CPU help for new computer

wildmanh

wildmanh

Part time Leather Bender/Sheath maker
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Jul 9, 2000
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Hi guys, I'm in the market to built a new computer and hope someone can give me some help.

New computer will be a dual core work station for playing some games (Quake 4, Half Life 2, WarCraft 3) doing graphics and animations with Strata 3D CX and Bryce 5 and probably audio and video mixing.

I'm considering the Opteron 165 (1.8GHz Socket 939) or possibly the Opteron 170 (2.0GHz Socket 939) or possibly an X2. I plan on doing a little over clocking of the computer as long as I can get things to run stable. Been doing it for years on both AMD and Intel CPU's and have a mean Liquid system picked out if need be. :)

My questions are #1 anyone have experience with the Opteron CPU's and have they compared them to X2's in a simmaler price point? #2 Under 3D Animations and graphics how much faster is the Opteron? #3 taking into account the over clocking potential of the 165 and 170 opterons which has a better Price versus performance ratio? I'm guessing the 165 but want others to weigh in.

Thanks,

Heber
 
Anyone into computers? Or am I just crazy? :p

Heber
 
Computers are my living but your talking about specialty parts I know jack about.
Might be better off asking on a "geek" forum.
My buddy Tom and you have a lot in common but he's about a thousand miles from me to ask his opinion hehe.
My only thought is for what you plan on doing
New computer will be a dual core work station for playing some games (Quake 4, Half Life 2, WarCraft 3) doing graphics and animations with Strata 3D CX and Bryce 5 and probably audio and video mixing.
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you may be better off with a Mac ? Far more expensive and your software is limited but from everything I hear it is hard to beat Macs on video editing/production.
 
I would get the new AM2 processor it supports DDR2 and well its a heck of alot faster than any penitums out there. Buy the AMD Athalon 64 X2 4400+ and then over clock it to 4600 ($539.00) if this is to much money tell me how much you wana spend. It's actually is better than most macs out there for its price.
 
conroe is around the corner(few weeks) wait for that and go. intel is going to grab the performace crown from amd with conroe
 
AMD is designed for gaming, Pentium is only faster at word processing. Ive seen many benchmarks that prove this as for the new pentium i dont know.
 
PerformanceFirst said:
Word processing? That isn't exactly CPU intensive...
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OfficeMark is a benchmarking program/system that analyzes a lot of office software performance on a machine. Word processing can be suprisingly memory intensive.

As for the original poster, poking around the forums at http://www.tomshardware.com/ would be my advice, along with waiting for the new Intel chips as AMD will be slashing prices in response.
 
Computers are my living as wlel but my AMD knowledge is very limited, I work with and built servers, workstations, gaming rigs, CAD design machines all the time but specialize on intel chips. The new 9xx chips are a big step up from the first batch of Intel dual cores and the new line of Conroes due out In July I think are suppossed to be one of, if not, the best ships on the market.
 
Everything I've read lately show the the new chips supporting ddr-2 as really having no advantage at all, though in january they were noticeably slower then the other chips, ddr-2 notwithstanding. (Basically because the memory controller amd built into their processors is so efficient!) They've currently just come up to speed with the previous chips. They were still recommended, mostly on speculation that there is still a lot of potential to be tweaked out of ddr=2 on an amd platform.
To tell you the truth, I haven't found a need or desire to go beyond even the socket 754 cpu!
I'm not much of a gamer, but I do rip movies and audio cds frequently.
Current computers really astonish me ... for a long time, watching the bios do a memory test on a gigabyte of ram made my jaw drop, remembering my first hard drive, which was only 20 megabytes.
And I also remember doing blends in corel draw or edits on a scan with an old AT clone where you could start your edits and go and have coffee & check later to see if they finished yet.
Hardware has sure exceeded the demands of software as of late.....
 
Guys, thanks for the information. But now I don't need it. Went to Sportsmans Warehouse today and put a pistol on lay away. 5 1/2" ick it up Saturday. :) IT's going to be a while before I can get a new computer. LOL!!

Thanks again,

heber
 
where can I get more info on this conroe chip?
 
http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?t=103381

That is a thread with a new conroe chip going over 4GHz on air cooling. Even the AMD guys are accepting defeat with this thing. Its the start of th enewer generation of chips. I frequent www.extremeoverclocking.com and you can find info there.

Release date on the conroes is July 25th, whether or not it will actually be released then is another story.

I waiting to build my new machine. I use a conroe processor and a DX10 compatable video card when they come out.
 
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