Do *not* get anything with an ATi or SiS or VIA chipset if you want to game with this machine.
You've made a decent case for not buying ATi, and SiS is still pretty crappy, but VIA isn't bad any more. Yes, they're not the best, but it's not nearly so stark a difference now as it used to be.
* SATA or SATAII Hard Drive (SATAII is not faster unless you are running a RAID array). Important! Do *not* get an ATA100 or ATA133 Drive. A lot of dealers are gonna be trying to offload these old, slow POSs. Get SATA.
Most 7200RPM hard drives can't push enough data to saturate ATA100; they're not that slow.
Do *not* get anything with an ATi or SiS or VIA chipset if you want to game with this machine.
You've made a decent case for not buying ATi, and SiS is still pretty crappy, but VIA isn't bad any more. Yes, they're not the best, but it's not nearly so stark a difference now as it used to be.
The situation may have changed in the couple of months since I was doing my research, but the reason I would avoid VIA is because their chipsets have compatability issues with X2 processors (as in they won't recognize both cores). Has this changed?
* SATA or SATAII Hard Drive (SATAII is not faster unless you are running a RAID array). Important! Do *not* get an ATA100 or ATA133 Drive. A lot of dealers are gonna be trying to offload these old, slow POSs. Get SATA.
Most 7200RPM hard drives can't push enough data to saturate ATA100; they're not that slow.
True, but SATA drives also have features like Native Command Queueing NCQ which can make the drives more efficient. The difference is not huge, but it's real. Why buy old tech?
Miles Teg
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Hadn't heard about the incompatibility until recently. One page I found suggested it was just the K8T890 chipset which was incompatible while the K8T800 was fine with it - which makes sense that I hadn't heard given that the last time I was looking at motherboard chipsets, they still hadn't released PCI-E motherboards for AMD yet.
I'm not advocating purchasing PATA drives, I was just pointing out that they're still viable drives. I'm going for SATA drives with my next hard drive purchase, but if I were comparing two different systems for purchase, the use of PATA drives in one wouldn't be a deal-breaker for me.
ATi drivers do not suck currently, not on any of the cards I've used or had my hands on.
And the Crossfire issue is irrelevent when we're talking single cards though I agree sticking a green card on a red mobo is silly
I think one of the main attractions of CrossFire is that those new ATI chipsets offer two x16 lanes, instead of two x8 lanes. I think SLI has two x16 lanes now though, IIRC. The main thing that sucks about CrossFire is that one of the cards has to be a special "master" card, which costs more I think. As far as dual videocards go, ATI has a lot of ground to make up.
I'm not sure where to start. 16x slots have ZERO preformance advantage over 8x slots. Look up any ASUS-SLI32x review.
The crossfire issue, ATi is dead in the water there.
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Ace Pace wrote:I'm not sure where to start. 16x slots have ZERO preformance advantage over 8x slots. Look up any ASUS-SLI32x review.
Not currently, true. But currently PCIe has very little performance gain over AGP, at least in single-card configurations. None of today's applications are bottlenecked by the available bandwidth between the videocard and the rest of the system. But that could change. As dual-core CPUs take more of a foothold, gain more support, and become able to send instructions to GPUs faster and faster, the benefit of more bandwidth between the videocards and the rest of the system could possibly increase performance. Future-proofing, you know.
Of course, you could go nuts and grab this monster. (Scroll down a bit)
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Ace Pace wrote:I'm not sure where to start. 16x slots have ZERO preformance advantage over 8x slots. Look up any ASUS-SLI32x review.
Not currently, true. But currently PCIe has very little performance gain over AGP, at least in single-card configurations. None of today's applications are bottlenecked by the available bandwidth between the videocard and the rest of the system. But that could change. As dual-core CPUs take more of a foothold, gain more support, and become able to send instructions to GPUs faster and faster, the benefit of more bandwidth between the videocards and the rest of the system could possibly increase performance. Future-proofing, you know.
