Re: Need advice on CPU and motherboard
- From: Paul <nospam@xxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 21 May 2008 11:52:35 -0400
Dave Pollum wrote:
I have an ASUS A7N8X-E deluxe mobo with an AMD Semprom 2600+ CPU, 1GB
DDR RAM (Corsair TwinX), and a Diamond Stealth S100 AGP 8x (ATI Radeon
9600SE). I also have 2 IDE hard drives, an IDE DVD/CD ROM burner and
a floppy drive. This system is 3 to 4 years old. The O/S is Win 2K,
sp4. I will be keeping this system, and will build a new one from
scratch.
I've used ASUS mobos for years, so I'd like to stay with ASUS. I've
also used AMD CPUs for a long time. I'm overwhelmed by the number of
ASUS choice and CPU combos. I seen a lot of ads that hype Intel's duo
core CPU. Is this better than AMD's equivalent? I'm not a gamer, so
I don't need bleeding edge performance. I do a lot of CAD (PCBs,
FPGAs, etc), so need something speedy, but it MUST be reliable and
solid. I plan on installing at least 2 GB of RAM.
The graphics card can be average as well. It would be nice if the
system supported 2 monitors. Do I need 2 graphics cards or will 1
card handle 2 monitors?
It looks like mobos come with only 1 IDE connector, but lots of
SATA connectors. So I'll have to shop around for SATA drives, right?
I plan using Win XP, so the mobo must support that. I do NOT want
Vista or Vista-only hardware.
I know I'm asking for a lot of info, but any advice is really
appreciated!
-Dave Pollum
You can get CPU charts here, but be warned, that Tomshardware places
emphasis on multi-threaded applications, and your CAD software might
tend to stay on just the one core. So the charts could over-state
the speedup to be expected, compared to what actually happens.
You'll still get a speedup over your current system. (And since
the Tomshardware charts are careful not to include results from
older chips, it is pretty hard to compare in a useful way anyway.)
http://www.tomshardware.com/charts
So the only reason to look at those charts, might be to do a
rough comparison between Intel and AMD offerings.
I'd say a P35 chipset board and an Intel E8400, would make a pretty snappy
dual core system. This is something I posted recently (saves me typing
it out again). As the motherboard price goes up, you get the odd extra
feature.
http://groups.google.ca/group/alt.comp.periphs.mainboard.asus/msg/e50576598267cef6?dmode=source
The E8400 is $195 right now.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819115037
Yes, getting a new SATA drive, might be good for your boot drive.
You can still stick drives on the one IDE cable, but the chip
driving the IDE, is a separate chip from the Southbridge. To
boot the system off that connector, might require pressing F6
during the OS install, and offering a driver to the installer
program. Since you can even get SATA CD/DVD drives, you can
save the IDE for occasions when you want to install the old drives.
For the video card, many of the cards now are "dual head", meaning
they can drive two monitors at the same time. All you have to do,
is look for a PCI Express card, with the right two connector
types on it. The cheapest cards might have 1 VGA and 1 DVI-I.
Above that price range (and below the super-expensive gaming cards)
will be cards with two DVI-I connectors. For more info on DVI,
see this article. A DVI-I connector, carries both analog and
digital signals, and by using a DVI to VGA adapter dongle, you
can get the familiar VGA 15 pin connector if you need it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dvi
This video card is fanless, and has two DVI-I connectors.
Bundled with it, are two DVI to VGA adapters, so you can
drive two VGA monitors if you want.
GIGABYTE GV-NX86T256H GeForce 8600GT 256MB 128-bit GDDR3 PCI Express x16 ($80, has rebate)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814125070
For fanless cards, I like to position an 80mm fan next to
them. That keeps them running cool. And since a case fan is
easy to replace, if the fan ever starts to squeak, you
can replace it easily. On a video card with one of those
tiny fans on it, it is a lot harder to find something
you could use as a replacement.
Paul
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