New system to build, need some info.

[kahuna]

Looking for a little advice.

I currently own a rock-stable A7N8X/Athlon XP2700-based system with an ATI Radeon 9700 pro GPU and 768Mb of PC3200 DDR ram. I'm a 39 year old gamer, and want to move to the next level in anticipation of Half-Life 2. Had no problems with running Doom 3, artifacts or otherwise.

This is my question: (and yes, I trolled the forum looking for the answer already)

I want to move to the 939-based Athlon-64, but am unsure of two things;

AGP 8X or PCI-E? If I'm only running 1 6800 Ultra or X800 (this is about all I can afford!), can PCI-E give me the same framerate as a single AGP 8X? The reviews only tell you what's achievable with 2 GPU's vs AGP.

EIDE-based HDD or SATA RAID? Why?

BTW, who makes the best mobo? why? I've had bad experiences with MSI and Epox. My ASUS board is ok, but I don't think it's great.

I've been building my own PC's for about 11 years. I've always been able to keep up with technology, but lately, it's moving faster than i am. Could use a little help.

The most important thing to me is legacy support. I upgrade every 3 years, and if PCI-E and the 939-pin package is going to be like Slot A, I'm not interested.

Thanks
Kev

 

[Legend]

I'd say wait a couple of months for nforce4. (and yes, I hate the waiting game, too) If your system can play Doom3 well, then you're doing good for right now.

Sata is definitely the way to go now, but RAID is actually pretty unimportant, I don't care what anyone says. Unless you really need redundancy (the only good feature for home use, imo) the gains are not worth the cost, really. Just get a single Sata drive. Either one of the 10K Western Digital Raptors or that "new" Maxtor drive with 16mb cache, if you're looking for best performance.

PCI Express isn't really worth anything as of now with graphics cards, and won't really mean anything until those SLI boards, like the nforce4, start coming out. 8x wasn't close to being saturated yet.

Best mobo question is begging for a flame since it's so subjective, but I'll still say Abit in terms of overclocking. I also have a Chaintech board that does pretty nice, but their boards seem to be win some-lose some with different chipsets.

 

[Anarchonixx]

AGP 8X or PCI-E? If I'm only running 1 6800 Ultra or X800 (this is about all I can afford!), can PCI-E give me the same framerate as a single AGP 8X? The reviews only tell you what's achievable with 2 GPU's vs AGP.

The only real advantage of PCI-E so far is the ability to go SLI. If you're not doing that, they are essentially the same. The AGP bus is not a bottleneck for games currently, this is why the jump from AGP 4x to 8x was disappointing.

EIDE-based HDD or SATA RAID? Why?

Well, you're comparing apples and oranges here. Are you saying IDE or SATA, or IDE RAID or SATA RAID? You can run a SATA drive not RAIDed. And anyway, with SATA drives being as cheap as they are now, I see no downside in going with SATA, but again ATA133 wasn't really a bottleneck, and the 150MBps SATA offers isn't a huge improvement. There are high speed SATA drives available that are great performers, though (namely WD Raptors), and aren't available for PATA. So if you're planning to get one of these, SATA is a must, but not neccesary otherwise.

The most important thing to me is legacy support. I upgrade every 3 years, and if PCI-E and the 939-pin package is going to be like Slot A, I'm not interested.

PCI-E will be around for a long time surely. And the 939 socket processors should be around for plenty of more time as well, considering they're pretty new to the desktop consumers, and 754 being phased out.

Sidenote: This is all based on probably old information (I haven't completely kept up with things lately, as I don't really have the money to spend on upgrades), but it should be pretty accurate. Plenty of people will correct me if I'm wrong anyway, so it's all good.

 

[kahuna]

Thanks, Legend. Yeah, I just read that sidebar in CPU magazine on the NForce 4 chipset. I have the NForce 2 on my ASUS board and like it. Supposedly, ASUS has a Nforce 4 board already in the consumer ppeline for a December (?) launch. I like the hardware firewall that Nforce 4 offers.

Thanks for your info.
Kev

 

[4keatimj]

PCI-E may claim to be future-proof, but I feel that AGP will stick around for a while. No game has used all the bandwidth of AGP 8x, and even HL2 probably won't. I would stick with AGP.

Also, go with SATA technology. RAID can get expensive (you need two HDs, remember), and the only RAID setup that offers performance for the home user is RAID 0. I would stick with SATA, and go for something like the WD Raptor (having seen good specs and good reviews) to offer the max performance.

Best mobo question is begging for a flame since it's so subjective, but I'll still say Abit in terms of overclocking. I also have a Chaintech board that does pretty nice, but their boards seem to be win some-lose some with different chipsets.

Yeah, it could end up with some flaming, but I'm going to stick my head out and say that ASUS make the best boards. They offer a lot of features, all the premium stuff, as well as reliability and performance. I would also say Abit and MSI, have had good experiences with those too. But still recommend ASUS.

 

[kahuna]

The only real advantage of PCI-E so far is the ability to go SLI. If you're not doing that, they are essentially the same. The AGP bus is not a bottleneck for games currently, this is why the jump from AGP 4x to 8x was disappointing.

See, I see SLI as a waste of money right now. The next gen GPU's are outrageously expensive and are so only because the developers know that they can get that kind of $ for them.(sorry, my opinion) Now, let's say that SLI becomes a mainstream idea, which it will, at least for a while. How is your average home consumer going to afford $800 or more for 2 cards as the norm. I'm thinking that I may wish to pursue this in the future, but right now is not a valid option. Here's a question I haven't seen yet: The original SLI was a setup that ran 2 Voodoo 2's side by side, and there was a jumber cable as well. The two cards had to be identical in driver version and build version. Now, with the SLI options now being produced, can I (for example) buy an ATI X800 and then add a card from ATI or Nvidia later? I'm thinking that answer is no. I'll bet that the two cards must be identical, at least for best performance.

Well, you're comparing apples and oranges here. Are you saying IDE or SATA, or IDE RAID or SATA RAID? You can run a SATA drive not RAIDed. And anyway, with SATA drives being as cheap as they are now, I see no downside in going with SATA, but again ATA133 wasn't really a bottleneck, and the 150MBps SATA offers isn't a huge improvement. There are high speed SATA drives available that are great performers, though (namely WD Raptors), and aren't available for PATA. So if you're planning to get one of these, SATA is a must, but not neccesary otherwise.

I'm sorry, I meant to leave the RAID off.

PCI-E will be around for a long time surely. And the 939 socket processors should be around for plenty of more time as well, considering they're pretty new to the desktop consumers, and 754 being phased out.

Sidenote: This is all based on probably old information (I haven't completely kept up with things lately, as I don't really have the money to spend on upgrades), but it should be pretty accurate. Plenty of people will correct me if I'm wrong anyway, so it's all good.

Thanks for your info! Much appreciated!
Kev