Help me!

This is what i'm looking at right now as for the situation with my computer. So please feel free to comment on any part of it as I run through it. I need help deciding whether the addition 500$ or so is worth the price for the P4 Extreme chip.

Plan:
Motherboard: asus p4c800
Graphics Card: Radeon X800
Memory: 2 gigs of DDR 400MHz/PC3200
Processor: P4 3.2 Ghz Extreme w/2 megs of cache
Alternative Processor: Pentium 4 3.4C Ghz 800bus Retail

Costs:
Motherboard: 191$
Graphics Card: 545$
Memory: 378$
Processor: 999/449$

Money Balance:
Overall Price: 2213$
Savings: 1167$
Remaining: 946$
Remaining for Alt. Processor: 396$

Also does anyone know what the C means in the 3.4C? If its celeron I'm going to definately say no. I'll never go celeron again in my life.

dunno what the C stands for, but if it's a P4 then it's an intel chip, and it's AMD that make celerons, so it wont stand for that.

dunno what the C stands for, but if it's a P4 then it's an intel chip, and it's AMD that make celerons, so it wont stand for that.

...Intel makes the Celeron.
C is probably the revision or something. I think there's different "flavors" of P4 chips with different speed ratings and all that.

athlon-duron-celeron, meh, it's late.........., and i knew that it somehow looked wrong, but couldn't see why.

now i do.

/shuffles off to bed..... nn

The EE is a huge waste of money.

Celeron would be blatantly stated in the name. Personally if you're dishing out that kind of cash I'd go with an Athlon 64. http://www.geek.com/procspec/procspec.htm for some specs on processors...but don't be fooled by sheer Mhz #s and such or else you're cheating yourself.

Yea, especially for gaming, AMD chips are way better for gaming.

Also, get a socket 939 chip, as they will offer best upgradability. If you go to www.overclockers.co.uk i think they are having a sale on AMD 64 chips soon.

Now that I look at it that's quite a badass system you've put together. I love PCs but would never really bring myself to spend more than $1500 (or even $1200) on one - I figure the system is good enough at that price to last me three years or so.

I can't bring my self to spend more then $500 for a complete system ... crazies.

The Athlon 64 is nice, but its overall performance is equal to the speed of pentium 4 he plans on getting, and the P4 is much cheaper then an Athlon 64. If you want a 64 bit chip (that is made to accelerate 32-bit computing) the Athlon 64 FX is the way to go, 51 or 53 class. Only problem is they start at $500.

By the way, that is entirly too much to spend on a mother board ... try looking some more to find a cheaper one ... Also, 3.2 Ghz aren't going to be utilized very well ... I suppose if you planned on not doing any hardware upgrading in the next few years (4-5) this would be a good investment, otherwise ... just build a system that can handle everything that's coming out in the next year (around $500) ... and then in a couple years build another computer around the same price. This looks like a lot of money that wont be well spent ... sorry :sad:

The 3.4C is what i would go for the C is just the newest revision also the C chips have ben known for good overclockability,

And i agree with Gorb on the EE being a waste of money

Umm, nonsense.

P4-C are the Northwoods, as opposed to the P4-E which are Prescott. If you aren't overclocking, the difference to you is minimal. The Prescott is the newer core architecture, the Northwood overclocks better, but only comes in up to 3.4 GHz. Newer Prescotts use a different chipset that is PCI-E.

Like someone said, the EE P4s are a total waste of money. Similarly, it seems unlikely you need 2 gigs of RAM right from the start... you could always try 2*512 initially, then if you are finding it all horribly slow, get another 2 - this method should cost almost exactly the same as buying 2*1024.

Right now, if you want a P4, I say go for a PCI-E board using the 915 chipset, as this will be more future-proof, and definately don't get the 3.6 or to some extent the 3.4 - you pay so so much for the extra 200 MHz over the 3.2, it doesn't seem worth it to me. Also, if you get a 915 board, it should be compatible with the fastest Prescotts (I think they are eventually going up to 4 GHz), so you may want to think about that.

