Call for help.Hak5 regulars - MOTHERBOARD advice

[wetelectric]

Tried asking this on irc, but while they mean well there were no old school hak-mites (techies) online. So im asking here.

I am an intel user. but i am swtiching to amd. With intel u have an order to the releases. u know pentium, pentium 2,pentium3,pentium 4 and xeon. Its pretty easy to see which is the fastest and which is the slowest.

I dont get how it works with AMD. Im buying a amd 64 3200+. Where is this on the amd scale?? High? low? good? shit?? no fukin idea. If someone could write a quick amd list for me, i would be most pleased. Ive tried google, but all i get is partisan sites trying to hawk their shit. This should be simple info to anyone who kept up to date with hardware. HEEEEEEEEEEEEELP

im buying this motherboard.

[VaKo]

I really really really would advise waiting until Intels Conroe chip hits the market. It spanks the current AMD line up, and will force some kinda price reduction from AMD at the very least.

[wetelectric]

yea i know what u mean dude. but currently im using a p2 with an 18 gig drive. So unless its coming out in 2 days i cant wait. i fully twitching at the mo.

[VaKo]

Think there shipping as we speak... but probally in limited numbers... Sure you can't hold off like 1 month? It'll be worth it...

[metatron]

AMD have already started slashing their prices.

[Sparda]

wetelectric, when it comes to AMD the bigger the number the more work it can do. The number on an AMD (in your case the Athlong 64 3200) represents how much work the AMD can do compared to the origional Pentium 4, so an AMD 64 3200 (while running at a default clock speed of 2GHz) can do the same amount of work as a Pentium 4 3.2GHz.

There are exceptions to this rule. The fastest Single core chips that AMD make are the FX50, but the fastest dule core CPU AMD make is the FX62, which is very fast.

I personaly have the Athlong 64 3200+ basicly becasue I couldn't aford any thing better. It's not the latest and gratest, but it's fast enough for now (untill I get money). If you are looking for some thing thats fast but doesn't brake the bank I surgest you go for an Athlon 64 4000+, you can pick one up for about £100 (wish I had £100), not nearly as expencive as an FX50, whcih would cost around £300.

[wetelectric]

dude i have a p2 that squeeks everytime i do a harddrive write, i cant play video, which means no pr0n. do u understand no midget pron no japscat octopus pr0n...nothing. I can run azurues (thank u mandrake 10) but the harddrive writes will eventually cause some sort of explosion. So no my friend i cannot wait. :)

man cannot live on water, food alone. One needs to see what happens when u haave a japanese girl a plunger and some eels in one room.

well the bundle in question amd 64 3200+ with some generic motherboard. is that good value. how new or old is the processor? See 1st post???

really twitching now (more than usual)

[wetelectric]

wetelectric, when it comes to AMD the bigger the number the more work it can do. The number on an AMD (in your case the Athlong 64 3200) represents how much work the AMD can do compared to the origional Pentium 4, so an AMD 64 3200 (while running at a default clock speed of 2GHz) can do the same amount of work as a Pentium 4 3.2GHz.

There are exceptions to this rule. The fastest Single core chips that AMD make are the FX50, but the fastest dule core CPU AMD make is the FX62, which is very fast.

I personaly have the Athlong 64 3200+ basicly becasue I couldn't aford any thing better. It's not the latest and gratest, but it's fast enough for now (untill I get money). If you are looking for some thing thats fast but doesn't brake the bank I surgest you go for an Athlon 64 4000+, you can pick one up for about £100 (wish I had £100), not nearly as expencive as an FX50, whcih would cost around £300.

nice dude. a Pentium 4 3.2GHz sounds nice. Im a bit skint at the mo (3rd week of the month and that) so £100 for a processor cannot be justified at the mo. £130 squid for a motherboard and processor would be cool. If someone finds a cheaper site they have used, dont be afraid to post linkage.

cheers.

[Sparda]

If you are upgrading motherboards and every thing (Since you are using a P2 that probably means you have SDRAM which will also need replacing) you should go for a AM2 motherboard, which means you will need DDR2 RAM, but won;t have to upgrade for a couple of years as far as the motherboard is concerned..

[stingwray]

Where are you wetelectric? States, UK etc.?

The 3200+ is a good CPU, as Vako explained their rating system was some what a comparison to Intel speeds.

The 3200+ is one of the lowest spec'd Athlon 64 but it is an excellent deal at the moment. It will overclock well, i have mine at 2.8GHz most of the time which makes it very fast. I wouldn't recommend getting anything higher in the single core range because you will be able to overclock it well with a decent motherboard. Going dual-core is worth it if you can afford it.

The Intel Core 2 Duo is going to be expensive at launch plus with bugs and things still in the works I don't think it is going to be a viable platform until Christmas.

If you are still interested in Intel for Dual Core the 2.66GHz Pentium D is a very good CPU with massive amounts of overclocking, Tom's Hardware managed to get it up to 4.1GHz on some decent air cooling.

AMDs dual core offering is much more expensive with the 3800+ X2 being the cheapest, its only really an option if you have the money and want to only look at AMD.

You've mentioned about looking at bundles, be careful with what motherboard you get. I think the motherboard is one of thing items you really need to be careful picking as its the worst to change/replace, and its going to determin the stability and features of your computer.

On a finally note, don't be tempted to go with Socket 939 stock, there are some deals out there but AM2 isn't as expensive as people think with 3200+ in both sockets being nearly the same price. DDR2 is worthing going with simply because it will hopefully go in your next computer if you upgrade say the motherboard and CPU. DDR3 isn't tabled until '08.

