Best bang for the buck in an AMD system

JMEaT · Post by **JMEaT** » Fri Feb 25, 2005 3:44 pm

Well it has been a looooong time since I've upgraded my system, and have fallen behind the times a bit with the hardware. I'd like to upgrade to a decent system, but not break neck cutting edge, cause the new 64Bit proccessors seem pretty expensive. Looking to upgrade board, 3d card (nVidia recomendations, no offence ATi fans), RAM, CPU. I currently have a 430 Watt Enermax power supply. Not too sure how strong the rails are. I'd like to take my 3 Western Digital 80GB drives and RAID 5 'em. Any recomendations on a good hardware controller card would be sweet.

I currently have an:

AthlonXP 2200+
1GB PC2100 RAM
GeForce 3 64MB
MSI MS-6380E 1.0 (Via 333)
SoundBlaster Live!
3 WD800JBs
Plextor 4x DVD+R
Linksys v5 NIC

Thanks for the help!

Testiculese · Post by **Testiculese** » Fri Feb 25, 2005 4:42 pm

The 2200 is really just fine. Get a 2800 if you think you need it, they're pretty cheap. Skip the processor and get better RAM, I'd say.

A BFG/MSI FX5900 is great, an Ultra version if you find it. They're dropping in price pretty quickly now that the 6800's are dropping.

I'm partial to MSI's or Asus's nForce series motherboards. I've had problems with Gigabyte, Tyan, and most others. Granted, this was in the past, they mught have gained some respectability since.

Sparkle, or PC Power and Cooling for PSU. Everyone worthy recommends these.

Most MSI and Asus comes with raid, tho' it might only be on the SATA side. Otherwise, a Promise card I think is what is generally leaned on.

Krom · Post by **Krom** » Fri Feb 25, 2005 5:06 pm

A 939 pin 3200 to 3500 system will delever way more performance then a any XP system can handle. In order for my XP chip to match a 939 pin .90 nm Athlon 64 part in performance I would have to be clocked about 900 MHz faster. For motherboards, avoid NF4 boards till the revision 2s come around, the first gen boards are often buggy. Don't get less then 1 GB of RAM.

As for the video card, a 6600 GT card will beat a 5900 card and a 6800 GT will totally destroy a 5900. AGP is still fine, get PCI-Express only if you want to suffer the price premium and plan to upgrade the video card to better models later.

RAID5 is going to require a PCI RAID card to pull off, stress probably knows of one that will do the job. It would probably be more worthwhile to morror two 200-250 GB drives without the PCI card then RAID5 three 80 GB drives tho.

Onboard sound has vastly improved over the last few years, NF3 or NF4 motherboards will work fine without the need for a extra sound card. Onboard LAN is pratically a standard today, and half of the motherboards have gigabit.

The NEC3520 DVD burner would be a nice upgrade, it does 16x +/- and it can burn DL disks too, for less then $70 shipped.

MD-2389 · Post by **MD-2389** » Sat Feb 26, 2005 11:06 pm

If you're going to use the onboard sound, make sure you get a board with "SoundStorm". Thats what I have on my nforce2 board and it totally blows creative's ★■◆● out of the water. Hands down. Going from my old SB Live to this was like going from a 286 to a quantum computer. I could definitely hear the difference in audio quality. Hell, I can encode to dolby on-the-fly! To my knowlege, SoundStorm is the only audio codec with this capability. I've got this baby hooked up to my 1000W surround sound sytem and lets just say I'm lovin' it.

pATCheS · Post by **pATCheS** » Mon Feb 28, 2005 4:12 am

I just got an A64 3000+ 939, A8V Deluxe, and a gig of RAM. Already had a 9800 Pro 128mb, 160gb WD HDD, and a DVD-ROM. For less than $450, my system went from fast to extremely fast

I previously had a Barton 2600 on the A7N8X-E Deluxe. The board was extremely kickass, but the Barton is a sad excuse for a processor compared to the A64. If nothing is tying you to the old Socket A architecture (price isn't one of these things, a Barton 3200 is more expensive than an A64 2800, and the A64 will run circles around it), *definitely* get an A64 CPU. And just so you know, Socket 939 supports dual core CPUs and dual channel memory. Socket 754 does not, and it's not a whole lot cheaper.

My only complaints about the A8V are the drivers (quite a few different ones to install, whereas the nForce drivers come in one tidy package), and its onboard audio. It is crap compared to nVidia's SoundStorm stuff. I mostly got this board because we sell it at the place I work, and it has an AGP slot for my good ol' 9800 Pro, which is still a very respectable card.

Audigy 2 sound cards give you *very* slightly better performance than SoundStorm according to the benchies; I highly recommend SoundStorm. It's extremely kickass

If you have an NF2 board, get the older 4.27 driver package (or any 4.xx I suppose. I used the 4.27 set). The audio drivers in the 5.xx packages suck ass (lots of bugs; in UT2004, many sound positions were screwed up, making it more difficult to play), and my system was overall slower with them.

