n00b here, need some help building a new system

[supergt99]

im looking into building a new system. im not sure whats good for overclocking because i have had a dell for the last 3 years. now im ready to build my own again. id like to use P4, but have thinking about going AMD. can i get either of them close to 3.8-4ghz? maybe someone here can recommend a setup for me start ordering things up. later

mike

 

[Shawn123456]

u can get an intel 3.2Ghz or an AMD Athalon 64 FX-53 if u want a fast chip..those are both ocable..however...imo AMD are better ocers (get more performance) than intel

 

[David]

Pentium4s are quite close to reaching 4GHz, and have already done in some cases. It really depends what you are going to use the PC for.

 

[supergt99]

it will mostly play games..

what speed are the AMD's upto?

 

[supergt99]

also there are a couple of 3.2 p4's. which one?

 

[David]

it will mostly play games..

what speed are the AMD's upto?

Athlon64s are supposedly better for gaming. I think they are reaching ~2.4Ghz to ~2.6Ghz usually. Remember a 2.6Ghz A64 > 2.6Ghz Pentium 4.

 

[Goldstandard]

My socket 939 is overclocked to 2.45mhz, and does better than the pentium 3.6 (At stock speeds though) Check out the attached pics for my sandra results. I have a radeon 9800 pro 128mb (overclocked to 430/370) and I do 6578 in 3dmark 2003, and 21838 in 2001. If you could overclock a pentium well, you may beat that but a 64 bit processor futureproofs you for when 64 bit software is eventually released.

I heard that prices for the socket 939 components will be coming down soon and the ones that use the 90nm fab should be out soon too. They apparently have a 5% boost in performance over the older 130nm ones. As far as overclockability goes, I would depend on your processor and board. Not all boards have the agp/pci lock needed for those extreme overclocks.

 

[Drec]

it will mostly play games..

what speed are the AMD's upto?

As anyone will tell you, AMDs edge out P4s in gaming, if your going to be doing heavy gaming id go AMD for sure.

most people with A64s have been OCing them to around 2.6-2.7ghz on air, remember clock for clock an AMD is faster then a P4 for 2.6ghz AMD64 ~ 4ghz P4 (roughly) the pentium will kill the amd in video encoding and multitasking especially with HT, but the A64 will take the pentium out it gaming like ive said, plus you get the added bonus of a 64bit chip that will be very useful later on when windows64 and other applications come out that take full advantage of 64bits...Either way you go you'll have one hell of a rig.

 

[David]

also there are a couple of 3.2 p4's. which one?

There will be the 3.2E and the 3.2C. The 3.2C is the Northwood C CPU and the 3.2E is the Prescott CPU. The Northwood should be easier to overclock and cool AFAIK and due to a difference in pipeline length should be slightly faster, MHz for MHz, than a Prescott I beleieve.

 

[batboy]

A good overclocked AMD A64 system cost about the same and provides about the same overall performance on average as a good top end P-4 system. For gaming the AMD folks like to gloat that the A64 does a little better in some (not all) of the gaming benchmarks. In reality, the vid card is far more important for hardcore gaming than whether you have Intel or AMD under the hood.

If you are considering a P-4, go for the 3.0C not the 3.2. The 3.0C overclocks about the same as the 3.2, but the 3.0C is cheaper and will have a higher FSB when overclocked. My 3.0C (see siggy) does 3.8 gig and it's awesome when used with PC4000 RAM that allows me to use the 1:1 ratio. AMD can't even come close to touching the massive memory bandwidth of a P-4 system.

All in all, you can't go wrong with either.

 

[nova7]

what speed are the AMD's upto?

Remember also that while AMDs have lower clock speeds, they also have more clock per cycle... (or something like that) but the point is, the 64 3200 beat the p4 @ 3.6 in (i think it was) 3dmark.