New Standards Are Arriving...Should I Wait?

[RichL]

I'm holding out on an upgrade until AMD start shipping Athlons with 333fsb. By which time we should be on 400mhz DDR too.
I hate spending a bucketload of money and finding I'm running yesterdays tech within a few weeks.
Its worse when you keep your system for a few years like I do, and after a year no one makes the same type of memory / CPU / whatever because its all the last generation of stuff.

I think my stock of 4mb 30pin Simms is actually gaining in value

[DGhost]

333fsb athlons will be yesterdays technology the day they were released. not only is the core almost a year old, the stuff due out within 6 months will make it look like a chew toy.

DDR400 will also be highly overrated.

[The_King]

Originally posted by BuddMan
I'll probably wait for the NV30 to be released so I can get a 9700 cheaper.

Thats what I'm doing...

[Admiral]

I was under the impression that both SIS and VIA dropped support for DDR400.
While memory already exists, we might not get motherboards with official DDR400 support till DDR II.

[Wombat]

There isn't even an official DDR400 standard, is there?

[DGhost]

last i checked no. same sort of thing as when DDR333 first was put out.

DDR400 would only offer any sort of decent performance increase if you were running 200FSB (with an athlon at least, a P4 would probably take advantage of it better). and even then the major performance increase doesn't come from the memory bus being increased. it comes more from the FSB being increased.

the athlon architecture is far more FSB limited than it is memory bandwidth limited, especially since they switched to DDR memory.

but, on the plus side, 400 is higher than 333, so it makes it easier to tell that its faster!!

[WyWyWyWy]

Next gen tech? Screw it.

Something you should invest on (that will work good in tomorrow's technology)

- Multi-processor
- Raid (preferably 1+0? If you have $$$ go Raid5 go!)
- Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, USB2, 1394, Giga-ethernet
- Dual/Tri head

and...

- Wireless optical mouse, sounds stupid but definitely a must buy

[rugger]

Hmmm

Most definitely optical mouse. Much less of a pain than normal mices.

I would say, buy now, before the christmas season kicks in proper and everything becomes really expensive.

As for waiting for new technolgies, I wouldn't bother, because all these new technologies won't be really needed for years. Just look at how long it has taken for most new technologies to be properly absorbed and taken advantage of, including PCI, USB, Firewire, CD-ROM, DVD-ROM, ATX cases, and the 386 chip.

I especially wouldn't wait for Hammer, AMD hasn't got a bright history of getting stuff out in reasonable time, and Hammer has already been delayed more than once.

[Umfriend]

I always thought that DDR-400 would benefit an Athlon based system. I realise that the CPU itslef will not obtain higher throughput itslef due to the 266 FSB, but I thought that the memory controller would be able to service GPU and IO requests without adversly affecting CPU bandwidht avaliability. So CPU performance would not rise, but total system (peak) performance would. Not true?

Umf

[DGhost]

for the GPU to get a benefit out of system memory it is gonna be in one of two ways... 1) you are doing AGP texturing out of system memory, which is something that is gonna hurt performance more than the DDR 400 will help... or 2) your feeding texture data into the GPU's memory, in which case you are going to hurt performance by forcing the graphics card to wait on the data instead of having to preloaded....

as far as other IO goes... it might, but usually other busses and devices are enough of a bottleneck that it doesn't really heavily impact system performance... maybe if you are doing video overlays from say a tv tuner or video capture board through main system memory and then to the graphics card (assuming DMA transfers) instead of just over the PCI bus...

its late here and i'm really tired so i'm not even sure if this post is coherent let alone factual...

[Pace]

Just spend all that cash on 5 monitors...and wait for a certain manufacturer to bring out a certain update to a certain graphics card

The problem with buying today's tech, is that if you upgrade to a new CPU/board, if might need SATA drives, DDR400 etc. However, if you aren't planning any new upgrades, then I can't see any speed advantages to waiting for new tech. How many people bought i820 or later i815 as a replacement for BX? BX still beat the early boards - who cares about UDMA66 support Plus the RAMBUS i820 died quite quickly (despite it being the real BX replacement).

P.

[thop]

hmm i have some trouble with your advice wywywywy

dual-cpu? barely anything optimized for it, useless.
raid? hmm ok.
bluetooth? too slow, useless.
wi-fi? convenient, but too slow.
usb2? hmm not yet.
firewire? hmm ok.
1000mbit? for dsl?

[cjolley]

My comment above was meant to be ironic.
Just buy yourself the nicest computer you can afford now.
If you wait for the proposed new standards to get here, there will be new proposed new standards to wait on.
It never ends.
Tomorrow is always the day after today no matter how long you wait.
chuck

[WyWyWyWy]

Originally posted by thop
hmm i have some trouble with your advice wywywywy

dual-cpu? barely anything optimized for it, useless.
raid? hmm ok.
bluetooth? too slow, useless.
wi-fi? convenient, but too slow.
usb2? hmm not yet.
firewire? hmm ok.
1000mbit? for dsl?

Just thought I would share my thought with you...

Firstly, games might not get optimised for multiproc, but most Linux applications (you running Debian, right?) and the W2K/XP kernel, Photoshop, video-editing software, and damn even IE are heavily thread programmed hence would make good use of multiproc. And as it is getting more popular, you will see more "threded" application in the coming years. (especially after P4 with hyperthread launched.)

Bluetooth, I personally like because of Ericsson handset... but you might not, ok. WiFi and 1394, disregard what I said if you have no use for it. USB2 is a must if you don't plan on upgrade in next two three years, most new USB devices (webcam, HDD, pendrive, CD-RW, etc) WILL be USB2.0.

Giga-ethernet is very promising indeed, if you have a home network set up.

And of course, these are just my thought and suggestions.

[Belwarrior]

my 2 cts worth,
- A SiS board (Intel or AMD...doesnt really matter.. i prefer AMD)
- CPU as long as it is around 2GHz it is more than enuff for 3 yrs
- at least 40 gig hdd
- A Very Good Power Supply and case
- A good graphics card (Parhelia?)

The time i would wait is until SiS comes out with boards supporting AGP 8x and USB 2.0