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AMD Athlon™ 64 3500+ Processor
Mainboard , 2000MHz SB, IEEE 1394, SATA
1024MB DDR 400 RAM Memory
300GB Serial ATA (150Mb/s) Ultra Fast Hard Drive
256MB nVIDIA GeForce FX 5500 - TV-Out - DVI
17" TFT Flat Panel LCD Monitor
SONY 16x Dual Layer DVD-RW (R/W all standard formats)*
5.1 Surround Sound 6 Channel Audio
Creative Labs Soundblaster SBS260 Stereo Speakers
Only thing worrying me here is the Geforce FX 5500 card. I'm going to be playing alot of games on this thing, yet I just read a review this card isn't one of the best performers for games.
Was looking at a Radeon 9800 XT or something hmmmmmm.
So I have Doom 3 here, if I stick it in on that thing will it still look pretty or erm...run?
> Go with the numbers on the AMD chips. 3500+ P4 3.4 GHz.
The athlon is a 2.2 ghz i just didn't understand the choice when for the same money you can get a much faster chip.
yeah pci-express is faster, but i doubt your motherboard will do it as it has a AGP slot i assume for the geforce card your getting.
> An Athlon 3500+ chip is surely 3.5 ghz no?
No thats just AMD's evil trick. '3500+' Thats it's name not it's speed. the link below shows the real clock speeds.
[URL]http://techreport.com/reviews/2004q3/athlon64-3500/index.x?pg=1[/URL]
Thanks for the link.
*reads*
My housemate fell for their dirty name trick and got a 3000xp about a year ago thinking it was a 3ghz the up side of that though was he got a radeon 9800pro with his computer which.
> Oh yeah don't get me wrong you are buying a good AMD processor. It's
> just not as fast as a intel one you could have got for the same
> money.
>
> My housemate fell for their dirty name trick and got a 3000xp about a
> year ago thinking it was a 3ghz the up side of that though was he got
> a radeon 9800pro with his computer which.
Time for a little lesson in CPU architecture. Speed isn't everything. A Pentium 4 does more cycles in a second than an AMD, but an AMD does more "stuff" every cycle.
Now if you have something to do on a computer, like compile a program or run Wordpro or something like that, anything really; that a 2.2 GHz AMD processor will run it just as fast as a 3.2 GHz Intel processor, because the AMD processor does more in every cycle.
Now AMD don't sell the 3200XP as a 2.2 GHz. Because most people would then think "that's way too slow, I'll just buy a Pentium 4". Which would be ashame because the AMD chip is just as quick.
Get it now?
I'll give you the proper reasons about pipeline length, data cache, instruction cache, cache hits etc if you want them. But I think it might go WHOOSH!!! so really all you need to know is that an Athlon 3400+ is about equal to (actually better at most things) than a P4 3.4 GHz and a Sempron 2800 is better than a Celeron 2.8 GHz.
It all depends on how good you want the game to look as well as how smooth you want it. Anything less than a 9800 PRO isn't going to be able to run Doom 3 on respectable settings without cut backs elsewhere.