Athlon 64 3000+: Pimping An Orphan?

1) I am considering getting a 754 motherboard, because the benchmarks for gaming has been impressive.
2) Again, I am considering this, but also considering a dual 64 solution.
3) Ed's views on this aren't too good. First off, he says that if I go FX right now, I miss out on onboard sata. This is wrong, because I have seen alot of motherboards with sata on them. It seems he is trying to steer people away from it.

"We just don't think going socket 754 at this point is a terribly good idea or value for most people in this audience."

Who is this 'we' is he referring too? The overclocker crowd? The AMD crowd? I am assuming he is talking to at least one of the two mention, and I do not think everyone agrees with this view. I look at it this way: socket A is getting old. a 2.2 socket A can't compete with a 2.2 FX double channel or not. If I got a 940 socket, I have to get registered ram which is quite costly.

Reply Like

I think the writer misses the same old argument we all see every time we want to buy some new piece of PC gear. Name one single computer component or CPU you can buy right now today that wont be outdated in less than a year. P4EE is already outdated, socket change on the way. FX-51, same deal. Athlon XP, history. Alpha's ? History.

SATA is available now on almost every platform. Does this mean your PATA drives are no good ? Of course not. Should you hold off on buying a new DVD drive or hard drive because an SATA one might be better? Up to you but most reviews say there's no real advantage except bragging rights.

DDR2 ? Sounds like RAMBUS all over again. And if its not so what. By the time DDR2 is common your system will be old news anyway.

PCI Express is like DDR2. By the time it is wide spread your AGP card will be old tech anyway. That does not mean you need to replace your AGP card. We all know there are no games available that can saturate the AGP bus and with 256m AGP cards available the likelyhood of ever saturating the AGP bus is slim, at least for a couple of years.

If the writer is trying to tell you not to buy an Atlon64 because it will be old tech soon my response is "What's your point?"

Shall we wait forever to buy the perfect "never needs to be replaced" PC ? Good luck.
:rolleyes:

Reply Like

The link in the first post points to the wrong article (dvd recorder) :)

The answer to that question is another question. Do you want an expensive quick fling, or do you want a (fairly) long-term relationship.

This is one of the most important questions raised, personally I think most people here change motherboards and processors fairly often.

This Athlon 64 is going to be obsoleted fairly quickly. AMD looks like it plans to move away from socket 754 to socket 939 for mainstream systems in 2004, leaving socket 754 for its value line.

This is probably because the Athlon 64 platform is a paradox: a high-performance engine with small fuel lines. If you want a performance system, especially for gaming, you need dual-channel memory. If you don't have it, that's a performance anchor that will become heavier and heavier as time goes on.

If performance isn't that important to you, or you do things that don't really require memory bandwidth, the Athlon 64 is overkill (at least given the price for the processor).

Looking at the recent reviews, it does'nt look like the narrow memory-buss is cripling the processor. I feel like the performance is still far better then what you are getting from anything else in the pricerange? Socket 939 is very tempting, but it won't be affordable before mid-summer. (possibly even later)

Perhaps more importantly, a generational shift in motherboards is imminent. This will consist of the following:

# SATA becoming the primary hard drive standard
# PCI Express becoming the video card standard
# DDR2 replacing DDR
# (At least for Intel) BTX replacing ATX as the motherboard form factor standard

Intel will implement the first three with its next-generation chipset, and complete the transition at the end of 2004 with its "Bigwater" motherboard for Tejas.

AMD looks like it will take smaller steps. The next generation of Hammer mobos will implement the first two changes. Memory will probably follow sometime in 2005, and we'll just have to see about form factor.

We are now talking about changes that will happen one year from now... I have also read speculations that ddr2 will not offer better performance in the beginning due to higher latencys. I'm not an expert on this, but if it's true, it could actually be better to get a motherboard that allows you to benefit from your current low latency ddr! Most people I know have bought radeon 9700 - 9800 videocards, and are not planning on upgrading them in the near future. If you think about it this way, it could actually be better to upgrade now, before the changes occure.

Then again, too, an overclocked Athlon 64 is also likely to generally do a little bit better than the average overclocked PIV system. Depending on how Prescott does and when socket 939 shows up, you'll have a couple to a few more months of glory. But that's it.

I wonder when there will be an upgrade available that will give you more then a couple of months of glory? :)

Personally I'm waiting to see how the nforce 3 250 chipset will be, it should be coming out pretty soon. If it's good I don't see any reason not to build a system based on it. Yes, upgrade choises will be limitecd. I am however noticing that recently I have'nt really been upgrading only the processor, rather the motherboard and processor at the same time. I think socket 754 offers a fairly cheap upgrade that will give you top notch performance on current standards, and keep you happy untill tejas / very well overclocking A64's. Even though amd's current roadmap shows future 754 processors to be 32bit, I would'nt be suprised if there where 64bit versions coming out too. Even if it does'nt happen, I don't see what kind of upgrade path you would have getting a P4 now.

Reply Like