But I have to say, even though I personally don't go for AMD normally, their 64-bit offerings are pretty damn good right now. Most buyers guides are recommending Athlon64 for new systems. Also, the general concencus is that the 6800GT is the overall best-buy graphics card in the high-end section.

Oh yeah, last thing, you put P4C800 - this is more expensive than the P4P800; are you sure you need any of the extra things this board offeres such as support for ECC memory, and PAT which is enabled in the form of ASUS MAM on the P4P800 anyway?

Isn't the X800 incredibly better than the 6800 for Half-Life 2? Obviously you want a card with all around good performance, but being a Half-Life forum, no doubt the majority of us are more interested in HL2 performance than other game performance. I'm sure performance differences in most games will be negligable compared to the hike in performance you get from ATI cards with HL2.

ReNo said:
Isn't the X800 incredibly better than the 6800 for Half-Life 2?

Yes, yes it is. It was posted on some hl2 website.

Generally, ATI cards are better at Direct3D while Nvidia cards are
better at OpenlGL. The ATI OpenGL drivers are currently being
re-written from scratch so this may change in the not too distant
future.

The computer will be used to model, light, and render hi-polygon scenes similar to IRobot for my classes at school. I dont want to upgrade for another year or two. Also 2 gigs of ram is first, I'll be planning on utilising the mobo's 4 gig max soon.

So p4 or 64bit athalon. I' mquite intrigued by these arguments.

I think it's unfair to compare HL2 performance before any HL2 benchmarks are actually out... If you have a look around, X800 is either the same or slightly faster in existing D3D games, and 6800 is significantly faster in existing and future (offical D3 benchmarks are out) OpenGL games. Sure, ATI are rewriting their OpenGL stuff, but I highly doubt nvidia aren't thinking about their own D3D performance. If you are buying for HL2, wait for the game, or at least official benchmarks (the old anandtech ones have no bearing on this newest generation) to be out; don't go on some forum post where somebody heard ATI were slightly better.

I advise people to go to a forum such as www.ocforums.com or the anandtech.com forums if they want to seriously compare products. Here we don't have a big enough balance of opinions to justify spending $400 or whatever, whereas on a proper hardware forum, they have plenty of people who know a lot more about it all, and in some cases actually own both of the cards you may be thinking of getting.

Ferret: I was reading somewhere that it can be cheaper and as effective to get a dedicated scsi controller and drive for your video/image editing's scratch disk. Perhaps this would be of use to you? (cheaper than buying 2 more gigs of RAM)

how does that work sJ?

I haven't used many image editing programs, but I do know that for example photoshop uses a scratch file when working with large images. If this scratch file is on the same disk as the program or the same disk you are saving and loading images to/from, it's slow, because hard disks are slow. A dedicated PCI scsi controller with a small (say 10 gigs) high RPM (maybe 12K) scsi disk connected can dramatically speed up photoshop's use of the scratching file if you set PS to use this new disk for the scratch file. You would have to look into whether other programs use a scratching file, and how this file is actually used though, as this is all I know about it.

It's generally good to have a really fast disk on its own IDE cable for virtual memory and scratch file stuff.

Jeff I'm not going on a random forum post, this was an article written on a website, which quoted Gabe Newell (or at least someone from Valve, think it was Gabe) saying that the ATI cards perform significantly better. It continued to discuss why that was the case, how they are trying to get around it, and what they have learnt from the process. I've searched the forums for the link but can't seem to find it, maybe somebody else will remember.

A_S posted a link to an article.

Yeah, I remember that article. For a start, everybody knows that the previous generation ATI cards were better. Second, the statement: "The new NVIDIA cards eat up more power and twice the space of the x800" is factually incorrect - the space/power issue only affects people spending ?400 on their graphics card, i.e. hardly anyone. Lastly, given the performance of the ATI cards in other DX9 games, it seems pretty obvious that the ATI cards will in fact run HL2 slightly faster. Of course it's up to you, but personally I wouldn't buy a card that's 10% faster in HL2 if it is also 30% slower in D3.