PC longevity...Intel Or AMD?

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BrainDanceR

Weaksauce
Joined
Aug 18, 2004
Messages
109
Hi Peeps,

I am looking at buying a brand new PC to replace my aging old PC.
My current PC has been good to me, I bought it almost 6 years ago (2000),
I have kept the original motherboard, but upgraded memory,cpu,gfx card from time to time.

I have gone from:
CPU:
AMD 900Mhz--->1400Mhz--->Athlon XP 2500+

Memory(PC133):
128MB--->256MB--->512MB--->1GB

Gfx:
3dfx 4500--->Geforce 3 ti200--->Radeon 9600Pro---->9800pro.

I can play oblivion on this at medium/low details, so its not done badly!

But now I am looking at buying a brand new PC (don`t want to upgrade this one as I need to replace mobo,cpu,mem,card,and the case sucks...I`ll keep it as a backup box).

If I get close to 5 years out of my next box, I`ll be more than happy...Although I realise I was lucky in choosing an Asus AMD mobo as they really did have great CPU support and the board lasted well.

So...

Question is, if I buy a new PC, with longevity/upgradability in mind, should I either:

A) Buy a Conroe system, which seems like a good idea in the short term, but intel are well known for changing their sockets often. Do we know if the next chip after Conroe will be compatiable with the Conroe MBs (I guess not)...If not, what will be the fastest Conroe chip?

B) Buy an AM2 system, which maybe slower than a Conroe, but by the sounds of things, will have a longer life than Conroe system as it should support K8L?

I realise I am guessing and asking questions that noone really knows the answer to yet...

Thanks for any ideas...

:D
 
It doesn't realy matter if your a socket behind. People with socket 939 are very happy, people love their dual core, opetrons, or like me, their single cores. People also love their socket 754. It doesn't really matter, for instance lets say you have socket 754. People are telling you to upgrade to socket 939 or socke AM2 because of dual core. If you just game and don't run multiple apps at the same time then why sink 300-600 $ for a dual core cpu that you won't use. I would just go for conroe.
 
Yes, I think going towards conroe would be best for you since you seem to like staying with the same rig.
 
i figure i need to throw in the "past performance does not guarantee future returns" line.

Just because AMD had a nice upgrade path in the past does not mean that it will be that way in the future. Same is valid for Intel. There are rumors at XS that the quad core Kentville (or whatever it's called) will work on a Conroe board, but you never know until stuff comes out.
 
Well, Core 2 will be moving to Socket P in early 2007, so the word goes. So it's probably better to not buy it at first if you want longevity.
 
I put together the rig in my sig about a week ago, largely for longevity purposes. With my current setup, I can upgrade to opty 285's (dual core at 2.6 ghz) or 256's (single core at 2.8). AMD may even release 290's and 258's, so there's a lot of room.

This mobo also supports SLi, so even though it's only a single 7600gt atm, it can take a lot more.

Finally, I can use up to 16gb of RAM, 32gb if I were to only use ddr333.

It was an expensive setup, but it should be plenty sufficient for a while, and has a ton of headroom.
 
dandragonrage said:
Well, Core 2 will be moving to Socket P in early 2007, so the word goes. So it's probably better to not buy it at first if you want longevity.
Click to expand...
If it happens, it would probably be like a year from now, if he were to wait that long for the new product every time he would never upgrade. :rolleyes:
 
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