[magatsu1]

Originally posted by pyro-manic
Yeah, but an  Athlon64 FX costs the wrong side of £600, plus £150+ for the mobo. VERY bad unless you're loaded....

jeez, you can get a "high street package" (ie; PC World etc)  for not much more...

[aldo_14]

Originally posted by IceFire
You've got to balance your processor, memory, and video card requirements.  The latest games use that high end processor to do the physics calculations while the video card does the visual rendering.  The split is almost total these days...games with high physics loads on a slow processor and a fast video card are still slow.

So you'd be best to sort of get something inbetween for both.

Right now I'm recommending the FX cards less and less.  The recent DX9 tests show their current inadequacy.  There are issues that need to be resolved....DX9 needs to be updated for them to work better (the current DX9 does not support the architecture that nVidia is employing to get the maximum out of their cards) and nVidia needs to implement new drivers.  Nonetheless, the ATI cards are a good choice these days.

A Radeon 9700 Pro is still a top performer (I have one ) and its price is very low...if you can find one.  Same will be for the 9800 Pro because the 9800 XT just came out and its quite a bit faster too.

The whole video card debate is kinda of dodgy, though... i'd agree that the top end ATI cards seem to be the best, but I wasn;t so sure about mid range - everything I've heard seems to hint that the FX566 has a marginal edge over it's ATI equivalent.  there's also the factor of card specific optimisations with certain games, which might be a factor... I think Half Life 2 will be optimised for ATI cards (owing to the fact it's being bundled with the new cards  - albeit as 'buy for free' voucher), but doom 3 for nVidia.....

[Admiral LSD]

Originally posted by Grey Wolf 2009
True. If you were going to go for one of the new A64s, I'd suggest the 3200+. That would only put you out the same amount as an equivalent P4.

So it costs the same amount as a 2.6Ghz P4?

[phreak]

well with recent developments, it looks like any nVidia card is out of the question.  unless its fake of course.

[Grey Wolf]

Originally posted by Admiral LSD


So it costs the same amount as a 2.6Ghz P4?

It costs the same as 3.2C, which has the same performance in games
Now if only they had a better implementation of SSE2, and it would handle as well as the 3.2C in rendering....

[Admiral LSD]

So in other words, if you buy a 2.6C P4 and overclock it to 3.2 you're still getting better value for money than either a "proper" 3.2C (which is a joke anyway as all the C class are "proper" 3.0-3.2Ghz chips) or an Athlon 64 3200+?

[Grey Wolf]

Yes, but really only if you already have a Socket 478 motherboard and you want to have 1 GB of memory. Socket 478's lifetime is running out, while Socket 754 will last for a while and doesn't require dual channel ram. Not to mention you can pull of a good 30% overclock of the 3200+ if you have good ram, which will put you at 2.6 GHz, beating the overclocked 2.6C P4.

[übermetroid]

So what is the ATI equal of the FX5600?  And what is a great motherboard for it?


This is price line as of a few days ago.
$109   _-_   GeForce FX 5600 128MB
$59    _-_   nForce2 chipset
$71    _-_   Athlon XP 2500 333

[Grey Wolf]

Depends on what you're doing for it. If you want a motherboard incredibly stable at stock speeds, get a Gigabyte. If you want a motherboard that overclocks really well, get an Abit. If you want a balance, get an Asus. If you want a cheap (price-wise, not quality) get a Biostar.

[magatsu1]

so like, how do you overclock a cpu ?

[Grey Wolf]

You go into the BIOS, usually by hitting the delete key ("Del") during boot. Then you go into either Adv. Chipset Options, Frequency/Voltage Control, or possibly another one of the menus (varies depending on the motherboard, check your manual). Then you find the FSB option. Increase it by about 5. Save your changes and let the computer boot into Windows. Then run either SuperPi or 3DMark2001SE to test stability. If it is successful, go back into the BIOS and increase the FSB by 5 more. In the event that you no longer can increase the FSB, try raising the voltage on the RAM and the VCORE (be careful with this) or increasing the multiplier.  If at any time the computer fails to boot open up the case and reset the CMOS jumper.