Mobo/cpu reccomendations. No budget

[FastRedPonyCar]

Ok gang. I haven't upgraded my motherboard/cpu since the abit IC7G was brand new and the 2.4Ghz p4 was top of the line.

The system has finally been brought to it's knees by Oblivion and being a HUGE morrowind freak, I simply can't live with the game knowing that I'm only seeing half the goodness. The 6800GT helps some but still shows weakness and it's time for an overhaul.

I only need a new mobo/cpu/gpu. I'm wondering if there's anything new and fancy just over the horizion that I should hold off on this purchase or not?

If not, then I need a good 939 board, good GPU and not necesarrily the most expensive/fastest AMD but one that offers the best bang for the buck. I'm assuming there's a popular dual core model that overclocks well?

I'd like to be able to overclock the system too (that's why I'm here right) so stability plays a role. I know I want SLI and I'm figuring that if I get a decent SLI board and something like a 7800 or 7900 nvidia, It would be ok and if needed, just slap another one in there next year or something?

I don't really need a whole lot of bells and whistles on my motherboard. Just the basics: SLI, stability, audio not required, usb and speed. I'm also using a zalman 120mm heatsink so the CPU socket needs to not be on the edge of the board. Centralized location would be ideal but from what I've seen, most sli boards have that. So no $180 motherboards with hd audio or integrated cooling or any of that stuff is needed so I'm hoping I can save some money in this area. If not, though, that's fine.

So bring on the help and suggestions. I've been out of the tech loop for a while so I'm all ears.

I'd like to hopefully try and keep the budget around $1000. It's not set in stone or anything but that's what I'd be most comfortable spending if I know I'm going to get as much use out of the core components as I've gotten out of what I'm using now (Since December of 2003!)

Just a current guess as to what would be decent would be
- DFI NF4 Ultra D motherboard
- BFG 7900GTX
- AMD Opteron 170 Denmark

Totalling just over a thousand. I could work with that. Is that AMD decent though? Or is there a better bang for the buck overclocker out there for $400 or less?

 

[leelegend]

i have got the spec below, and i am VERY happy with it...
i have not gone into overclocking the bios etc, but as you can see from the benchmarks it is a solid performer, and it will overclock 10% with no stability issues.

things have moved on a bit now so probably a 7900gt and the A8N32 are the new models.

lee

 

[FastRedPonyCar]

Wow that Asus looks like a pretty nice board but what does it offer that I would need that the DFI doesn't? (If I'm going to spend almost twice what the DFI costs)

It's got built in audio and that funky cooling with the heatpipe but cooling isn't really an issue or won't be I don't think.

Oh and it'll probably be mid/end of may when I order this stuff. My Bday is on May 15th so I'll use whatever I get from the wife/parents to put towards this. Hopefully by the end of May, prices will have gone down a little.

 

[leelegend]

i have read about the asus being a lot more stable, but not having anywhere near as many overclocking options....horses for coarses

lee

 

[FastRedPonyCar]

well...I'm not a hardcore overclocker though...I mean I say that but looking at my sig, you'd think otherwise but really the abit board I've got, I just cranked the fsb, set the multiplier and raised the cpu/ram voltage a little and it's been smokin since day one with not a single hiccup.

 

[Thrasher_Z]

AM2 release is in June if your after the latest greatest hold off for the DDR2 support

 

[<<Spider>>]

Best Bang for your buck mobo is the AsRock SATA2. Just add the mod bios and it'll overclock like crazy. It also come with both PCI-E and AGP.

 

[FastRedPonyCar]

the AM2 looks nice but I imagine the prices will be outrageous. I'm not that hardcore to be on the very bleeding edge of technology. I think a fast 939 system with a 7900GTX or X1900XTX with the option to add another one for probably much cheaper later on this year or early next year seems to be the best option.

I also don't want to have to spend more money on RAM. I upgraded ram middle of last year and don't see a real need to do so again at the moment.

I'm sort of in limbo of what to do regarding the CPU speed vs. mobo. That A8N32 looks pretty sick but if I got that, I would probably have to cut some cost on the processor and get a slower one.

On the other hand, if the A8N32 offers no real clear cut benefits that the Ultra D (or it's equivalent) offers, I can put that extra money towards a faster processor.

