Major Upgrade - Opinions?

[agallag]

I'm about to upgrade my PC, and use the leftover parts to build an HTPC. Here's what I have planned:

Athlon64 3200+ S939
Asus A8V-E Deluxe
OCZ PC-3200 DDR400 Premier Series 1GB (2x512MB) Dual Channel Kit CAS2.5
Sapphire Radeon X700 PRO 256MB GDDR3 PCI-E w/ TV-Out, DVI (Lite Retail)

Then I'll grab an "Antec Lifestyle Overture Piano Black Quiet Media Case w/ TruePower 300W Power Supply", throw all the old components in there, and hook it up to my new big-ass TV.

Whaddaya think?

[Chrono_Wanderer]

CPU: make sure u get the venice. the serial number on the venice is labelled BP at the end iirc.
mobo: ever considered an nforce 4 board?
ram: have that too. good so far.
card: pretty good. ever considered 6600GT?

quite similar to my setup...

[ZokesPro]

Why the venice Chrono?

[Jammrock]

Why the venice Chrono?

Better chip. Better overclocking. Cooler, lower power operation. Fixed memory controller. SSE3.

[ZokesPro]

Better chip. Better overclocking. Cooler, lower power operation. Fixed memory controller. SSE3.

Go with the venice!

[agallag]

CPU: make sure u get the venice. the serial number on the venice is labelled BP at the end iirc.

Yup, was planning on the venice.

mobo: ever considered an nforce 4 board?

I've heard nForce boards don't always play well with ATI vid cards.

ram: have that too. good so far.

Cool

card: pretty good. ever considered 6600GT?

XFX 6600GT 128MB = $232
Sapphire X700 Pro 256MB = $189

quite similar to my setup...

How's yours treating you? All good?

[Gurm]

On the video card:

nVidia = Teh Suxxorz!!!!1!1one

On the motherboard:

nForce plays fine with ATI in my experience.

[agallag]

On the video card:

nVidia = Teh Suxxorz!!!!1!1one

On the motherboard:

nForce plays fine with ATI in my experience.

I've never liked nVidia either. Is the nForce really better than the Via?

[Jammrock]

I've never liked nVidia either. Is the nForce really better than the Via?

It's been the big thing in AMD motherboards since the nForce3 chipset came out. Good drivers, stable chips, fast as hell.

The ATi 200 Express chipset has been getting a lot of good press lately, too. r whatever it's called. On par with nForce4 in pretty mch everything, but they sell PCIe x16 with PCI only options, while the nForce4 gives you a mix of both and some better integrated options if you opt with the nForce4 Ultra chipset (dedicted Gb lanes, hardware firewall, hardware RAID, 1000 MHz hyper transport and a few other goodies). For non-SLI systems the nForce4 chipset is king right now...well, it's king for SLI systems too.

[Admiral]

I have nothing against VIA, have one myself, but the K8T890 will probably be the only chipset that doesn't support dual core CPUs.

[Gurm]

VIA has gotten much better... but it was only a couple years ago when VIA utterly sucked. nForce is just... well, let's say that nVidia's video and motherboard divisions pursue different paths. The nForce just rocks. Frankly my nForce2/Ultra400 is pretty decent too. I think the nForce3 disappointed a lot of people, but nForce4 rocks.

[Chrono_Wanderer]

How's my new system treating me? One word: can't ask for more (except another LCD so I can photoshop and write reports more easily)

NForce has always been strong in chipsets. The only chip that wasn't very good from them was the nForce 3 150 (which nobody used... because of its slow HTT links) But nForce 4 + a GeForce 6? The Force is with me. LOL. Gaming is awesome, and building that system had a "built-by-gamer-for-gamer feel".

Whatever you do, just don't go with ALi (or ULi), I had nighemares with them. VIA and ATI are probably good in chipsets these days...

I can understand why you don't go GeForce 6. Its cheaper and all. I went NVIDIA b/c of drivers (CCC is a bit slow), dual dvi (only on some x8x0), and a religious believe in their design concept in general (throw in extra transistors for the unused features lol) not that I really need it but just something I believe in chip design. Thus my nvidia fanboy-ness.

Mind you, ATI has great products. The chip themselves is probably geared more toward gaming than nvidia's (especially apparent in the FX line, 32bpp vs. 24 making it dog slow in HDR. but its a bad architecture in general so whatever). And although nvidia is much more strict in 2d than years ago, ATI probably still has the edge in that.

[agallag]

Ok, A8N-E it is then. Thanks for the tip guys.

[agallag]

Systemspecs link in my sig has been updated.

[DGhost]

ATI used to use a ALi/ULi southbridge, partially because their whole chipset was primarily lisenced from them.

I don't know how the new PCI-E chipset is, but I know their older ones had relatively poor performance for their peripherals. they were supposed to fix it on their new chipset, but I don't know if they ever did.

re: nForce chipsets. the nForce 3 was great except the first rev (also called the nForce 150) was lacking built in SATA features. the second rev (nForce 250) corrected that and introduced a host of other options. the only other issue i ever encountered was that motherboard vendors used the nForce3 chipsets in lower end boards and sometimes did some funky engineering to keep costs down - using cheap 10/100 NIC's instead of chipset supported 1000gb ones, cheaper audio codecs, etc etc.

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