[Unclassified]

Hey Im new here
Im going to be building a custom system soon, it will be mostly for gaming and i cant decide on what motherboard and cpu to get. I looked around abit and found these
Asus A8N SLI Premium
DFI LANParty NF4 SLI-DR
Abit Fatal1ty AN8 SLI
Gigabyte GA-K8N Pro-SLI or GA-K8NXP-SLI

The first two look pretty good to me. Are they 64bit and are these any good and which 64bit AMD cpu should i get.

This post has been edited by Unclassified: 13 January 2006 - 12:08 AM

[Vitalix]

First, what is your budget?
Second, what is your video card?
Third, how much do you like to tweak? If you go the Asus, Abit, or Giga, they are mostly plug and play, with some overclocking options.
If you go the LANPARTY route, first of all, get the Expert model (better stability from what I hear), but BE PREPARED TO TWEAK for 2-3 weeks to get optimal settings. The LANPARTY SLI-DR is an overclocking banshee, but very particular with memory and how it is setup. You would have to goto DFI-street for directions to setup, but you can FSBs in excess of 400 with the DFI. THE DFI will let you change like 20 memory settings and give you up to 4V memory o/c (read: enough to fry anything not Winbond or Vx).
The ASUS is widely considered the best OC board other than the LANPARTY, just easier to use.
As far as CPU, I have the 3800+ X2, and I wouldn't trade it for anything! runs better than my duallie Xeon 2.8GHz before!

First post?
Welcome to the forums!

This post has been edited by Vitalix: 13 January 2006 - 08:34 AM

[Unclassified]

I dont really have a budget but i want want to keep the price down as much as i can. I havent decided what video cards im getting, im going to buy that after the motherboard and cpu, but i want them to be sli and 256mb. I want a board that will overclock easy but nothing really crazy. What price roughly would i be looking at if i went with a DFI LANParty NF4 SLI-DR and 3800+ X2 or similar.

[Vitalix]

The DFI will defnitely overclock, but there is nothing easy about it! You will spend a lot of time tweaking.
If you are more casual and OK with a 20% overclock instead of a 45% overclock involving liquid cooling and memory dividers, go with the ASUS board.
Between the board and CPU (if you go X2) you should be under $500. Get decent memory, don't go for the Valueselect stuff. Pick up $130 or so range 2X512 chips from either OCZ, Corsair, or Mushkin. You can also check the mem compatibility with Asus. You can go 2X1GB, but that is for the purist gamer (or someone who plays Battlefield2 alot -- I have 1GB [OCZ Plat Rev2 EL] and Far Cry, Half Life 2, FEAR, all run fine).
What games are you looking to play? You can spend from $140-$800 on a video card.

[Unclassified]

Im looking at playing counter strike and doom3, stuff like that. Im guessing that $500 is american. If i got the asus motherboard with the 3800+ X2, corsair 512mb ram, a decent power supply and a cheap 128 or 256mb graphics card would it be able to hande a fully modded gta sa. If i do that i will get a better graphics card when can afford it. Is there any thing im forgetting? i already have a case and moniter.

[Vitalix]

The video card is actually more important for gaming than the CPU. Will you be doing a lot of workstation stuff other gaming, or mostly gaming?
Remember, the most important item when looking at video cards is not the memory, but the GPU chipset (e.g. nvidia 7800GT, 6800Ultra, ATI 800XT, etc.) the memory is only used for shaders and makes less of an impact than the actual GPU.
Let me know if you will mostly game or mostly use other applications, and I will recommend what I think is best for you (let me know your limit on spending US$ as well).

[Unclassified]

Ive decided on the Asus A8N SLI Premium and the athlon64 3800+ x2 and i can get both of them for about $569 is that a good deal. And what graphics card would be best to start out with, im just going to get one to start with.

This post has been edited by Unclassified: 14 January 2006 - 09:02 AM

[Vitalix]

The best value for a video card right now would be the 6800GS. The 7800GT is the best performer for the money. The minimum card I would go for is the nVidia 6600GT (whichever your pleasure for brand, but most prefer BFG, XFX, and eVGA). You don't want to go any less than that. Don't go ATI since you will not be be able to link them together (unless you go with a Crossfire motherboard). Definitely go with the 256MB memory, for future games and better eye candy at high resolutions.
In the US, the 3800X2 and the ASUS board would cost you about $480 from Newegg.

This post has been edited by Vitalix: 14 January 2006 - 09:22 AM

[Unclassified]

Thanks for the help.

[puntoMX]

The X2 CPUs will give you not much more performance on games, I would go for a single cored CPU. You will save some money on that. More info you will find on the net, google a bit I would say .

[suryad]

And I would recommend to not cheap out on the RAM. Get a gig and you will never regret it.

[ripken204]

puntoMX, on Jan 15 2006, 01:24 PM, said:

The X2 CPUs will give you not much more performance on games, I would go for a single cored CPU. You will save some money on that. More info you will find on the net, google a bit I would say .

i think that dual core does give you extra performance in games compared to single core. lets compare a 2.0ghz dual core with a 2.0ghz single core. with single core you are running the whole OS plus the game all on the same core. for dual core you can divide it up so that 1 core is working the OS and the other is dedicated to the game. this way you will have nothing to interrupt you game.

suryad, on Jan 15 2006, 01:48 PM, said:

And I would recommend to not cheap out on the RAM. Get a gig and you will never regret it.

i recommend getting 1gig minimum for windows xp. 512 just wont cut it at all these days, there are alot of games out that use over 512mbs of ram. 2gigs is the optimal ram to get but it can cost.

