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Well I built her
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 Re: Well I built her
Posted by Wild Card on Sun Oct 23rd at 4:23am 2005

I decided to go for it and so, I did it.

1300 dollars later...

AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ dual core
ASUS A8N-E nForce4 Ultra with onboard sound
ASUS Radeon X800 256MB PCI-E 16x
Corsair XMS 1024MB DDR400 3-3-3-8 (times two for 2gigs total RAM)

As well as my older components:

Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 80GB 8MB cache SATA
Western Digital Caviar 120GB 8MB cache SATA
LG 52x24x52x16 CD-RW/DVD combo drive
standard floppy disk
Hard drive caddy
Samsung 80GB 2MB cache PATA in caddy (for college use)
Thermaltake Butterfly 480Watt PSU w/ fan controller
Blue Cathode
Red EL cable kit
Chenming AE601 Black aluminium
D-Link DWL-520+ 802.11b wireless adapter
Vantec Stealth 80mm case fan (times five)
house furnace filter as mock case fan filters <img src=" SRC="images/smiles/icon_biggrin.gif">

Stuff I got rid of:

AMD Athlon XP 2500+
Abit NF7-S nForce2 with onboard sound (Which I blew with a 400Watt mixer)
Creative Labs Audigy 1 OEM
Thermaltake Silent Boost
ATI Radeon 9800pro 128MB AGPx8 (board by ATI)
Zalman GPU heatpipe/heatsink
Crucial 256MB DDR333 (times two)
512MB DDR400 (unknown manufacturer, I got it for free)

I'll upload some pics tomorrow.

Software I've re-installed:

Windows XP professional Service Pack 2
Motherboard drivers (off CD)
Video card drivers (off CD)
AVG7.0free
Ad-Aware SE 1.06
Spybot Search&Destroy 1.3
Registry Mechanic 5 (licensed)
Firefox 1.06
Smartbar XP (whatever the latest build is)
Folding@Home 5.03

I've noticed Folding@Home doesnt seem to be coded for dual core processors. I always have the program running in the background at 100% CPU usage. With my XP2500, it would literally use 100% CPU. Now with dual core, it hovers around 50% usage. It'll put a heavy load of 75% on one core and 25% on the other, and then a few seconds later, the process reverses and the first core has 25% load and the second has 75%. Give or take, its just to give you the idea.




Quote
 Re: Well I built her
Posted by SuperCobra on Sun Oct 23rd at 7:06am 2005

Why the Standard X800? The standard X800 is not that great of a video card now the XT and XT PE is where it is at.



Life is like a box of chocolates u never know what you'll get you might get a.....scream.



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 Re: Well I built her
Posted by Nickelplate on Sun Oct 23rd at 7:08am 2005

So what you're saying is that your computer is really good?

I never liked AMD's I always had problems with them, and i still don't buy them to this day...




I tried sniffing coke, but the ice cubes kept getting stuck in my nose.
http://www.dimebowl.com



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 Re: Well I built her
Posted by Wild Card on Sun Oct 23rd at 12:42pm 2005

lol, because the X800 by itself is better than a 9800pro and I dont have unlimited cash to spend.

I just wanted to try dual core. Which I am loving so far <img src=" SRC="images/smiles/icon_biggrin.gif"> But for that I needed to get a PCI-E video card, and I didnt want to flip more money than I had to.

As for problems, its all about preferences. With the Athlon XP, a lot of inexperienced users didnt like them because they'd break them. Since the P4 heatsink could be installed both ways and the XP one had to be installed only one way. Now-a-days though, it seems to be the other way around. AMD has gotten easier now that Intel released 775.




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 Re: Well I built her
Posted by MisterBister on Sun Oct 23rd at 12:49pm 2005

How is the dualcore compared to your singlecore?
Is there very much of a difference?




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 Re: Well I built her
Posted by satchmo on Sun Oct 23rd at 12:55pm 2005

As far as the dual-core, does it make any difference in gaming? Have you noticed framerates skyrocketing? How are your SATA drives set up?

Looks like a sweet setup though. I am running a Radeon 9800 Pro myself, but I am still quite happy with it.



"The greatest thing you'll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return." -- Toulouse-Lautre, Moulin Rouge



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 Re: Well I built her
Posted by Wild Card on Sun Oct 23rd at 2:24pm 2005

I was still happy with my 9800pro, but it was AGP, and I didnt want to spend extra for an AGP motherboard (since they are more expensive than PCI-E) and then having to upgrade motherboard and video card in another 2 years.

As for performance boosts, well, yes I've noticed some. Although I've only played Doom3 so far. Im installing Half-Life 2 right now. I have yet to be able to max out the cores to 100% though, but I havent tryed CPU burn in.

You'll have to give me a few more days so that I can get my system back up to the way it was, and to give me more time to explore with dual core. But the short answer is, yes I can see a difference.