So... suggestions?

Originally I came into this project upgrade with the mind to spend as much as I want and splurge on two fast cards, a killer cpu and top of the line motherboard but after talking it over with the wife and really pulling myself back down into reality and into "land of practical thinking", I think that $1000~$1200 is the max spending that I'll put into this project.

Adding a new CPU/mobo leads me to beelive that I'd need to re-format and I've always wanted a raptor drive to put windows and system files on so that's a definate "mabey" but not certain. I am doing some odd jobs on the side of my actual full time job to earn a bit more money for this project so I may get one of those to make full use of the new system speed.

That abit AN8 32X looks pretty decent too.

 

[shmadz]

I just recently did a similar overhaul, barton2500 -> opteron 165 ; ASUS A7N8X-E -> Asus A8N32-SLI ; 6600gt -> 7900gtx ; 1G -> 2G ram. It runs oblivion like a dream - the only problem is the eyecandy causes me to drool all over my keyboard . The thing that worries me is not the AM2 or conroe, it's the release of dx10. If games come out and they require dx10 compliant hardware, my 7900GTX is gonna be one big expensive paperweight.

I highly recommend the opteron 165, mine does 2.6 on air at 1.39v easy. with a little voltage I've gone up to 2760 MHz (8 hours prime stable) at 1.5v and if I had better cooling I'm sure it would do quite a bit more...

The asus A8N32 is a matter of choice, I personally don't like the fact that the board thinks it knows better than me and will simply reject settings that it considers too high. example: voltage is capped depending on what kind of processor you have, memory timings are automatically relaxed if you set them too tight, etc... On the other hand the automatic-ness of the board probably saves your hardware.

I have never owned abit or dfi so I can't say, but if I could do it over I would probably try out the DFI expert

also, for a graphics card, if you get the 7900gtx and go sli with the asus A8N32 you will not be able to use any of the pci slots, there's just no room. with 2*7900GT you should have one pci slot for your sound card available (which is all most people need) And for your ram, I see that your sig says 1.5gig, I assume that's 3*512, I don't believe you can run dual-channel ram with an odd number of stix and if you add 1 stick for 4*512 you can run dual but not at 1T settings. I personally found a 25-30% decrease in ram bandwidth (measured with sandra) when comparing 1T and 2T.

 

[FastRedPonyCar]

I've built 5 machines now all with abit boards and they've all done awesome. My brother's rig has a 939 dfi lan party that has done very well also. I've never dealt with Asus though and there are a lot of good reviews regarding that board and a lot all complaining about heat but I'm no stranger to heat so I don't think that'd be a problem and it's always a crapshoot no matter how small the odds of the board being DOA.

What benefits would the opteron 165 have over the dual core amd's? I've noticed the prices are similar but I'm needing something that has all around speed and not just gaming speed. There needs to be a 50/50 balance because I do lots of audio work (recording guitars/bass/vocals etc) and DVD...err backups... I'm sure both cpu's are adequate for the tasks and gaming but if one is better at one task than the other, I'd be curious to know what's what.

Regarding the ram, I thought that may be the case but that was also supposed to be the case with the IC7G motherboard but when I added the extra stick of ram, every benchmark test I ran went up quite a bit.

Audio card is the only PCI I use. I doubt the built on audio is as good as the audigy but if for some reason, it doesn't fit, I can live with that.

All the reviews I've read say that the abit, the dfi expert and a two others are all pretty much on even ground as far as performance goes but two of them have cpu sockets that don't allow large heatsinks and the DFI looks a little bare bones (which isn't a bad thing) but if the price for the dfi and the abit are the same, the performance numbers are the same and (since I'm not a hard core overclocker) the abit has the windows software overclocking guru which from all reviews say it works amazingly well, the Abit seems the logical choice for me. I've read a few reviews saying that the northbridge fan on the DFI is a problem for large video cards (which was the case for my brothers...I ended up having to slide a guitar pick in between the bottom of the video card and the top of the heatsink fan's shroud because the card sat on top of the fan not letting it spin. The fanless heatpipe design of the abit just removes one more potential problem out of the equation.

So anyways... yeah the Abit seem to have everything I need and nothing I don't and the price is decent. Regarding which cpu to get though, that one is still anyone's guess.

