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"Athlon 64"

Do you need nforce 3 boards or equivalent to run these things?

Just looked and saw that my VM is set it 1536MB which I think is enough with 1024MB of RAM on top of that.

You shouldn't really disable VM as it can lead to some nasty system crashes if you open to many programs. I've set my PC to have 2GB of Virtual Memory on top of my normal RAM, as it tends to stop my system crashing.

512mb is the decent amount for any user, More is nice but not nessacery. Virtual memory can be disabled if you have 512mb anyway, its only there for lower RAM users.

I will be upgrading to 512mb next week (currently have a measly 256 at the mo) which should offer a nice peformance increase.

Icarus wrote:
> I find that 512MB is more than enough for everything bar video editing
> - the 1gig machine I have now doesn't run noticeably faster at all.

In an idea world you should go for as close as you can get to your CPU's clock speed e.g.
For a 2GHz CPU try to have 2Gb of RAM. I know that isn't cheep, but it means you don't need to worry about your virtual memory (where hard drive space is used like RAM) which can significanly slow down your PC if you have a slowish hard drive, and even with a quick hard drive you'll notice a difference.

I find that 512MB is more than enough for everything bar video editing - the 1gig machine I have now doesn't run noticeably faster at all.

My graphics card is already kick ass.

;D

I guess i could by a load of RAM though.

You could get an XP 3000 for less than £150. That would keep you near the cutting edge for only a few months less than an Athlon 64, and it's £200 cheaper. The fact is that mainstream software isn't going to be using this chip to anywhere near its full capacity for at least another year or two; and I personally would find it hard to put a two hundred quid premium on word processing really, really fast under Linux. By the time that 64-bit processors ARE the only ones worth buying then they'll be down at sensible, mainstream prices and you won't need to mortgage your mother to buy one.

Don't get me wrong, I would love it if somebody gave me an Athlon 64, but if you want my advice then get a fast Barton and spend the difference on a kick ass graphics card. The cutting edge is for suckers, so be patient and slipstream them.

unknown kernel wrote:
> The thing that puts me off an Athlon 64 (other than the horrendous
> price) is that I heard that there is only likely to be a couple of
> versions of the chip before they change the socket design, leaving
> you with an unupgradable, first-gen folly in your PC.

Perhaps, but if i settle for an nforce 2 board now then i will have to buy another motherboard anyway when all of the proccessors worth buying are 64 bit. Even with an unupgradable mobo you will still be near the top of the field for a good few years to come.

It is only available to manufacturers though, you can't purchase it as an individual software package, you can also get it only with a new system, but there are not many of these around, so it is not on general release yet.

Colin

Windows XP-64 has been out for a while.

http://www.microsoft.com/WindowsXP/64bit/default.asp