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I was reading up on chips before i buy my new system and I found www.cpuscorecard.com . They claim that right now the Pentium 2.4 has the best performance to price ratio. The one negative point it had about it was that it had a "Limited Socket423 upgrade path". I was wondering if anyone could explain that to me and also I was wondering if anyone would argue with cpuscorecard.com about Intel's 2.4 being the best value for price.
Thanx for any opinions or comments.
It probably does have a pretty good price/performance ratio.
The reason for this being, as you pointed out, that it uses the out of date socket423, rather than the current socket478, so you are buying an 'end of line' P4, which is why it is relatively cheap.
In essence, this means that you will not be able to upgrade it in the future, as all new P4 chips use socket478. Socket423 P4's also run with a FSB (front side bus) of 400MHz, as opposed to socket 478 P4's which can currently run with a FSB of 400, 533, or 800Mhz.
IMHO you would probably be better off getting a mobo that supports socket478 and a FSB of up to 800Mhz, with say a 2.4 Ghz socket478 P4 (400 Mhz FSB) - or faster if your pocket will stretch to that - there is a wide variety of P4s to choose from. In the future you could then upgrade to a faster P4 (800 Mhz FSB) when the prices come down to a more reasonable level without major hassle.
OK so your saying that the mobo I get is gonna have to have the socket423? And it wont be upgradable?
I am always wary of these self-appointed experts running their generally irrelevant benchmarks. So they can write next month's copy, and get paid for it.
Best value for money for what?................what would you rather fly an F-16 or a MIG-21? [Answer: the MIG-21 if I have 15 squadron mates!] {OK...I know..shoot down the tanker and take the rest for a trip round the bay...they only have 20 minutes endurance!}
This is a PII-266MHz, and is perfectly adequate for most purposes..............hey, I have a P4 2.26GHz sat less than a foot from it and can't be bothered to swap the cables? If I needed another box right now I would go and switch on the PI/133 in the corner...I have tuned that to within 15% performance of this PII, according to the benchmarks.
I think that you have had some very good advice regarding being wary of end of range, obsolete kit. On the other hand............how many people have you heard of upgrading the processor? You generally have to change the MoBo as well?
The first questions you should ask before buying a box is: what do I want to do with it...and how long before I will be able to afford to change.
Also, I have had some very good experiences with AMD processors...even a 1.3 Duron, so please give them a thought.
I am trying to warn you about putting all your cash into a processor when operating system, motherboard, memory (particularly memory type) and hard-drive are just as important. Also sound and graphics cards, if you are into those sort of applications.
It is all about balance I suppose? Think of your total budget, of what you want to do and then balance your spend accordingly. This is the best way to avoid disappointment
Another point worth considering, is that software is designed to run on as many machines as possible........not everyone has a P4, particularly outside the wealthier nations...so the software may not utilize the capabilities of the processor. I have personally encountered this with multiprocessor machines that might as well only have one, the way the software was written.
Hope this helps
I'm just trying to get a nice gaming machine, for as cheap as possible. Specifically I want to be able to run Star wars: Galaxies, their new MMORPG with no lag at all.
Im looking at a Radeon 9200, or Geforce4 something, under $200.
I want a mobo between $120 and $160
512MB DDR RAM PC3200. Which is about 130 bucks
and a $40 dollar 18" 300W case.
I only have a few hundred dollars to work with so I'm shopping around, getting opinions.
I'm open to either Intel or AMD, I was going to go with AMD before i read the review on the P4 at cpuscorecard.
Any more suggestions?
i'm personally a fan of AMD's . As with nihil, even the Duron's have treated me good.
as far as the 2.4 P4's... if you *know* that you are the kind of person who will NEVER get into hardware upgrades, etc... then it's not by any means a bad deal. If you want the option of going up in the future, don't bother with it. For the most part, 2.4 GHz will run most apps rather nicely. If you are doing renderings, animation, etc, then you definitely want to know what your NEEDS are.
Ignore that site, their ratings are way off base. They say that thier checks are based on a variety of things, but they have a celeron 2.2 chip rated over a Xeon 1.6. For everyone here who uses Xeon processors, you know that they are far superior in servers, are are well worth the money; but also you know that their true performance is much more than similar clocked chips are. If anyone would be willing to say that a celeron 2.2 out performs a Xeon 1.6 then they would have to be complete morons, as they are at that site in my opinion. Oh yea, they also have a Mobile Athlon XP 1600+ rated over a Xeon 2.0 :rofl:
I am not a great gamer, but have worked a lot with e-cad and m-cad stuff in the defence sector. I think the key is going to be your choice of graphics cards?
I would now certainly go for AMD.................an XP2800+ will bury a P4/2.4, and an XP 2200+ or better will give it a good run for money.............my problem is that I am over here in England, where the pricing structure is different, so I am having to generalize.
