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Recommendation Regarding Rig Choice

m0dd

n00b
Joined
Sep 2, 2004
Messages
14
Hey ppl,

New to the forums and i don't believe i didn't come across this forum earlier.

Well my question is simple, i am a cheap ass student from England and i need help deciding my next purchase.

I currently own a crappy 1.4 Athlon( non-XP) system equipped with a G2 Ti.
Here are a few of my choices:
-Upgrade the 1.4 to dual 1.4. Cost £100-200 - need to purchase second processor and mobo.
-Build dual system (opteron probably but will have to do my homework regarding opteron vs xeon) equiped with my current GPU to save money. Cost £800-1000
-Build shuttle beast AMD 64bit 3200+ 1GiG + X800. Cost £800

My main purpose will be intensive media encoding (dv-mpeg2, dvd-divx) and dv transfers and media editing. In addition to all that i would like to at the same time listen to music, surf the web, watch porn, download porn, extract files and burn dvd's.
I play games, but not often it be cool to play Doom3 but aslong at it does UT2003 and CS fine them im happy. My main concern is that my current system is so crap it really lags when i do alot of things at the same time, which i tend to do alot and love doing.

My questions are will a single cpu like a AMD 64bit 3200+ or 3500+ be capable of doing so? Becasue if yes then i can save space and just go single cpu path.

If not will a 1.4 dual system be capable of doing so? then i can save money and maybe later build a SFF and leave that running 24/7 and just use the dualie when doing intensive encoding and stuff.

Hope i made sense and thank you in advance.
Cheers,

m0dd
 
Ever thought about using an Intel Pentium?

Pentiums are close in performance of the 754 flavors of the Athlon 64s and usually fair better in media encoding. Unless you try to match them against the very expensive 939 A64s.

But one P4 with HT sounds like something you can benefit from, since Hyper Threading is basically having two logical processors. I am asuming you are running WinXP of course to take advantage of it.

That might be the cheapest route for you IMO to get all of that out of it
 
Cheers for the reply m8,

I have considered the Pentium 4 775 espically pairing that with that new Shuttle SB81P.
I would have brought a Pentium if it was 2 months ago, but i get the feeling 64bit maybe worth the investment, espically with nForce4 and SLI not to far away.

I am really not sure, i need more recommendation, i dont wanna start a Intel vs AMD, i know Intel kicks ass in the media division and AMD is the king of games but i need some first hand recommendation as to if the Pentium with its amazing HT feature can really handle everything i need.

I know im not making sense, but you have know idea how cheap-ass i am and i am in situation were computing power is very essential.

But many thanks man for the reply,
 
Going dual Opteron is the best choice for speed and encoding but a normal P4 with HT should do you just fine. BTW what kind of RAM do you have? If it is slower than 2700 then upgrade it also because you will need the speed boost.
 
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