Re: Ancient P3 - upgradeable?
- From: Daniel James <wastebasket@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 05 Dec 2005 13:20:48 GMT
In article news:<4392d912$0$108$65c69314@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Xmas wrote:
> > ... keep the old computer for the things it does well and buy or
> > build a completely new system.
>
> Yes, I've definitely been converted to that idea!
It's what I always do ... which is probably why I have a 386 and two 486
boxes languishing in the attic (but they served their time as
second/spare/test computers before the hike up the ladder).
> > (or sell your perfectly-good non-gaming system to help
> > finance the purchase).
>
> I don't think selling this box (which is held together by masking tape
> and prayer) will net much,
<smile> you didn't mention the masking tape and prayers. In that case I'd
say you should *definitely* start from scratch!
> Any suggestions for a basic setup for a (reasonably good) gaming box
> with a future upgrade path? Most of my games are strategy rather than
> shoot-em-up, so ...
This is outside my field as a surreptitious game of patience is about as
close to computer gaming as I get ... but the NVIDIA 6600GT based boards
are now coming in a bit below £100 (plus VAT) and seem to me to offer a
reasonable compromise between price and performance -- most of my dedicated
gaming friends would say that the fastest board available at any cost was a
better compromise, though ...
If that seems too outrageous and you *really* only want to play strategy
games then maybe a motherboard with on-board graphics would be better value
-- you could always add a dedicated graphics card later if you feel you
need/can afford it. I noticed the Asus A8N-VM board recently, for around
50-60 quid you'll get a Socket 939 board (will take an Athlon 64 or Sempron
64) that has onboard GeForce 6150 graphics. I don't know how that compares
for speed with dedicated graphics cards but you do get it thrown in at
about the price of any comparable mobo without graphics.
The link to the product page on Asus's website is either broken or far too
obscure, so here's the direct URL from a vendor's site:
http://www.asus.com/products4.aspx?l1=3&l2=15&l3=0&model=766&modelmenu=1
The disadvantage is that it's a MicroATX board (the ones with GPUs tend to
be) so it only has 2 pci slots, but it does have a PCIe x16 slot so you can
upgrade to better graphics later is you want.
> DrB suggested a Gigabyte NForce 3 + Sempron 64 combo, but isn't that
> roughly equivalent to the Intel Celeron range?
As others have already said: the Sempron 64 is an entirely different
marmite of bouillabaisse. I personally would go for an Athlon 64 3000+ for
what I would be pleased to call a "low cost" system. You can get them for
under £100 nowadays, but the Sempron would be cheaper. Either gives you the
option to upgrade to a dual-core A64 when you win the lottery.
> I am completely unfamiliar with AMD CPUs and how they compare
> to Intel ones.
It's a religious thing. One always used to hear uncertainties as to whether
the non-intel chipmakers could produce chips that behaved exactly like the
intel chips, and questions as to whether there would be hardware or
software incompatibilities. Nowadays the hardware compatibility issue has
more-or-lss gone away because the AMD chips are not being sold as plug-in
replacements for intel chips, but have their own sockets and the own
supporting chipsets. The software side is still very slightly as issue, but
software vendors know that the AMD market (in particular) is huge, and *do*
test their stuff on both intel and AMD platforms before release. There are
some subtle differences in timings between the intel and AMD chips that may
mean that software optimized for a Pentium runs a little more slowly on an
Athlon that software that's not optimized at all -- and /vice versa/ -- but
we're only talking about a few percentage points in the benchmarks, nothing
you'd ever notice in practice.
I've had slight problems with a mini-ITX board with a VIA CPU that won't
run some flavours of linux out-of-the-box (not VIA's fault, in fact, but a
wrong assumption by the gcc compiler about certain "optional" 686
instructions being supported by the chip) but it runs others just fine. In
practice you'd be unlucky to hit a problem, and it's very unlikely you'd
hit one for which there was no easy workaround.
I've always used intel CPUs in the past -- apart from the one VIA box --
but my next CPU will almost definitely be AMD. The solutions to the cost,
speed, and cooling equation just don't seem to me to favour intel at the
moment.
Cheers,
Daniel.
.
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