have my heart set on the Nforce4 boards, probably ASUS or Giga-Byte, I already have a 3000 939 proc but that will be going as well, I do want SLI even though I wont be utilizing it at first $ or lack of it. I have my case ps, and dvd burner an audigy2zs, but I will be needing a new video card as well, so if theres any advice on the pci express flavors Id appreciate it. Thanks!

 

[pat]

guess what?? in 6-8 months,newer cpu, newer motherboard with better feature and better video card with maybe lower price will be there.

So all that what will be told today wont hold true anymore. Until then, read about the multiple board maker, what they offer, how reliable they are, look at new technology developpement and implementation.

In one word, you may ask many question, but the ansqwer might not be valid in 6-8 month. So, just keep reading... and when you,ll be ready to move, you'll know a lot more about the product, the board maker and the technology used. This will help you to make a way better choice than the answer you'll get today...

-Always put the blame on you first, then on the hardware !!!

 

[schuy1]

Thanks, all of that is true, but I assume that the setup I am interested in now will be adequate for some time with the SLI and all, and I was looking at the a64 3500 ive heard it usually oc's well, I am just tired of putting a little in at a time last time through it was a nf3 939 300 a64, and a new vid card, so I am pretty much wanting to do new stuff except my hdds are already sata, but im sure the 3gb/s ones will be out soon as well, anyhow I was just going off of what is available now, thanks again

 

[sh1ft3d]

The 3gb/s SATA2 hard drives are already out... probably the reason you haven't been hearing much on them is because there's not much of (in fact in some benchmarks, SATA2 w/NCQ actually performs WORSE than regular SATA) a performance increase. The biggest determinant of how fast a hard drive will perform is and probably always will be it's rotational speed (5400, 7200, 10000, 15000). Increasing bandwidth for a hard drive would be like expanding a road from 2 lanes to 4 lanes, but keeping the speed limit the same and expecting traffic to go faster (given they don't speed). imo, SATA2 is overrated (my apologies to the person I got into an argument with over this if he happens to be reading this - now I agree with him on SATA2). The main features of SATA2 are NCQ (question I have is do all SATA2 hard drives have NCQ?) and 3gb/s, both of which don't really help out the regular home user.

The way I see it, there are really only 3 main advantages to nForce4 over non-nForce4 (some will disagree):

1) PCI-Express - not much, if any, of a performance increase over AGP 8x, but may see future video cards able to take more advantage of the increased bandwidth.
2) Active Armor - built-in hardware for the onboard NIC that is supposedly to reduce CPU overhead during heavy network traffic. Looks to be most advantageous when doing things like playing on-line games or transferring files across the network. Some estimates are that it will reduce CPU overhead by 60%. This is only on the ULTRA and SLI nForce4 boards.
3) And of the course, the famous SLI which is only present on SLI boards.