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Anaxagoras1986

Member
Joined
Oct 19, 2002
I posted this on the Intel forum. I was interested in your opinions on this (just in case you didnt see it). Which system would you get? They are both almost the same price. Also, what changes would you make to these configs if you were going to get one of them? Thanks for any of your input.

Asus A7N8X mobo
Athlon XP1800 Tbred
2x 256mb Corsair DDR
Maxtor 40.0GB 7200RPM ATA133
R8500LE 128Mb

The P4 system was the same except for:
Abit BD7-II mobo
P4 1.6 or 1.8 (maybe 2.26 but that one is pushing budget)
1x 512Mb Corsair DDR

EDIT: Sorry for those of you who have already looked at this earlier, I forgot to paste the systems.
 
Last edited:
Anaxagoras1986 said:
Asus A7V8X mobo
Athlon XP1800 Tbred
2x 256mb Corsair DDR
Maxtor 40.0GB 7200RPM ATA133
R8500LE 128Mb

The P4 system was the same except for:
Abit BD7-II mobo
P4 1.6 or 1.8 (maybe 2.26 but that one is pushing budget)
1x 512Mb Corsair DDR

Asus makes good boards. I've seen too many Abit boards die an early death.

Why 2 DDR RAM chips on the AMD setup?? One single RAM chip is the "way to go" if you intend on overclocking that RAM.

40GB is alright, but with the amount of data I deal with, it will likely get filled in short time in my box. The 80GB WD 8MB cache drives are fairly cheap and very fast, why not one of them?

Radeon's a good card, but it's days are numbered. If you can splurge, the minimum I recommend to any gamer is a Ti4200 ior radeon 9500.
 
I went with two sticks b/c of the feature on the nforce2. It has Dual DDR.

WD SE is really nice. And so would a R9500, Ti4200, but I am going to get a better card at a better time. I think the 8500 would be strong enough for now. The 9500PRos are about 180 right?
 
Asus A7V8X mobo
Athlon XP1800 Tbred
2x 256mb Corsair DDR
Maxtor 40.0GB 7200RPM ATA133
R8500LE 128Mb

That AMD system would rape the Intel system you described. I have an 8500Le, and get between 65-100 FPS in UT2003 with max details at 1024x768 with 16x anisotropic filtering. If you can swing it though, a 9500PRO would be better. And 8500 is better than a 9000 though, so get atleast an 8500. Also, ATi has MUCH better picture quality than any nVidia card to date, so that's an added bonus. My 8500 is almost as fast as a TI4200, and it has much better image quality.

I would recommend a different motherboard, although the one you mentioned is very good. If I were you I'd get an Asus A7N8X, based on the new nForce 2 chipset. It's the fastest of the new nForce 2 boards. With good cooling and a tbred 1800+ you should be able to hit 2.0 GHz, or Athlon XP2400 performance. (Even faster than 2400+ if you OC with FSB and not multipliers, due to the added memory bandwith..)

My $0.02. :)
 
To be completely honest, I'd take the Intel P4 system. I like it for several reasons:

Performance - the 1.8a or 2.26b overclocked would have the upper hand over the AMD. Last I looked the 1.8a's were getting 2.7 GHz stock voltage - 150FSB.

Bandwidth - The memory bandwidth in Intel systems are much better and efficent than AMD Systems especially comparing directly at VIA. The dual ddr did boost AMD systems bandwidth 3-5% but it isn't significant like it is in Intel systems.

Stability - Intel chipsets are less problematic than VIA.

However, the only thing you have to beware of is SNDS:

http://forums.oc-forums.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=115166
 
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