As for difference in gamming, the dual core wont do much there. Games arent coded to take advantage of dual core yet. However that wasnt my main concern. I wanted to try dual core. That and I run Folding@Home all the time, even if I play games, so I wanted to see if there was a difference.

Doom3 level load times are much faster though <img src=" SRC="images/smiles/icon_biggrin.gif">




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 Re: Well I built her
Posted by SpoolE on Sun Oct 23rd at 3:21pm 2005

? quote:
1300 dollars later...


HOLY MOTHER OF f**k!! Not to cheap eh! :
Good computer anyway. AMD Athlon's are way better than P4 for gaming, btw!



I would love to change the world, But they would'nt give me the source code.



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 Re: Well I built her
Posted by Wild Card on Sun Oct 23rd at 3:25pm 2005

thirteen hundred Canadian currency. So while its not cheap, its also not USD. So its not expensive either.




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 Re: Well I built her
Posted by omegaslayer on Sun Oct 23rd at 6:48pm 2005

Dont install the video drivers off the CD, go to ATI's website and install the newest drivers, thats all I have to say <img src=" SRC="images/smiles/icon_smile.gif">. COngradulations on the new computer by the way <img src=" SRC="images/smiles/icon_biggrin.gif">.



Posting And You



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 Re: Well I built her
Posted by Crono on Sun Oct 23rd at 7:27pm 2005

I imagine he's already installed drivers since he was playing D3.

The computer should be working like a normal AMD64 during games and such though. Check out the Far Cry 64-bit upgrade. I've wanted to know how that 'feels' for awhile (you can get it through AMDs site).

As for "AMDs are better for gaming than P4" ... what do you know? They're the same. Not to mention, you didn't even say what AMD, you said the entire line of every AMD chip ... ever ... is better than Pentium 4. Which, isn't particularly true, since, if considering the Athlon XP, they both had the same amount of registers, and the P4 had a higher cache and FSB. Does that make it better? Not really. The XPs were cheaper. In general they performed the same.

As for comparing the AMD 64 to Itanium III (Intel's 64-bit chip, for the EPIC arch.) The AMD is the winner ... because the Itanium can't run 32-bit applications ... period.

Anyway, I'm just getting tired of people spouting garbage on things they, obviously, know nothing about.

WC, a little pricey (But that seems normal). I checked after we talked and the cheapest X2, here, is $200USD more expensive than the cheapest AMD 64.

Then again, the system only cost you about $1094 USD image

I'm still not sure why you wiped the system. Did it bitch because of hardware changes? If you got new drives ... Didn't read through ... you could use a conversion software for transfer data. (CMAXX. Free, fully functional utility. AND it uses DMA modes. You have to accept that agreement though. It's just fully sponsored or something like that)


Blame it on Microsoft, God does.



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 Re: Well I built her
Posted by ReNo on Sun Oct 23rd at 7:40pm 2005

He did say "athlon" actually Crono, but your point still stands <img src=" SRC="images/smiles/icon_smile.gif">




Designer @ Haiku Interactive | ReNo-vation.net



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 Re: Well I built her
Posted by Crono on Sun Oct 23rd at 8:05pm 2005

Oh did he? Ah, there it is. Sorry about that.

But yes, my point is still valid.


Blame it on Microsoft, God does.



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 Re: Well I built her
Posted by Wild Card on Mon Oct 24th at 4:07am 2005

? quote:
Oh did he? Ah, there it is. Sorry about that.

Blame it on Microsoft <img src=" SRC="images/smiles/icon_wink.gif">

I'll check out Far Cry 64-bit. But I dont own the game so I dont know how that will go.

I wanted to wipe my primary drive to start off clean, without junk. But Windows also rejected the new hardware and refused to boot up. Even in safe mode.

The drivers I have are off the CD. Im way too lazzy (and busy at the moment) to deal with confusing driver downloads and installs. So long as the driver CD works, Im happy. When it doesnt, then I'll start to worry.




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 Re: Well I built her
Posted by ReNo on Mon Oct 24th at 12:16pm 2005

It's not confusing - both ATI and nVidia used unified driver sets now, so you don't need to hunt for drivers for your specific card, just the right ones for your OS. Just go to ATI's site, download the newest driver set, uninstall your current drivers, restart your computer, and install the new ones. It's not a lot of work, and I would recommend it for performance and bug fixing issues. Only takes 10 minutes really, if that.




Designer @ Haiku Interactive | ReNo-vation.net



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 Re: Well I built her
Posted by Wild Card on Mon Oct 24th at 1:54pm 2005

Well, I dont know about nVidia, I havent owned a card since Geforce4.

ATI just have weird packages, I can never tell which one is the complete thing. When I get un-lazzy, I'll go take a look.





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