System upgrade time...some questions

[Nuno]

Nuno, the thing is, while I completely agree that Asrock are very good boards for their price, I want a nice, fully-featured ASUS motherboard, I'm very partial to them


Sooo, basically everyone here is saying I should go AMD...thing is, I bought my new video card just a little while ago, so I really would like an AGP system and have never been into hybrids (like the ULI Nuno mentioned).

Asrock is associated with Asus, it´s actually their budget motherboard line.

As you put it, save the gigabit lan (can´t you really live with a 100Mbps network? ) I think the Asrock 939DS2 actually has more features. It actually supports natively AGP8x and PCIe 16x Buses. It has a most elegant design, as the PCIe controller is on the nortbridge and the AGP controller is on the southbridge, sending data to NB through a 1000Mhz 16bit HHT bus, that´s more bandwidth you can ever use. It´s the only rational choice for anyone having a decent AGP card on a 939 AMD system. It supports dual-core CPU´s, either AthlonX2 or dual-core Opterons. It does support SATA NCQ. It has all those fail-safe bios boot features.

If you go with a P5P800 and a P4, you´ll need to buy a new motherboard for you next upgrade. And that means even your video card.

If you go with the 939 Dual-Sata2, when you upgrade, just put a new PCIe card on the slot (you can even run a fully functional AGP8x and a PCIe16x cards at the same time!), put a dual core AthlonX2 on the CPU socket, and there you go, a brand new system. I wouldn´t even mention the "future CPU port" this board has, that´ll support the upcoming AMD M2 CPU´s via a daughter card with a CPU socket and some DDR2 slots.

So I went this way and I´m more than happy. For little more than 200€, I have a up-to-date system with a 2500Mhz AMD venice core (something like a odd AMD64 4000+, as this runs 100Mhz slower but has more L2 cache), virtually silent - it´s actually quite difficult to do this on actual P4 cores - and running completely stable on my old Chieftec 360W PSU.

Grab one while you can. They can be found as cheap as 60-70€, wich is a steal for such a board. As you may noticed, nvidia just bough ULi, i wonder why?

[lecter]

OK, so basically the ASRock has two advantages: PCI-Express support and dual-core AMD support. The problem is, right now I could only afford a single-core AMD CPU which by my reckoning would be worse than the Intel in anything other than games...and my savings by going this route would be 40-50$ at best. Also, it wouldn't solve my audio issue, I'd still be stuck with crappy, non-EAX, onboard sound. I agree that the ASRock is better for the future, but it'd be worse now.

Thanks again, I'll make a final decision in the coming couple of weeks.

[Wombat]

AMDs are also much cooler (temp-wise), and you'll be socket-compatible for a future upgrade. Plus, EAX cards can be found cheaply.

[lecter]

Well, I don't overclock so I wouldn't care much about the temp difference between a full-load AMD or Intel, and my apartment aircon makes more noise than a cooling system anyway

As for socket compatibility and PCI-Express, a future upgrade (which would be at least a year away) would make me change my video card, CPU & add more memory anyway, so I could just throw in 100$ for a nice, new, fully compliant (perhaps even BTX) motherboard then.

Also, that freaky little sound upgrade would give me EAX Advanced HD support, which is an Audigy+ feature, which would mean at least 60$ if I were to buy a separate card here.

[Belwarrior]

let me try tempting you to AMD if you can just sell off your agp card and get a pci-express card

take a look at this

http://www.hardwarezone.com/articles/view.php?cid=6&id=1787&pg=2

the above is overkill but what about the following which also has onboard creative chip

http://www.msi.com.tw/program/products/mainboard/mbd/pro_mbd_detail.php?UID=638

cheers!

[lecter]

And tempted I am! That looks like a really sweet mobo...I won't have the cash for a full upgrade right now, but I just might pace it over a month and go for the whole shiznit.

[Mcollector]

...
take a look at this

http://www.hardwarezone.com/articles/view.php?cid=6&id=1787&pg=2

the above is overkill but what about the following which also has onboard creative chip

http://www.msi.com.tw/program/products/mainboard/mbd/pro_mbd_detail.php?UID=638

Do you happen to know if either supports ECC memory? Or an alternative that does if these don't?