[VaKo]

fuckit... if your skint, and running a steam powered P2, just grab a celeron for 30£, cheap mobo and stick of 256mb ram. Less than £100 all in all, although you will need a ATX PSU as well, and possibly an ATX case. Have you thought about a cheap ass dell base unit? You can get great deals on the refurbished units from places like EuroPC and Ebay.

[wetelectric]

fuckit... if your skint, and running a steam powered P2, just grab a celeron for 30£, cheap mobo and stick of 256mb ram. Less than £100 all in all, although you will need a ATX PSU as well, and possibly an ATX case. Have you thought about a cheap ass dell base unit? You can get great deals on the refurbished units from places like EuroPC and Ebay.

Dell?? Celeron?????? Let us never speak of this again oh VaKo one. :cry:

this am2 sounds interesting. So ur saying i could use the same processor? Nice. i dnt want the amd equivalent of the celeron tho.

[VaKo]

LMAO... ain't nothing wrong with a Dell, there cheap and they work. Buy via there small buisness side and you can get next day onsite support instead of a truck load of "free" printers and a HD full of crap. Then just fdisk it and bung on your OS of choice.

As for celerons, again there cheap and cheerful but dude... you have a P2. ;-)

[metatron]

You can pick up a AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ for £139.

[wetelectric]

You can pick up a AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ for £139.

your just teasing me now arnt you? where can u get this?

[metatron]

You can pick up a AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ for £139.

your just teasing me now arnt you? where can u get this?

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/acatalog/Socket_939_X2.html I just looked at it, it doesn’t include VAT

[Snowy©]

Less than 2 weeks until the price wars begin

AMD price drops on the 24th of July

Edit actually the price metatron quoted above kinda matches the price drops due for the 24th LOL

[stingwray]

AMD AM2 Athlon 64 3200 Orleans Core, 2.0GHz, 512KB Cache, Retail - £67.94

Gigabyte GA M51GM-S2G NF430, Socket AM2, PCI-E (x16), DDR2 800, SATA II, SATA RAID, uATX - £52.83

1GB (2X512MB) Corsair Value Select, DDR2 PC4200 (533), 240 Pin, Non-ECC Unbuffered, CAS 4-4-4-12 - £53.99

Total - £174.76

That motherboard also has on-board gfx which will keep the price down of the computer and will last you until you can afford a gfx card. All you need in that is a hard drive, dvd-rom and case with psu.

[cooper]

The number on an AMD (in your case the Athlong 64 3200) represents how much work the AMD can do compared to the origional Pentium 4, so an AMD 64 3200 (while running at a default clock speed of 2GHz) can do the same amount of work as a Pentium 4 3.2GHz.

No, no, no. NO!

The number at the end is the speed of their processor when compared against an Athlon 1000 in a number of benchmarks. So the 3200+ is at least (on average) 3.2 times as fast as that ancient Athlon 1000.

AMD started rating their chips like this when Intel decided that the clockspeed number meant more than actual performance. Now that Intel's wisened up and figured out that a better design involved a lower clockspeed, they found themselves competing with their own marketing. So now they just drop off the clockspeed and use model numbers. Confusing for the customer, but it's better than admitting to the customer that their 'clocks are everything' mantra means the older chips are 'better'.

Interestingly, Intel was making noise a while back that the rating number AMD uses was unfairly used to compair against P4 speeds because, according to intel, when the numbers matched, the P4 model was the faster one. That's when AMD pointed out the fine print in their model number assignment methodology.

[wetelectric]

Update..........

am now at home. My hardrive on the p2 did indeed b0rk. So now i am using knoppix (2004) with 200mb of mem@ 640x480 res. I am in the jungle people... im talking fighting cannibals and monkeys type shit. Fuck me. I mean look at my new filesystem:

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on

/dev/root 3.4M 1.1M 2.4M 32% /

/dev/scd0 700M 700M 0 100% /cdrom

/dev/cloop 1.9G 1.9G 0 100% /KNOPPIX

/ramdisk 145M 39M 106M 27% /ramdisk

Running straight of memory no hard drive!

Fuk fuk mother mother fuck fuck.

gna see if i can get a bundle deal on an am2 + an atholon 3200+ for unser 150 quid. if not i'll go with the previous bundle. Like i said any linkage detail.

Bit confused on the ol' speeds tho. I currently have a p4 2.0. socket 478. I want to know that the one I am buying (see first post) is better than my old one. :?

[Sparda]

AMD 3200 is fastenough if all you do is desktop stuff.

[Luka_Krmpotic]

I really really really would advise waiting until Intels Conroe chip hits the market. It spanks the current AMD line up, and will force some kinda price reduction from AMD at the very least.

Digg:

Intel Launches Conroe Tonight!

Core 2 Duo, Core 2 Extreme, all launching tonight! 1.86GHz for $183 to 2.93GHz for $999, availability to come on July 23rd. Intel's goingn to make deep price cuts on existing processors too.

[theslayer]

if i could be arsed i would post up some system setup with componet links but it cant.

yeh that sounds like the priceing of cpus is gonna become intresting very soon.

but im an amd fan boi so nuf said

[melodic]

apple ftw :D screw pcs

[Sparda]

but the hardware costs like 3 times as much, and so dose the software! Apples are good... as long as your name is metatron and you have litrual Morrisons bags full of £50 notes.