Of course, you could go nuts and grab this monster. (Scroll down a bit)
Futureproofing for what? Aslong as AGP cards hold a significent fraction of the market, no one is going to use the PCI-E bus fully to its REAL extent which is bidirectional traffic of up down.
Even 4X only brings a minor drawback, and givin the fact he won't be upgradng this PC means its even more irrelevent.
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All I mean to say is that if you can get the tech now, for a reasonable price, then I see no reason not to get it. If it's outside your budget, then it's obviously not an option.
I see your point, however. I forgot for a moment about the not upgrading part . But I don't think it's too hard to see that AGP's best days are behind it. It may take years, but I think the full potential of PCIe will be realized. If you're building a new system, I see no reason not to go PCIe, unless you're not going for one of the new super-high-end cards.
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"A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin." - H. L. Mencken
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Darth Quorthon wrote:All I mean to say is that if you can get the tech now, for a reasonable price, then I see no reason not to get it. If it's outside your budget, then it's obviously not an option.
I see your point, however. I forgot for a moment about the not upgrading part . But I don't think it's too hard to see that AGP's best days are behind it. It may take years, but I think the full potential of PCIe will be realized. If you're building a new system, I see no reason not to go PCIe, unless you're not going for one of the new super-high-end cards.
Hey weirdo, no one said AGP, what I AM saying is that the Nforce SLI 16x is a waste of money.
By the time high end GPUs will be running something that uses PCI-E bandwidth fully, we'll be in Socket M2 and beyond, making it irrelevent.
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Miles Teg wrote:True, but SATA drives also have features like Native Command Queueing NCQ which can make the drives more efficient. The difference is not huge, but it's real. Why buy old tech?
Miles Teg
Just as a punctuation on this point, single-drive benchmarks do not reflect the benefits of NCQ, but any long-term SCSI user knows about them already. I recently swapped out one of the two ATA drives in my system with an SATA drive. The result is not hugely noticeable on operations such as booting up and starting an app.
However, when I am doing major time-consuming disk-intensive operations such as authoring a video DVD (where literally gigs of material are being moved back and forth between drives), I often try to work on something else at the same time. With the old setup of one ATA drive on the primary IDE channel and one ATA drive on the secondary, there was severe performance degradation whenever I tried to do this. Even something as mundane as starting up a web browser during a DVD authoring process was slow and choppy. But now that one of those ATA drives has been replaced with an SATA drive, the system responds almost as quickly as it would if the DVD authoring operation were not running at all. Multi-tasking is a big reason for NCQ, which is why NCQ (which has always meant "SCSI" until recently) has always been considered mandatory for servers.
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Agreed, for the main disk of a comp I would certainly go SATA. Hell, for any new disk purchase for that matter. PATA are only good for achive storage at this point (ie you have a disk leftover and you plug it in for more space).
On that note, is the older system supposed to be still functioning after the purchase of the new one? If its not, certain components could be cannibalised . That and the instalation of new stuff could be done at a local store for free if you buy the new stuff from them (at least that is the way over here). Depending on the quality of the hardware you now have it could be worth it save a decent amount of cash.
In general maybe you should check out the local stores, especialy the smaller ones that are not part of a big chain. Again, at least over here, they usualy offer free assembly and a decent warranty, in fact they insist on the free assembly since that cuts down on their tech support situations. Plus there is the bonus of them being local so you can get the comp to them fast if there is any problem (and be loud and annoying so they fix it asap). Unless the markup they have on the hardware is absurd, that would be what I would be checking out if I planned to buy a comp which I couldnt service. Maybe you could check out a couple of them and post their websites so that we could look at their hardware and prices.
Perhaps I'm not enough of a geek, but I always prefer local vendors for electronics stuff since in the case of something going wrong they are usualy more responsive and faste.
. But I don't think it's too hard to see that AGP's best days are behind it. It may take years, but I think the full potential of PCIe will be realized. If you're building a new system, I see no reason not to go PCIe, unless you're not going for one of the new super-high-end cards.