[puntoMX]

ripken204, on Jan 15 2006, 02:04 PM, said:

i think that dual core does give you extra performance in games compared to single core. lets compare a 2.0ghz dual core with a 2.0ghz single core. with single core you are running the whole OS plus the game all on the same core. for dual core you can divide it up so that 1 core is working the OS and the other is dedicated to the game. this way you will have nothing to interrupt you game.

Ripken, you think to much . Believe me, there is still no advantage of dual cored CPUs for games. Use google and you find out why. Before I was thinking the same like you, but tried it my self and I was surprised about the not optimal performance. And the price of a dual cored 2GHz CPU comes close to a single cored 2.4GHz CPU, giving you more benefits, believe me...

For games the CPU speed is not that much of importance, just be sure to pick AMD b/c of 3Dnow!+ and since it has also SSE3, it will kick iNTELs a** any time .

This post has been edited by puntoMX: 15 January 2006 - 01:24 PM

[ripken204]

well i dont rly care, im prepared for the future
and the fact that my 2.0ghz dual core is running at 2.6ghz is a nice factor too. i dont think that there is even that much of a difference once you get to these high speeds. games will run flawlessly and that is all that matters.

and what about dual core vid card drivers? i am already getting a boost in my 3dmark05 score b/c of them.

[puntoMX]

That’s just b/c of the CPU test in 3dmark, and it will not be that much of a boost just b/c of drivers . How much did you gain any way? I tested it when the x2 3800 came out so I can’t tell what the new drivers do .

You also say that you are prepared for the future, but I think you will get your self a second job (if you already have one) and buy the newest technology by then. And I’m not talking about years, I know hardware freaks, as I am one of them, and the can’t do longer then a year with there new rig .

[nmX.Memnoch]

There is currently no benefit of having dual core CPUs with games. It's been the same story with SMP systems for the past few years.

However, all of the major game makers are working on dual core support. Take for instance the recent Quake 4 beta patches to add multiprocessing/multicore/multithreading support to the game. Granted right now it's heavily optimized for Intel setups but that's why it's still in beta.

XBox360 and PS3 are both SMP and multicore machines. A lot of the game developers program for both consoles and PC games. Overcoming hurdles on those two consoles will help them overcome hurdles with the PC support as well.

Multicore is definitely the future of both desktop and mobile PC computing so the support will eventually get there. It's just like when Intel first added MMX to their CPUs. The support took a while to get there but once it did the benefits were immediately noticeable.

[Unclassified]

Is this ram any good. Corsair TWIN2X1024A-6400 1GB (2x XMS2 512MB) Twin2X PC-6400 DDR2 RAM, 2x64Mx64non-ECC, 240-pin DIMMs, Unbuffered, 5-5-5-12 and will it work on the Asus A8N SLI Premium?

[Vitalix]

Unclassified, on Jan 16 2006, 04:41 AM, said:

Is this ram any good. Corsair TWIN2X1024A-6400 1GB (2x XMS2 512MB) Twin2X PC-6400 DDR2 RAM, 2x64Mx64non-ECC, 240-pin DIMMs, Unbuffered, 5-5-5-12 and will it work on the Asus A8N SLI Premium?

No, it will not work b/c it is DDR2. You want to stay with DDR memory, and the lower timings the better. Try to stay in the $140 range for 1GB of RAM. Your pleasure on the type of memory, some prefer OCZ, others Corsair, others Patriot or Mushkin. Just try to get timings in the 2-2-2-5 1T speeds at DDR400, or close to it (such as 2-3-2-5 or 2-3-3-6 for more of a budget). The AMDs react much better to tight timings then Intel processors.

Going back to the X2 commentary, since Unclassified will be dropping some cash on this rig, why not futureproof yourself for a year or two by going X2? And the X2 will also help when regular applications (such as Photoshop or perhaps even Powerpoint) start having patches for SMP support since dual core and SMP is becoming much more mainstream now. Duallies/SMP were a specialty sector in the past. Now they are becoming much more common since they are in one chip for both Intel and AMD..

[ripken204]

puntoMX, on Jan 15 2006, 03:09 PM, said:

That’s just b/c of the CPU test in 3dmark, and it will not be that much of a boost just b/c of drivers . How much did you gain any way? I tested it when the x2 3800 came out so I can’t tell what the new drivers do .

You also say that you are prepared for the future, but I think you will get your self a second job (if you already have one) and buy the newest technology by then. And I’m not talking about years, I know hardware freaks, as I am one of them, and the can’t do longer then a year with there new rig .

i usually skipp the cpu test, but with the cpu test i get abut the same score

[suryad]

If people are playing COD2 and Quake4 then yes there is a big boost...adn that is just with a patch. If people want to get max performance from Unreal 3 based games better get your multicores out...there is a general trend for switching to dual core in the software world. I recommend dual cores wholeheartedly especially since we are getting all new engines and so on released soon. I think the CryEngine 2 will be multicore supported as well.