FX series graphics cards have **terrible** PS 2.0 performance. Get a 6600 GT (maybe an ultra if the price is justified. if it's anywhere near a 6800GT in cost, jump for the 6800GT), or a 6800 GT/Ultra if you want nVidia (no non-GT/non-Ultra cards, they're a waste of money. GT cards are more cost-effective and can often be OC'd beyond Ultra speeds), or if you want ATI (they've improved their drivers quite a lot over the last two years, although I still favor nVidia's drivers... got the 9800 for free though, so what can I say

) the 9800 Pro (not the non-Pro, which has half the memory bandwidth! huge performance hit for that.), X700 (same performance class as the 9800, but PCI Express), or higher.

RAID5 isn't as fast as RAID0 unless you want to pay a premium for a good RAID card (with which I am not familiar, sorry), and even then it would still have slightly higher latencies (probably negligible) because of the math that the controller has to perform. RAID5 is more server-oriented, and does very well in those environments. If you need reliability *and* speed, RAID10 (aka RAID0+1) is a better option. Else, RAID0 on three drives... faaaast

So... dump everything you have but the hard drives (your RAM is too slow, get PC3200 or better), keep the case if you want, make sure your PSU is in good shape (if it's more than a year old, seriously consider replacing it; PSUs die horrible and often-catastrophic deaths), and either use the rest to build a low-end system to keep or sell, or sell the parts. Unless you can live with 4x DVD burning.

You'll end up spending anywhere from $500 to $900+.

MD-2389, the SB Live is Creative's budget card series. Of course they suck nuts.

I work at a computer store that sells a cheapo Live card in a white box for $27.

okay, I think that's everything...

Intel17 · Post by **Intel17** » Wed Mar 02, 2005 2:03 pm

For a CPU, you're going to want to go the Socket 939 route, as you can get *extremely* fast CPU's for a relatively low price. I'd suggest an Athlon 64 3200+ as those are pretty cheap right now, and the platform will be upgradable over time, so you can pick up some faster single core chips or some dual core chips in the future, basically saving you a motherboard upgrade.

Now for a motherboard, I'd personally go with an Abit AN8, because Abit usually makes excellent stuff (running an Abit IS7 now actually), and it's based on the nVidia nForce 4 chipset, and I rank them just as high as intel in terms of chipsets. Plus, it's not too, too expensive.

I'd say your sound card is pretty good, and I don't know if it's just me, but there's not a whole hell of a lot of difference between the soundcards these days in terms of gaming, especially since most sound systems in modern game engines are host based.

Now for RAM, heh, a while back when I was putting together my current rig, I bought some expensive mushkin ram with 2-2-2 timing, but it was very crashy, and I eventually returned it, and got some much cheaper Crucial PC3200 with "seemingly" slow timings at CAS3. However this stuff overclocks to about 440MHz with absolutely no cooling what-so-ever and is extremely stable. So i'd reccomend you to get Crucial because it's fast, built with margin and overall works perfectly. You should get a Gig of PC3200.

On the graphics card...don't get any nVidia NV3x class cards. Pixel Shader 2.0 is being used much more widely in todays games, and it would be unwise to invest in any card in that class. For simple pixel shaders it would be fine, but for much more complex stuff with more instructions, it absolutely dies (although it has a large maximum instruction count, ironic huh?. So since you're unwilling to go down the ATi route (i've got a Radeon 9800 pro and i've never had a single problem, although the drivers for ATi still have quite a ways to go in terms of catching up with nVidia's excellent ones)you should try to get *AT LEAST* a 6600GT, but it would probably be much more future proof to go with a 6800GT (however, you'll see a *huge* speed and quality boost in the latest games with any 6x00 card so it's win/win).

On RAID5, I agree with pATCheS.

So, those are my reccomendations!

Krom · Post by **Krom** » Wed Mar 02, 2005 2:25 pm

One recent article on anandtech about SLI motherboards might catch your interest. Even if you aren't going to get a SLI system the review is extensive and covers the motherboards quite well. At any rate some of the NF4 boards are looking better and better.

http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=2358

MD-2389 · Post by **MD-2389** » Wed Mar 02, 2005 6:05 pm

pATCheS wrote:MD-2389, the SB Live is Creative's budget card series. Of course they suck nuts. I work at a computer store that sells a cheapo Live card in a white box for $27.

I've had that card ever since they were first released, and at the time they weren't budget cards.

(That card is so old it doesn't even have the "digital out" jack.)

Admiral LSD · Post by **Admiral LSD** » Wed Mar 02, 2005 8:32 pm

SoundStorm isn't included on nForce3, 4 or even later nForce2 examples (nVidia dropped the MCP-T south bridge in favour of two more variants of the MCP SB: One with SATA and RAID, the other with Gigabit LAN) unfortunately

Still, with an Athlon64 you're not exactly going to be seriously starving anything of CPU power while it's servicing an onboard AC'97 codec.

Krom · Post by **Krom** » Wed Mar 02, 2005 9:05 pm

Yeah, they stopped making those after the NF2, too bad too, mine kicks. =)

JMEaT · Post by **JMEaT** » Sun Mar 06, 2005 8:45 am

Thanks for the feedback