 

[<<Spider>>]

I've used DFI, ABIT, ASUS, MSI and many others. There is not really any favorite for me. Everyone has a few good boards and a few bad one.

If you want to save money, get the AsRock. If you want a good overclocking performance, get the DFI NF4-Ultra or Expert. Mother board does not necessary increase performance. However, motherboard does increase stability (ecspecially when overclocking). At same CPU speed and setting all motherboard are very similar in performance. Real performance mainly is CPU clock.

Dual Core is much better for multi-task and applications. Gaming wise, it offers almost no gain at all. At lease not unltil the next three to four years. Cost wise, it's better to get the single core. Overall Performance goes to dual core.

AM2 is definately not worth waiting for. DDR2 offers very little increase over DDR in performance. What is worth waiting for is the new CPUs that comes in AM2 like the 65nm ones. These CPUs should be very easy to OC over 3 Ghz. They just released the Opteron 256 that is stock at 3Ghz.

 

[MeatTheEB]

Wow that Asus looks like a pretty nice board but what does it offer that I would need that the DFI doesn't? (If I'm going to spend almost twice what the DFI costs)

It's got built in audio and that funky cooling with the heatpipe but cooling isn't really an issue or won't be I don't think.

That "funky cooling" would be nice chipset/mosfet cooling, and it is essential for any kind of good overclocking.

 

[MeatTheEB]

the AM2 looks nice but I imagine the prices will be outrageous.

AM2 will not be worth an upgrade, initially. The only initial offering it will hold is that of DDR-2, and past experience has taught us that you really want a front side bus to match the extra RAM speed. Obviously, we'll have to wait for the next revision (65nm) AM2/Athlon64 processors to make use of (potential) added memory bandwidth that DDR-2 affords.

We saw this with the Pentium 4's and DDR-2... tests showed that DDR-2 had not made a significant contribution to system performance until it approached the 650-700Mhz range. This isn't so say that DDR-2 will kill the Athlon64, but if you're running 533Mhz DDR-2, you really want a 533Mhz (stock) front side bus to match, you know?

It would really be smart to just wait (anybody) on AM2 until next year, when new processors better utilize the new socket, chipsets, and DDR-2. Until then, it's just a huge, random money sink.

Hell, my 2.2Ghz, 1MB cache (stock) 3800+ stock, or at 2.64Ghz, or at 2.80Ghz, runs Oblivion fabulously with my 2GB RAM and 7900GT (stock, or at it's usual 545/1680 overclock), and you're looking for a system as good if not better than mine. Go with something more modest, and you will be quite happy.

 

[shmadz]

What benefits would the opteron 165 have over the dual core amd's? I've noticed the prices are similar but I'm needing something that has all around speed and not just gaming speed. There needs to be a 50/50 balance because I do lots of audio work (recording guitars/bass/vocals etc) and DVD...err backups... I'm sure both cpu's are adequate for the tasks and gaming but if one is better at one task than the other, I'd be curious to know what's what.

I don't know if there is any difference between the socket 939 opterons and their athlon brethren. My opty actually gets recognized as a toledo when I thought they were supposed to be denmark or something like that, anyways the rumour is that the opty's are binned better or have better chance of reaching higher clocks.

The big difference for me was that with the 165 you get a full 1 MB cache per core, whereas if you go with a athlon64 the 4400+ I believe is the cheapest they offer with the 1MB L2 cache. I doubt that a 4400 would reach a higher speed than my 165 and it costs $150 more. the only benefit would be the higher multiplier but most nforce boards will do over 300 HTT so that shouldn't be a problem.

One thing about the music editing - the dual core will probably be your best bet as I am pretty sure just about all encoding/decoding takes advantage of multiple threads. Another thing to consider, don't forget about your storage. If you are working with large files your hard drive will become your bottleneck (Isn't it always )

You really want to make sure to have at least 2 hard drives. I do some editing with really huge (over 1.5 gig) wav files and if you have everything on one drive it's hell. What I have set up right now is 2 separate raid-0 arrays. When you work on the main file save it to the other drive when you make changes. You allways want to read from a different drive than you are writing to. I don't know if that makes sense but you know what I mean.