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"Buying a new comp and would like your thoughts..."

Hi guys,

i will be upgrading my P3 800 soon and have two systems in mind, one the AMD route, the other Intel. However, i can't really decide which way to go. Both work out to be pretty much the same price (around £280) so price is not an issue. Just want the most gaming speed posssible, so any of you lot how have anything *useful* to say, then i would like to hear your thoughts on the two systems outlined below.

Also, i have a GeForce 3 vid card and don't plan to over clock the machine. much ;-)

So which is the best for high res and max detail games (and why)....

Athlon 2500+ (Barton with a 333Mhz FSB)
ASUS A7N8X Deluxe Gold
256MB stick of DDR 2700 RAM X 2 (for the dual channel mobo)

Or

Pentium 4 Northwood, 2.40B (533 FSB)
Asus P4PE/L
512MB stick of DDR 2700 RAM

Thanks for any advice in advance.

Hmm good points AMD Man.

However, just to clarify. Dual Channel DDR RAM support does not need to be coded into a program, as things like SSE instruction sets are. The dual channel option on the mobo means that the system can use the two sticks of DDR RAM at the same time and in tandem, and thus improves through-put of the sub system by quite a bit. If you just buy one stick of DDR ram and slap it into the first DIMM socket, the mobo won't operate in Dual Channel mode, that’s why you need two sticks.

I think i am going to go for the Barton. maybe. I just don’t know.

If you are not planning on overclocking much then i would go for the Athlon system as they are far more supirior clock for clock than intel for gaming, but it you are into overclocking then the p4 would be a good root to go as they overclock very well and it is very possible that you could push it past 3ghz with retail cooling, with dual channel ddr on an athlon system you will not really see much benifits as there arent much programs that will benifit from it at the moment, also you should get dual channel optimized ddr ram but with dual channel ddr on a intel motherboard the performance increase is supposed to be substantial but as you are not going to go for the dual channel ddr motherboard for intel (which i don't blame you for that price) then thats a bit of a mute point. Also the benefits of the p4 chip is it's multi media SSE2 instructions which makes multimedia on an intel system better than on an athlon system, it's a hard decision to make and depends on a load of factors but if you are only going to use it for games then i would go for the barton unless you are going to overclock and do alot of multimedia stuff (watching dvd's, ripping dvd's, converting video\audio format etc etc)then i would go for the intel.

I hope you havnt started an "intel is better than AMD" or vise versa row :).

c.b.

Yeah i was only ever going to get 512MB of DDR, there isn't really much point in going beyond this.

However dual channel isn't to do with the amount of RAM in the system, it's a set up similar to RDRAM on the Intel side. you have to buy you RAM sticks in pairs, so i would get 2 sticks of 256MB DDR 2700, and they then work at the same time but independantly of each other - giving you two 'channels' of RAM, thus doubling the bandwidth, and been as memory is, 9 times out of 10, the limiting factor of a computers bandwidth, this dual channel set up helps alot from what i have read.

Hmmmm

Well, to be honest, having huge amounts of DDR Ram is pretty worthless. Once you have a decent amount - obviously you can get 512MB chips, which for DDR is a huge amount of memory - unless you want to run Windows in cache, I really don't see the point in having any more...

Yeah IB, the P4 2.4b is a real bargain at the moment. Oh and for the record, I’ve seen one for £134.99! The exact same price as the 2500+ Barton XP.

The only thing that has made be reconsider (this time last week I was dead set going for the P4) is the fact that the Nforce 2 mobo on the AMD side supports dual chan DDR ram and to get the same feature for a P4 based solution means going for a granite bay mobo, and they costs around £180!

Tough decision, very tough.

Well, I can't help but be biased here, because I'm in the market for a 2.4ghz Intel myself. And since a shrewd consumer can pick up the chip for around £150, you can't really go wrong.

Hi guys,

i will be upgrading my P3 800 soon and have two systems in mind, one the AMD route, the other Intel. However, i can't really decide which way to go. Both work out to be pretty much the same price (around £280) so price is not an issue. Just want the most gaming speed posssible, so any of you lot how have anything *useful* to say, then i would like to hear your thoughts on the two systems outlined below.

Also, i have a GeForce 3 vid card and don't plan to over clock the machine. much ;-)

So which is the best for high res and max detail games (and why)....

Athlon 2500+ (Barton with a 333Mhz FSB)
ASUS A7N8X Deluxe Gold
256MB stick of DDR 2700 RAM X 2 (for the dual channel mobo)

Or

Pentium 4 Northwood, 2.40B (533 FSB)
Asus P4PE/L
512MB stick of DDR 2700 RAM

Thanks for any advice in advance.