[thegreenmonk]

Hello, all

I finally have some money to buy a new setup, the problem is I have no idea what to go for.  I do a fair amount of CADing, but mainly play games or use word etc.  Mainly just need a handle on whether to go AMD/Intel or Dual or Quad core.

Cheers

[Al Tarket]

it might be expensive but Nvidia's Quadro card is the best for CADing, but i do not recommand it because of the price. if your looking for computer games though, i would say ATI has the best speeds however generally more unreliable then an nvidia card within the graphics. my 3850hd agp is already playing in on freespace 2 quiet a lot but not on other games, so bad card or incompatibilities, if incompatibilities it would imply fs2o is not fully compatible for all pcs.

the Pheonom or Quad core's are getting fastest and faster, these days you can find 14 ghz cpu's but i would imagine you need a top range mobo with high tech cooling solutions, couple that with 2x 1gb ati or nivida cards with a X-fi champion or higher and you probably have one of the best rigs, because of the power requirements try find a 1000w psu and make sure it's a good one.

[Androgeos Exeunt]

Is getting Intel Core 2 Duo Extreme a good idea?

[Nuke]

its a very good idea, getting a core 2 quad is a better idea

also if i was doing of cad, go with a quadro card instead of a geforce.

[colecampbell666]

Last time I checked, the FireGL 8650 pwned the Quadro 5500. At 500$ less.

14 ghz cpu's

First things first. The CPU speed is not found by adding the cores. A quad core at 3 Ghz is not 12 Ghz, it is 4 separate processors, each running at 3 Ghz.

The best choice right now is the Q9450, and the FireGL 8650.

How much are you willing to spend?

[Al Tarket]

lol so be it. 14 ghz, split between 4 cores.

[Ghostavo]

That would imply that you could increase and decrease the frequency of each core up to 14 GHz, so no.

[colecampbell666]

Exactly. 3.5 Ghz, on each of 4 cores.

[CP5670]

If you're primarily interested in games, get a standard gamer card. They're much cheaper than the professional cards and still do a reasonably good job with 3D modeling programs. Actually, I'm not sure if the current 4800 and GTX 200 lines even have workstation versions yet.

A quad core is not very useful in most games, but it will be more so with CAD programs. The Q9450 would be your best choice.

[Androgeos Exeunt]

Whatever you do, try not to get an Intel chipset. I have one on my MacBook and it makes thrusters look like razors cutting the back of their parent ships...

[Al Tarket]

amd cores i have never tried for 7 years, because it never told me the actual of speed on the cpu. it was also a fateful day for me, that cpu just exploded and caused a huge fire which burnt down my parents house and i had no choice but to move into Jerusalem because the council wouldn't allow me to live outside the city limits. ive never gone back to amd since that day. strange thing was the analysts said that the cpu wasn't fully constructed, which i though was strange considering amd is a good company.

that was a one off, dont let this put you off from buying amd cores.

[Mars]

 
I'm not sure what you mean by "the actual speed of the CPU" basically the only way to tell is through benchmarks. Also, typically, if a CPU blows it does so with a small puff of smoke, not a destructive fire.

I don't have much expirience with high end cores; but every modern (using post 1995 parts) computer I've build (4 out of 5 are still running) have used AMD cores. I haven't had any trouble with the CPUs... graphics cards, memory, and hard drives, yes, CPU, not yet.

[colecampbell666]

Whatever you do, try not to get an Intel chipset. I have one on my MacBook and it makes thrusters look like razors cutting the back of their parent ships...

That's an onboard GPU, which he will not get. It's impossible to get removable Intel GPUs. And that is a problem with the game engine, the thusters cut through ships on any card.

if a CPU blows it does so with a small puff of smoke, not a destructive fire.

move into Jerusalem because the council wouldn't allow me to live outside the city limits

I think he was exaggerating.

[WeatherOp]

Whatever you do, try not to get an Intel chipset. I have one on my MacBook and it makes thrusters look like razors cutting the back of their parent ships...

Maybe I'm wrong, but in ever review I've seen both the Core2Duo and Quad blow away anything AMD has on the market right now.

In any case, I just bought a C2D 8400 3Ghz(OC'ed to 3.2) and it's running extremely well, my older C2D 6850 was very powerful in it's on right.

[Jeff Vader]

Whatever you do, try not to get an Intel chipset. I have one on my MacBook and it makes thrusters look like razors cutting the back of their parent ships...

Maybe I'm wrong, but in ever review I've seen both the Core2Duo and Quad blow away anything AMD has on the market right now.

... Keeping in mind that chipset =/= processor.

[Spicious]

Can't forget chipset != onboard graphics.
Intel chipsets are the way to go unless you want SLI.

[Scuddie]

Considering the overwhelming price and exhausting toll SLI systems have, I'd say get a P35 chipset.  nVidias chipsets are god awful now.

* Scuddie nostalgically remembers his old AMD 8131 chipset and sheds a tear in mourning of better days past.

[Nuke]

cpu clock frequency is only one factor in a long equation that states how fast a cpu is. other things you must consider is how many floating point and integer units the chip has, how many instruction set extensions it has. other things like bus width and memory speed play a role too. not sure if anyone has an actual equation written down (if they do there are of factors). you cant say that clock speed is performance, but you can say that performance is proportional to clock speed.

[Dark RevenantX]

I'm on an Athlon X2 5600+ with 4gb of DDR2 800mhz Crucial SDRAM and a Radeon HD 4870.  It runs perfectly for me, so beyond getting a quad-core processor I don't think you need anything more.

[colecampbell666]

I thought you got a new PC?