Need computer shopping advice

[bsdgeek]

cking4, Asus is now making boards that support Prescott.

[Byock]

I would still wait. I got the KT400, had I waited 2 weeks, I would have got the Nforce2. I would wait for the dust to settle.

[Kooldino]

Lose that sound card.

[Zao]

Kooldino: If you couple it with the kX drivers, it's OK.
If one uses the Creative 'drivers', one has to blame himself for any problems.

But since the mobo probably has integrated sound, I might use that instead.

[Admiral]

I installed the kx drivers out of curiosity and I seem to be loosing EAX/EAX2 support in games

Back to our Prescott compatibility, according to this french site that follows rumors on other sites, all Gigabyte made i865/i875P boards are Prescott compatible, having been built following the FMB 2.0 specs while Prescott requires a minimum of FMB 1.5 specs.
So I guess that would mean my 8IK1100 can handle a Prescott, yey

[Zao]

The kX drivers doesn't support EAX yet, due to its properitary nature.
Accelerated DS3D support is coming very soon, in the next driver release.

[Admiral]

I'd say get a 2.4C and upgrade to a Prescott sometime next year.
My Radeon 9700 Pro pretty much caps at 2.4GHz, overclocking the CPU to 2.88 didn't bring much extra performance, so I guess the video card is the bottleneck here and a CPU over 2.4 might not be worth the money.

[Kurt]

Originally posted by cking4
Re: Admiral

Thanks for the info on Gigabyte... if that's true, then I already have two choices here, this and the Asus model
that bdsgeek pointed us to.

On a completely separate note -- does anyone know what price the Prescotts are going to hit the street at? Will
"C" P4s drop in price after this as well? They're stating Q4 2003 for availability; I guess I'm going to have to decide
if I want to shell out for the Big Kahuna up front or upgrade to it later...

I vaguely remember seeing a $697 price for the 3.4GHz Prescott S478 in 1000 qty. The other P4 models _will_ come down in price when the new chip is introduced. usually the next speedgrade looses about 30%, the 3rd speedgrade too then 18% for the 4th etc...

[Kurt]

Anyway, the Intel Pricing Roadmap only shows price decrease for the P4 at the end of October...I guess that that would be when they introduce Prescott...