[Belwarrior]

Do you happen to know if either supports ECC memory? Or an alternative that does if these don't?

erm... I cant find any info from the website or the manuals regarding ECC ram support for the MSI boards.

So far i have seen ASUS boards have listed ECC ram support but they dont come with creative sound chips so if that is not a problem, take a look at the following

http://www.asus.com/products4.aspx?modelmenu=2&model=744&l1=3&l2=15&l3=226

http://www.asus.com/products4.aspx?modelmenu=2&model=539&l1=3&l2=15&l3=148

http://www.asus.com/products4.aspx?modelmenu=2&model=455&l1=3&l2=15&l3=171

ASUS has too many products based on nvidia chipsets, i suggest you look up the website for boards with less features

DFI and Giga-Byte have some nice boards as well

[Dr Mordrid]

Intels support for extended memory configurations is hampered by it's piss poor external memory controller. AMD's is internal, making slower memory types work faster than Intel with faster ones.

Oops.

Dr. Mordrid

[Tjalfe]

much higher latencies on DDR2 too, compared to DDR1

[Mehen]

if you put the DDR2 back to DDR1 speeds you can get the exact same latencies on equally priced ram. And the same performance as well. With DDR2 basically all you get is more flexibility and headroom to play around with the speeds and timings.

[Marshmallowman]

Definitely go for Intel if you are buying single-core processor based machine.

How does that work, amd's single cores are faster anyway and you get the bonus of being able to upgrade to dual core without worrying about socket compatabilty.

I think the middle of next year is about the time you would EVEN consider buying intel again, as the new stufff is looking promising...but still wait and see.

I think we are just starting the transition right now, only the fastest dual core AMD chips are starting to get starved of memory bandwidth at 400mhz, but setting the ram speed higher helps and *almost* officially supported. So now is the time to transition to ddr2, just as its becomeing needed, viable and cheaper.(hence M2 next year)

However don't write off ddr1 yet, there is plenty of high performance ddr1 parts that is and will be price & performance competative for quite a while to come. (well I hope so anyway because I just bough an expensive ddr1 system recently )

[Mehen]

AMD single cores are only faster if you are doing a single task. With a P4 with HT, you can set a process in motion, and go play say some CS, and it'll be playable. Even the fastest AMDs (single cores) get bogged down too much to do this. But if you are the type that never has anything cpu intensive in the background, or you don't multitask with heavy loads much, AMD is the way to go.

Check it out.

Nothing running in background.

Program running in background.

[Marshmallowman]

Or you could set the process priority on the encode to low and get a very nice game of CS while it encodes , though the p4 would *probably* finish first

They above test are very misleading, do they say how long the encode took while maintiaing x fps?
perhaps the render on the amd finished faster cause on the athlon becasue it hogged the cpu?

The above is a flawed test, unless they show the full story.

I will concede in general P4's with HT multitask better, but apart from that the fact athlons seem to attribute their resources badly by default(adjusting priorties fixes that), but in real tems the HT improvements are of the order of a few %, and athlons can be more than a few % faster.

[Mehen]

few %? The P4 is 62% faster while encoding. If you think it's flawed, I'd take that up with HardOCP.

"On my previous 3.2GHz Pentium 4 system with HyperThreading, I could easily start a DivX encode using Dr. DivX and then go about my other normal daily tasks that for the most part are not CPU intensive. On my Pentium 4 system with HyperThreading, the DivX encode was all but transparent. Of course, you could not run another heavily CPU dependent application and expect the same smooth user performance. Trying to do my daily work on my FX-53 box while encoding DivX left me with an unresponsive user interface that was slow and laggy. I was simply not able to get my multitasking workload done without a large amount of frustration." < Which is why I won't go AMD unless it's dualcore. Give me a FX-57 to compete against my current P4 and although I would certainly be impressed with its gaming capabilites, I can all but garauntee you I'd stick with my P4.

http://hardocp.com/article.html?art=NzY2LDQ=