Buying the bleeding edge?

C

CestusGW

n00b
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Sep 20, 2004
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Alright, I'm finally tired of saving money. Tired of having the budget version this, the price-to-performance ratio that. I don't want a processor two or three generations behind, I don't want the one generation old bottom-of-the-line video card.

So on that note, I've decided to hop on AM2 as soon as I can lay hands on it. I'm going to spend some money, and get the current, system-of-the-moment components. But I've never done this before. I've always bought the highly-available, or even "they stopped making these a year ago we're running out" parts.

So I'm living in a small town in Canada, and the nearest major city is Ottawa (which is a good 200 klicks away {I live in the middle of the woods, alright?}) What difficulties will I face trying to pounce on an AM2 CPU and motherboard when they launch? Should I be making a reservation with a store in Ottawa that does delivery? Should I be camping outside some store in the city on launch day? Doing sexual favours for store owners? Or can I hop on these parts with a website like tigerdirect.ca on launch day? Will there be much price jacking, will it really hurt my wallet to get these parts at launch instead of weeks later (with much of the summer gone)? And finally, will I write a sentence in this paragraph that doesn't include a question mark?

So any advice on purchasing parts in this unfamiliar "new and shiny" territory would be appreciated.
 
I think it will be available online long before it's available in stores.
 
Still use caution. It's fun to be one of the first through the gate, but you might get your hands on something glitchy with kinks that need fixed.
 
This is just my highly subjective opinion ...

From what I've been reading in various forums etc AM2 may not be the way to go :( It appears that this move may mainly be motivated by the cheaper price of DDR2 memory and performance gains (if any) will be limited by higher latencies.

FWIW if you want to go with AMD (and money isn't an object) then look at a higher end CPU's (I understand that the s939 opterons OC pretty well) and pair it with a SLI or ATI crossfire mobo running 2 7900 GTX's or X1900 cards. Oh yes, and get 2 Gigs of some decent (OCZ, Corsiar etc) RAM. The latter I've really only found necessary with BF2 but what the hell :cool:

FWIW I wish I was in your position - I've just had to order a cheap s939 mobo to replace a kaput Gigabyte SLI board :(

HTH

Bill
 
If you are going to go with AM2, wait atleast 2 weeks. The price jacking will stop after that and there might be a revision out. Another good thing about waiting is that you will be able to read lots of reviews about it's performance relative to a s939 opteron 165 or 170.

2gigs of RAM and SLi 7900GTX's are a must for highend gaming
 
I'm planning on having this be my development (I tinker with all kinds of code, and am recompiling packages for my Archlinux install on a regular basis), schoolwork (4th year computer science) and gaming system (playing EVE Online, Oblivion, and FPSes like FEAR mostly)

I was looking at getting a single 7900GT, an SLI mobo (probably whatever ASUS launches with, I've had nothing but good experiences with them), an X2, 4200 or maybe 4400, and then 1 to 2 gigs of RAM as money allows.

I'm really not interested in buying into S939. What I've been doing all along is buying into the old, dying, or already obsolete technologies to save money, and it's gotten me nothing but frustrated. So I'll keep tabs on tigerdirect.ca, ncix.com and other Canadian web sites for parts, and watch out for price spikes within the first couple of weeks past launch.
 
For what you're planning on buying, there's no reason to not go to 2GB of RAM, the price difference is minimal compared to the rest of the parts.
 
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