Is it worth the upgrade

[Tin_10]

Hey guys, back with a quick and simple(might be complex) question. I run a small computer buisness, www.stechservices.com. With it, I try to be on the cutting edge, well near it if I can, of technology. I have no problem suggesting 64bit processing, a better agp card, more ram, more hard drive space, but I am having a slight problem with myself.

I want to be able to suggest 64bit processing in the matter of new chipsets, including DDR2, PCI-e, and possibly SLI systems. So my question is this, first off, from my system that is in my sig, is it worth the upgrade to go to 939, DDR2, and PCI-E? Simple question - is it worth it? I want to explore the possibilities of this new technology, but if the cost factor for the upgrade isnt worth it, then I simply wont do it, but if you guys can convince me otherwise, I certainly will! Thanks for all your help in advance!

tin_10

 

[waddles]

DDR2 RAM is twice the price for trivial performance gain, and video cards are not even using up all the bandwith of AGP yet, so you get left with tons of wasted bandwith for PCI-e cards. However, both are the wave of the future. All the new video cards are coming out in PCIe, and everything is moving towards DDR2. S939 is going to be the chipset of the dual core processors.

Basically, if you want to shell out money in the interest of "future-proofing" (I hate that term) and get all of those, go right ahead. All three interfaces are certainly the top performers right now, but the technology is expensive and, at this point, unrefined. You can't go wrong if you get an 939/ddr2/pcie motherboard and will notice a good performance increase, but it will cost you.

I'm just going to wait around a year or so until the technology has been through a revision or two and prices come down.

 

[HvyMtl]

DDR2 has not been accepted yet by Amd - so buying that ram will give you no boost as it wont fit in any AMD based motherboards yet ( say 2007. The present and near future cpu cores have the memory controller incorporated - thus the reason that DDR2 has not been an immediate upgrade that Amd has followed as it means a reworking of the cpu.So the present single cores and the new just announced dual cores will still be DDR. Expect DDR2 when they move to thier 65nm core.)
pci express, is well, over rated as there have not been any pci-e cards other than video cards to come out yet. I hope this clears up in the next 6 months or so. SLI is a neato thing but has not gone past nvidia only yet - and software support for it is near zero as of yet. Give it a little and hope that the nvidia sli and the ati sli is cross compatible. Besides, there has not been a show of use for high end work stations to use it yet. That is when sli will go well, when you can use it in your graphics work stations.
Basically wait until you can show off newer tech with it (like when the creative audigy 2/4 replacement comes out on a pci-e card, or a scsi card does.)
64 bit is fine as Windoze XP64 is supposed to be out. (and linux is already compatible.)
Do look for the new SATA hard drives with NCQ as your clients will get a boost from them on the high end work stations/ servers...

 

[kirbyrj]

939 and PCI-E are worth it just for the expansion possibilities in the future (if you're buying new now). If you're carrying over a nice AGP card, then you can still get 939 w/AGP. DDR2 is an Intel thing only at this point. The prices are coming down, but the A64's seem to like the lower latencies better than the extra speed that DDR2 offers.

SLI is really only useful for gaming. If a client (or you) wants to game as fast as possible and with no regard for price, SLI can't be beat.

64-bit all depends on what Windows XP 64-bit does (with apologies to Linux). Personally, I don't see a big change until Longhorn since WinXP is already widespread and that's the group that software companies are going to write to.