I have NOT noticed the difference between PC2700 and PC3200 in REAL life. AND it cost me about 2x as much to get a MoBo that would take a Gig of PC3200! (plus the added cost of PC3200).... you may save a bit here to put towards the graphics card.
512Mb will be OK as you are not building stuff from scratch, so it does not have to do a lot of the complex vector math that a cad system requires. I would suggest that you consider ECC/Registered with so much $$$ tied up in the one strip.
Please be careful that your MoBo supports your graphics card and vice versa (ask them both) and the specific games you named...I have heard of problems with Via chipsets...........the disclaimers are often in the small print inside the clingfilm wrap :mad:
I would suggest that you look for both MoBo and videocard that have inbuilt overclocking facilities. I have used GigaByte, and found them safe...........hey...the P4 2.26 I mentioned earlier was overclocked to 3.066, and ran stable at 41 degrees centigrade.
Another thought is how much of your game runs from the HDD, and how much from the CD?....
for HDDs I still favour the deskstar...SCUSI is doubtless outside you declared budget, even though it is the best....and for the CD you just need something that READS damn fast.
Hope this helps..keep the thread going until you have the info. you need
Are you serious a XP 2200+ will match a p4 2.4 in gaming? I was thinking of getting a XP 2500+ Barton for $144. When the P4 2.4 I saw was going for $244.Quote:
an XP2800+ will bury a P4/2.4, and an XP 2200+ or better will give it a good run for money
Is ECC a brand? I want the good stuff for RAM, seeing as Overclocking will be partially dependent on it.Quote:
I would suggest that you consider ECC/Registered with so much $$$ tied up in the one strip.
I have had great performance with AMD kit, my usual box is an XP 1900+ (actually I have two...but one runs XP pro :D ) with a Gig of PC2700DDR .............I have tried a few games....Freespace, Max Payne, Soldier Of Fortune, etc..no problem....they also work fine on the DURON 1.3 with 512 of pc 2100 SDR. I have various graphics boards including Radeon 9700 and the latest nVIDIA offerings...all at 128Mb of DDR................I will be very honest and say that there does not seem to be that much difference between them and 64Mb stuff!
Krim, if you were to make a game...you would want to sell it to as many people as possible right?...so it would have to work on anything with (say) a 733P3 and a 32Mb PCI connecting graphics card................hey, what I am saying is that the kit has outrun the software..............DIRECTX 9................where are the games???? No point in building a box to play what isn't there?
Memory....ECC = "error checking and compensating"...I think..."registered" is another sort of internal memory checking...it's more reliable as you can lose bits and it still works. With the cheap stuff you lose the lot...except that 512 meg strips aren't cheap?
Cheers
All my PCs are Intel, but I'm an AMD supporter all the way. I've seen AMDs of similar ratings outperform my processors. My recently purchased laptop was a Celeron 2.2Ghz (only because I had to cut some corners to make it affordable). Anyways.. My post is regarding your RAM purchase. Make sure your RAM is the right RAM for your FSB. For example, with the Intel i865G and i865PE motherboards, these rules apply:
Quote:
1. to get DDR400 memory to run at full speed -> you need a P4 800MHz FSB processor
a. DDR400 will run at 333MHz when using a P4 533MHz FSB processor
b. DDR400 will run at 266MHz when using any 400MHz FSB processor (P4 or Celeron)
2. to get DDR333 memory to run at full speed -> you need a P4 533MHz FSB processor
a. DDR333 will run at 320MHz when using a P4 800MHz FSB processor
b. DDR333 will run at 266MHz if you use any CPU with a 400 FSB processor (P4 or Celeron)
On the issue of RAM, you may well find that DDR400 (PC3200) is only slightly more expensive than DDR333 (PC2700). Make sure you get your RAM from a good supplier, like Crucial, if you are looking to overclock. As HTRegz mentioned, it won't run at full speed except on an 800Mhz FSB, but on the other hand it will still work. The comments also apply to non Intel chipsets e.g. SiS as used by MSI, amongst others.
It all depends on whether you are considering a hardware upgrade in the future.
If you get a decent mobo (for either AMD or P4) with DDR400 RAM, and a modest CPU, then you can easily double your PC's power by purchasing a new CPU, as you will be able to use your existing mobo & your existing RAM.
When I ordered some DDR333 recently, the supplier was out of stock, and sent me DDR400 instead at no extra charge. I guess this is because the memory chip manafacturers are mainly making DDR400 at the moment.
If you are looking at a gaming PC I would get at least a P4 2.4 or XP 2500, together with a graphics card that fully supports DirectX 9 (preferably with 128Mb), as there will be a host of games released in the next 6 months or so which will only run properly on this type of rig (Doom III, Half life 2 etc. etc.).