Intel or AMD - Canadian

[bloodeagle]

Hey, I'm looking for alittle help assembling a new gaming system. My current one sucks, quite a lot. As for the amount of money, I'm willing to spend between $600-800, really doesn't matter all that much, but the cheaper, the better. I'm all for overclocking, so if I can cheat that way I gladly will.

So the question is, for the money and the performance *I hope to keep this for 2 years, with only small upgrades* which is better, Intel or AMD? What should I be looking at, or for? What type of motherboards should I look into? Video cards? ATI or Nvidia?

It's been a long time since I've looked into these things, nor have I any knowledge of AMD. So where do I stand with roughly 600-800CAN?

Thanks!

 

[Nazo]

As far as best bang for the buck goes, GENERALLY speaking, AMD combined with an nVidia card. Now, if you start going towards the more expensive high end things it gets more iffy. Until the 7800, ATI was ahead of nVidia in the ultra-high-end rich spoiled kid who likes to burn money range. Generally speaking, right now, the Geforce FX 6600GT is a nice round best bang for your buck kind of thing as it gets pretty decent performance and everything. Though, if you can find one and are staying with AGP, check out the 6800LE, which is a bit better than the 6600GT stock, and potentially can be unlocked to NU or maybe even GT in some very rare cases. 6800LE is OEM only, so it's hard to get a hold of, but, the real reason why it's not enjoying a lot of popularity is that it's AGP only and most people these days are moving on to PCI-Express. On that subject, there's not much real advantage to PCI-E right now, but, it has future potential, so AGP is essentially depreciated and will someday be dropped many years down the line -- though it should still be supported fully for a while yet. It's kind of up to you whether you want to be reath with PCI-E, but, I'm inclined to say that by the time you have to go to it, you'll probably be needing to update your CPU/MB anyway.

Same kind of thing sort of goes for the processors. Right now the high end processors on both ends are insanely expensive. Even not quite so high end is tricky. Like those new Venice cores, which are supposed to run cooler and quite possibly overclock to a much higher range with stability (one reviewer was running a 3500+ at 2.8GHz with stability.) The main thing is, if you do get an AMD and you get an Athlon 64, you should try to get a 90nm process chip as the 130s can get a bit hot and don't overclock as well. The winchester is the cheaper of them, but, you wouldn't regret spending the extra for the venice, just don't go crazy and buy the latest and greatest. ^_^ I suggest that you do go with a 3200+ at least for whatever you get. By that token, if you go with Intel, you do need to try to get something in the 3.2GHz range unless it's REALLY good (don't keep up much with all these different P4 versions anymore, but, I seem to recall that there was one with an insanely huge cache size, I think 1MB, so that might get some extra bit of power out of a lower clock.)

BTW, if you do get AMD, generally speaking the nForce series is about the best chipsets you'll get these days. Via has always had some issues where some things like AGP just weren't quite as fast as they should have been, and, in my experience, SiS is just plain low end to begin with. Not that nForce is perfect. For one thing, you might actually get better performance with an ATI card on a Via system. I haven't tested. I do know my old Radeon 9600 Pro ran pretty tolerably on a nForce 2 though... I don't know about Via with PCI-E right now as none of us have gone to PCI-E yet since AGP is still more cost-effective -- this won't be true forever as that HSI bridge costs a little extra on native PCI-E cards with nVidia, and ATI is likly to either charge more in the long run or even drop support for AGP sooner (they seem to only care about ultra-high end ultra-expensive stuff these days anyway, so to heck with more low end things apparently.) It costs them more since they decided not to come up with their own version of the HSI bridge so have to make two seperate cards.

 

[o0akoni0o]

i'm not too sure on this, but thats better $450-650 USD right? anyways if thats the case you can buy a decent system now, but to future proof it for about two years you will wanna spend a bit more. basically a solid budget system right now consists of an AMD64 (s939 if you can afford) it, with a nforce chipset mobo, and an nvidia 6800. i'll leave the details to someone else, but imo with what you're looking for that should be the minimum you should be getting.

 

[forumposter32]

I might answer this later but I have many things to do today. I ordered stuff from tigerdirect.ca so I know what it's like...

Mod Edit - There are already half a million threads addressing this question. The AMD / Intel decision or even ATI / nVidia questions are very general and the best answer is probably "it depends". Search the forums, read what has already been discussed, and come back with more specific questions. You'll learn something about the hardware and make a better purchase decision based on your needs that way.

Good Luck - B.B.S.