What speed should I get?

[kurokaze]

I'm due for a computer upgrade.. haven't done one in almost 3 years.

I'm definately swinging over to the AMD side of things.. tossing around whether to get a Duron or an Athlon.

My budget is about $1500-2000 CANADIAN.

There's a sense of vanity by getting a CPU over 1Ghz,
but it may not be that practical. So what do guys
think? 1Ghz+ or not?

Mainly (being a programmer) I'll be running development
tools and such.. but I definately want to play lots of
games (I've got a vid card figured out).

 

[Crashman]

Gopher it, prices are down!

Suicide is painless...........

 

[Arrow]

The extra speed will pay off; you can get a pretty decent system with that budget!

Rob
Please visit <b><A HREF="http://www.ncix.com/shop/index.cfm?affiliateid=319048" target="_new">http://www.ncix.com/shop/index.cfm?affiliateid=319048</A></b>

 

[dhlucke]

Definitely go for it. You can get a 1.2 ghz 266 FSB for $198 USD, so your budget will definitely allow you to build a killer system...

<font color=red>Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.</font color=red>
Pablo Picasso

 

[viper2211]

get a 750 or 800 and OC it

I am too lazy to type a signature

 

[mbaha]

What ever you decide on I would make sure to get a "C" chip with the 266mhz fsb and a mb with the kt133a chip set that runs at a 133mhz bus. I would recommend a 1-1.2 gig chip asus a7v133 with at least 256megs ram but you can 512 for not that much more. Do you need monitor and keyboard ect. or just the box? And what video card are you looking at?

mbaha

“Build your own you will love it more”

 

[HolyGrenade]

You don't 'need' any particular card to take advantage of the cpu. whats more, the T&L GPU based graphics cards do not utilise cpu power that much. And dont say that it wont help because not many games support T&L, because with a 1.2 GHz TBird, any graphics card above £60 would more than suffice to run any of those games at 40fps+ at a decent resolution.


<i><b><font color=red>"2 is not equal to 3, not even for large values of 2"</font color=red></b></i>

 

[peteb]

I think the point was to try and build a balanced system.

A GeForce Ultra will not really do a good job of keeping up with an Athlon 1.2Gig so why rate your system back further by using a GTS2, MX or TnT?

You could take the GTS2 now at a good price and get decent performance and then in 6-12 months upgrade to a GeForce3 (or whatever the slightly not new buzz is) for similar cash.

Don't put a lover video card in a 1.2 Athlon box if you want to do good gaming on it, you might as well just get a Duron (no offence to Duron owners, if that's all you need or your budget will stretch to).

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[Guest]

I would go for the 1.33 cos it has droped to £200 over here in the uk already and make sure you get the best Graphics card or you cpu will be having a sleep..

Enjoy

Opinions are like arseholes .... everybody’s got one....

 

[HolyGrenade]

Did you know GF2 Ultra cards run games smoothly at high speed on 600Mhz machines?


<i><b><font color=red>"2 is not equal to 3, not even for large values of 2"</font color=red></b></i>

 

[Guest]

mut, you should have told us your choice of vid card!
if your happy with gf2 mx, a t1000 is o.k.
a gf2 ultra may like the extra power
of course this only applies to games at reasonable resolutions
for your compiling duties i can only guess faster is better

 

[ajmcgarry]

I agree with Holy. Tom has shown in the past that when playing games it is usually the Graphics Card that is the limiting feature. Unless your playing at under 1024x768, and nobody should be in this day and age.
Hell, my old PII400 with 64MB RAM can manage 1024x768 playing unreal on a 16MB TNT2 card at around 30fps.


Try pairing a 64MB Geforce2 GTS with a T-Bird 1Ghz Type-C and around 256RAM.
You could probably compile a program and play Quake3 at the same time.
If you can stretch it go for the Ultra

<font color=red>Why don't you ever see the headline "Psychic Wins Lottery"?</font color=red>

 

[peteb]

wasn't that basically what I said?

-* This Space For Rent *-
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[kurokaze]

Hehe.. ok ok.. this is what I had in mind.

CPU? ($150-300)
MB? ($200)
RAM: 512MB PC133 ($300)
Vid Card: GeForce2 MX (< $200 - at least until Kyro II is widely available)
HD: 2 * 20GB ($400)
RAID controller: ($150 - Considering it.. )

Thats about $1600 Cdn. I'm going to re-use my existing CD/RW and DVD drives and Sound card.
I have a ton of network cards so I'm ok there too.
My monitor is this old 20" monster that only does
60Hz @ 1280x1024 (the resolution I run Windows at
- 75Hz at 1024x768) so getting super high frame
rates is pointless for me.

 

[HolyGrenade]

Oh yeah! last paragraph.
soz!



<i><b><font color=red>"2 is not equal to 3, not even for large values of 2"</font color=red></b></i>

 

[dandan]

Look on Tom's site, as he did a review of Athlon & PIII scaling recently with GeForce2MXs, GTS & Ultra, and it is very clear that if you are playing games, for any one graphics card, there is very little difference generally between 800Mhz & 1.2Ghz for 3D Games. However, upgrading the Graphics does see the scaling benefit you'd expect.

If you play 3D stuff, better to have the Ultra with an 800 than the MX with a 1.2Ghz. If 3D is not so much your thing, then it's CPU power that counts over graphics, and get the fastest CPU you can.

Also remember to go for a balanced system. As Tom frequently says, don't have one component being the bottleneck for the whole system.

Cheers

Dan

 

[HolyGrenade]

First of all, you need English lessons.

Now, name some games that wont run at 1024x768@32bits at 40fps or more onn an Athlon 650 with a GF2Ultra.


<i><b><font color=red>"2 is not equal to 3, not even for large values of 2"</font color=red></b></i>

 

[Guest]

dude your a mut, a canadian mut at that,
over here in aussie our dollar is just as [-peep-] as yours.
i got a T1000, KT7A, 256M pc133, ASUS v7100, old ata33 HD
i get about 125/126 fps on QIII fastest
i get about 88/89 fps on QIII high quality

at the moment i'm happy,
for multiplayer games on the Net i'm stuck on a 56K modem

 

[kurokaze]

Hmm.. did you have point to make?

Anyway, whats the point of sticking with old ATA33 HD?
Thats way too slow for your system. I know for the work
I do my HD speed is really a big bottleneck so thats why
I considering a raid controller so I can stripe em.

I do feel sorry for your modem situation though.. I have
a friend is Australia and she complains about how expensive
cable modem is over there

 

[noko]

Well the T-Birds keeps on dropping in price, for instance, 1.33gh 266FSB going for $227. Maybe in your price range in Canada and really not that much more than a 1gh T-bird but yet much more powerful. I just picked up another 256mb of CAS2 ram from Crucial for $94.00 and prices of Ram are going up now. Recommend you buy your ram now and then when ready buy the rest of your system.

 

[Guest]

sorry mut my point was a T1000 pumps out great frames per second when coupled with gf2 MX
ata33 from old system, all i do is play games,surf net, so fast HD is not so important to me.

 

[kurokaze]

Yeah I agree, I just bought a stick of 256MB Infineon CAS2 PC133 for $140 Cdn. yesterday. Sad thing was, it was $120 not two weeks ago!

Anyhow I'll probably hover around the 1Ghz mark, slight above or below it should matter too much since I can just overclock it.

 

[girish]

prices are down, but if stuck anywhere downgrade your cpu
but get a good motherboard and good memory.



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