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"Motherboard + CPU advice..."

I have picked up a few weeks contract work and I inted to pick up a new motherboard and CPU afterwards. I currently have an Athlon 2600 XP + with KT400 motherboard. I am looking to switch over to Intel. What is the best motherboard and CPU at the moment, money shouldn't be an object. I am looking for a setup that will overclock easily enough.

Any advice would be appreciated, cheers!

http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/ products/index.html?action=c2hvd19wcm9kdWN 0X292ZXJ2aWV3&product_uid=55344

NB is that what you have? This is the low latency 3200 RAM so I think I will go ahead and get a couple of sticks.

I think its the normal latency.

ÂLŠ†ÂÎR wrote:
> I am looking into getting 2 x 512mb Corsair PC 3200 RAM

Is that the normal or low latency version?

Even the normal version is great, thats what ive got and ive got 8-2-2-2 timings. You could probably tighten that up a bit more too (if you wanted of course), i havent messed around with the RAM yet.

The thing is I have clocked my 2600 XP + to run at 3200 speeds. Some new RAM with my new fans etc will able me to clock it further.

AMD 64!!!!!!!!!! :P honestly it's bloody fast, thrashes my old 2400+!

Cheers for that man. I have just scanned around and seen your motherboard for £69.99 delivered. I am looking into getting 2 x 512mb Corsair PC 3200 RAM and a new heatsink for my CPU so that I can clock it over 2.25GHZ. Sounds like the best thing to do, I will wait then and see what the next lot of CPUs have to offer.

Cheers for all your help.

Well Ali, I'm with Miserableman. There is no real point in replacing the CPU here. I'm working on getting my AMD Athlon stable at 2.5 GHz at the moment. In use, whilst it runs, it doesn't feel faster than when it was at 2.1 GHz.

I wouldn't go for an Athlon 64, they have no future. I wouldn't go for a P4 at the moment either. They change socket soon as well.

What I would do is get a decent overclocking motherboard. I have an Abit NF7-S and it is great. Couple that with some good PC 3200 RAM. My TwinMOS Value stuff does 223 MHz FSB stable, so I recommend it. A decent board, decent RAM, a high FSB and a higher CPU clock speed and you'll be fine.

If you are really set on a platform change, then I've heard of people getting over 3.6 GHz from the P4 2.4C. Mainly on Abit IS7 or IC7 or Asus P4P800 or P4C800 motherboards.

I think you would be better spending £120 or so and getting a new motherboard and new RAM which will allow you higher clock speeds and more memory bandwidth, as opposed to spending £200 and not getting any real performance boost. And still having slow RAM.

Ye I think I got about 5-7 more FPS on a constant basis when I clocked mine to 2.1GHZ. Whether this frame rate will be fixed on the final game is a mystery, someone on the Far Cry forums had an Anthlon 64 with 1GB PC3200 RAM and a Radeon 9800 XT and he was getting 15-25FPS outside. I have tried it with all Catalyst drivers from 3.8 through to 4.2 however nothing changed. In the final version I really do hope they will tweak it and sort out the Cat driver problems. Although I'm not building my hopes on it as they wouldn't be the first not to fix demo problems.

ÂLŠ†ÂÎR wrote:
> Bring up the console and type:
>
> \r_displayinfo 1

Thanks. At 1600x1200 it was doing around 20-30 and seemed worst than when I played it before. Put it to 1280x960 and was doing 30-40 and was better. I might think about overclocking my CPU to 200 FSB and keep the overall speed the same. With the increase of FSB it should run a little faster.

Bring up the console and type:

\r_displayinfo 1