Athlon 64... Is it worth it?

Cereal Killa · Oct 1, 2003

I mean for now, is it worth the extra $ ? I'm from Belgium and here the price difference between an Athlon XP Barton 3000+ and Athlon 64 3200+ is roughly ~€ 200 (about $ 220-230 I guess...)
Anyway, the programs that are avaible now, do they really benefit from this new CPU?

Thx
--Cereal

OC-Master · Oct 1, 2003

Definately not...

Especially being based around overclockers.com

Most forum members will agree with me that there is some progression that needs to be made before forking out that much cash.

My personal opinion, I'd wait untill Socket 939 emerges along with DDR that can be used thats NOT registered.

OC-Master

shiyan · Oct 1, 2003

Fellow Belgian on the board. Cool.

If you are dying to upgrade, get a 2500+ and a NForce 2 motherboard. Together should cost you something like 226 Euros (from Forcom in Antwerp as one example).

You can overclock that to a pretty good speed. Pretty near what the A64 and 3000+ are speed wise.

The 2600+ is only 20 Euros more than the 2500+, and people on the forum seem to be of the opinion that they might have better stepping.

There's very little software about which takes advantage of A64, except some in Linux I think. Though this might change in a year or so.

cherryp00t · Oct 1, 2003

20 euros is alot of money.. i'd go with the 2500+ =d

shiyan · Oct 1, 2003

Cereal Killa · Oct 2, 2003

Hehe

, thx though

pelikan · Oct 2, 2003

I'd sure love to get an A64, but I just can't stomach forking over so much $.
My policy is to wait to upgrade until I can't play the newest games at the highest detail level. That hasn't happened yet. So for now I'm sticking with what I have.

cherryp00t · Oct 2, 2003

my justifications comes maybe 3-6 months after the .09 process comes out =d cuz by then we have socket 939 chip that should be fast, oc-able and more or less stable or at least the boards will be by then.. and thats where's the speeds at ;d

CrashOveride · Oct 2, 2003

Not to me ATM, even if I had the money (unless maybe I had hundreds of thousands of dollars just sitting around).

cherryp00t · Oct 2, 2003

hehe spend a dollar on a lottery ticket

you might end up taking that back

dpw2atox · Oct 3, 2003

if I had the money i'd get an athlon 64 3200+ but i wouldn't get the FX cause its just going to be phased out for the 939 pin ones. Im waiting and hoping for a dual version of the Athlon 64 to be released and then get 2 of those suckers running.

Molester · Oct 3, 2003

pelikan said:
I'd sure love to get an A64, but I just can't stomach forking over so much $.
My policy is to wait to upgrade until I can't play the newest games at the highest detail level. That hasn't happened yet. So for now I'm sticking with what I have.

well, when doom3 comes out, i'm sure it'll be pushing our systems hard, maybe too hard(from what i saw when playing at quakecon, the computers they were using lagged quite a bit, coulda just been bugs though, but i doubt it, graphics were brillian by the way)

shiyan · Oct 3, 2003

the thing is, switching from an overclocked Barton 2500+ system to the A64 system won't improve it by any great margin.

pelikan · Oct 3, 2003

shiyan said:
the thing is, switching from an overclocked Barton 2500+ system to the A64 system won't improve it by any great margin.

I don't know...overclocked Barton to overclocked A64...In UT2003 Botmatch, for example, at 1024x768 you'd go from 84 to 110 FPS.
In 3DMark01 you'd go from 20K to 24K.
I think that's a great margin.

shiyan · Oct 3, 2003

But the thing is, it is not going to be these high framerates which would cause anyone concern.

At this relatively low resolution the cpu is the main limiting factor if you have something like a 9800 Pro, and so the difference between these two can be felt.

It is only when it gets down to like 30~40 that people would complain about framedrops etc. (I know many people can notice a drop in performance at higher framerates, but I'm just talking about what would be considered comfortable for gaming) This normally happens when the resolution and quality settings are high. Most of the time in these situations the main limiting factor is the graphics card.

I think in such cases the A64 + 9800 Pro will not be faster than the 2500+ + 9800 Pro by that same 20% which you demonstrated.

I don't have the exact figure, but I would expect the improvement to be less than 20%.

Of course it would be quite a different picture with purely CPU dependent applications. I can't remember the data for this though.

I'm only saying that the A64 is probably not worth it if you are just buying it to be able to run your games faster.

pelikan · Oct 3, 2003

I hope you are right. I don't want to have to upgrade to play all the great new games that are coming out soon. I do prefer to play with the highest detail levels. But fortunately I don't care about AA or AF.

shiyan · Oct 3, 2003

well, I think what I have said has been the generall pattern for a while. Whenever a game becomes graphics card limited, a faster cpu doesn't help much, only a faster graphics card brings large improvements.

of course if someone had a PII + GF3 (or higher) and was running at 20~30fps, going to a Tbred 1700+ will probably quadruple his framerates, whereas getting a 9800 Pro won't help much at all, as in this case the limitting factor is the CPU.

Sk8erfreak986 · Oct 5, 2003

what is the conversion rate of Euros to dollars lol

shiyan · Oct 5, 2003

Go to XE.com, but I though it was around 1.16 dollars for each euro...

edit: no, it is 1.157 dollars for each euro.

Tomsawyer · Oct 6, 2003

I got my xp2100 to 2.6ghz via my watercooling setup, an epox 8rda+, and twinmos pc3200 for less than 300 bucks total (and yes the watercooling rig is home built and carries over from system to system heheh)

Now here comes the hot new toy FX51 at $700 to $800??

Hmm all my games run great, my apps cruise along, and I can post in forums lol.

Would I like an FX?? Hell yes! Will I spend 800 bucks for performance that I will not truely able to see? Sorry No.

Now come April where the chip may have apps or games that will rock on it count me, esp if the price comes down out of the exosphere.

Athlon 64... Is it worth it?

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