Nooberal
04-21-2006, 03:32 PM
Yawn. I'm sure that these forums have been here on more than one occaision; though unfortunately not with me at the root of the thread. So without further a do...
The power supply gave out on my old machine at the beginning of the week, finally provoking me into investigating an upgrade. Well, I'm currently sat next to a replacement power supply; though I'm due a new machine. My current machine's a 2.8ghz P4 (one of the last pukka P4's without hyperthreading, to my knowledge). It's done a good stint but is about three years old and needs to be put out to pasteur.
The market's changed considerably since I was last looking for hardware, and I need a little run through of what's good to go and what's to be avoided.
What I'm looking for in my next machine, aside from the obvious increase in raw power, is a machine that multi-threaded applications will make good use of. Money's not a problem (within reason), so long as I find a machine that will produce the goods and last me more than five minutes.
I started looking at the Dual-cored Intel 955 and 965 chipsets, which I was quite keen on until I saw that the spec's are much of a muchness across Intel vs AMD, and that the AMD chips cost a bit less. It also seems that AMD environments are a little bit more organized than those of Intel, what with the memory controller appearing on the chip, rather than out on the motherboard. The Intel chips also appear to run very hot, and it seems to me that there's is a technology that is coming to the end of its usefull life, shortly to be replaced by the Conroe chips later this year.
So Not Intel then. Mebe AMD have what I want.
I had a look at X2-4800 chips and FX60 chips. For me, it seems that the X2 chip is the better purchace. The main difference between the two chips seems to be the unlocked clock multiplyer on the FX chip; though I've never been into overclocking and so would not make much use of such a feature.
It was at this point that I looked at about every darn benchmark under the sun. I'm not a fan of benchmark tests, often confusing and with different tests offering conflicting results. All the hunting, searching, filtering and fiddling resulted in my not being confident that either of the above AMD chips would cut the mustard, yielding an under-par improvement over my current aged machine.
I don't like being in this position, not knowing if I've made the right descision or not. So I thought of another plan...
Dual Opteron 280's.
This means a whole four cores, which is bound to produce the goods. This way, rather than feeling nervous about having bought sub-standard gear, I feel guilty about having spunked a mountain of cash - but these feelings will obviously subside when I get the new machine and start to have a play.
So a machine based around dual dual cored Opterons. Done. Or not...
Conroe's on it's way, and it looks jolly interesting from what little I've read. I'd rather get an Intel chip if they're on top of the market, than an AMD chip if AMD are on top, if that makes sense.
I've also heard that AMD's moving toward DDR2 support (though I'm not sure if using DDR is such an issue, given AMD and their memory effiency).
So do I wait until summer? Do I buy now?.. Or do I just face the timeless fact that it doesn't matter when a new machine is bought, it will be out of date within the blink of an eye and I should just shutup and spend some wedge.
So then, I guess that's it. That is, if anyone managed to read this far.
What do I do?
The power supply gave out on my old machine at the beginning of the week, finally provoking me into investigating an upgrade. Well, I'm currently sat next to a replacement power supply; though I'm due a new machine. My current machine's a 2.8ghz P4 (one of the last pukka P4's without hyperthreading, to my knowledge). It's done a good stint but is about three years old and needs to be put out to pasteur.
The market's changed considerably since I was last looking for hardware, and I need a little run through of what's good to go and what's to be avoided.
What I'm looking for in my next machine, aside from the obvious increase in raw power, is a machine that multi-threaded applications will make good use of. Money's not a problem (within reason), so long as I find a machine that will produce the goods and last me more than five minutes.
I started looking at the Dual-cored Intel 955 and 965 chipsets, which I was quite keen on until I saw that the spec's are much of a muchness across Intel vs AMD, and that the AMD chips cost a bit less. It also seems that AMD environments are a little bit more organized than those of Intel, what with the memory controller appearing on the chip, rather than out on the motherboard. The Intel chips also appear to run very hot, and it seems to me that there's is a technology that is coming to the end of its usefull life, shortly to be replaced by the Conroe chips later this year.
So Not Intel then. Mebe AMD have what I want.
I had a look at X2-4800 chips and FX60 chips. For me, it seems that the X2 chip is the better purchace. The main difference between the two chips seems to be the unlocked clock multiplyer on the FX chip; though I've never been into overclocking and so would not make much use of such a feature.
It was at this point that I looked at about every darn benchmark under the sun. I'm not a fan of benchmark tests, often confusing and with different tests offering conflicting results. All the hunting, searching, filtering and fiddling resulted in my not being confident that either of the above AMD chips would cut the mustard, yielding an under-par improvement over my current aged machine.
I don't like being in this position, not knowing if I've made the right descision or not. So I thought of another plan...
Dual Opteron 280's.
This means a whole four cores, which is bound to produce the goods. This way, rather than feeling nervous about having bought sub-standard gear, I feel guilty about having spunked a mountain of cash - but these feelings will obviously subside when I get the new machine and start to have a play.
So a machine based around dual dual cored Opterons. Done. Or not...
Conroe's on it's way, and it looks jolly interesting from what little I've read. I'd rather get an Intel chip if they're on top of the market, than an AMD chip if AMD are on top, if that makes sense.
I've also heard that AMD's moving toward DDR2 support (though I'm not sure if using DDR is such an issue, given AMD and their memory effiency).
So do I wait until summer? Do I buy now?.. Or do I just face the timeless fact that it doesn't matter when a new machine is bought, it will be out of date within the blink of an eye and I should just shutup and spend some wedge.
So then, I guess that's it. That is, if anyone managed to read this far.
What do I do?