Im thinking of either upgrading my current system, or building a entirely new one. I wanted to see which option you guys think I should choose based on a price and performance comparison.
My current system: new Athlon XP 3000+ Barton new Elsa 6800 128 DDR new 2x Kingston 512 MB Hyper X ABIT KD7 Mobo
Antec True 500W Audigy 2 new 2 Seagate 120 GB
Personally i would keep your system and save your money, i am very tempted to go for a 64bit system, but lets be perfectly honest and realistic shall we..
they are bloody nice, and we all want one, but windows 64bit operating systems are rubbish, and the only OS at the moment that will properly use any of the potential 64bit power is linux / unix, there are 64bit games / programs of course but it’s still in early stages.
the only reason i say wait, is because at the moment there is no real use for them.. yeh the performance gain is big enough to want one badly, but is it really worth lashing out that money now, when your system will quite easily cope with pretty much anything you throw at it..?
i say wait, because athlon have killed the production of all athlons / durons below the “2600+” range, and the “2600+ - 3200+” will be killed off by xmas.
then i would get your money and buy / upgrade because it will be a good time to do it, its not to long away, prices will have dropped alot.. their will be great bargins cos its xmas + you’ll have saved more money (if you choose to).
(by the way im not slaggin the 64bits off.. i want one 2 but its about patience, cos if we / you get one now, i suspect come xmas or around then, you’ll regret it)
I’d really just sit and wait. Yes, you’ll get a faster system, but, IMO, it’s not worth the cost. Right now, PCIe and DDR2 are just starting to come out. However, they are not at a point where they can be made good use of. You could wait a year and then it’d be about time to upgrade and you’d then get better performance for the money.
Yes, you can get something faster, but for the money and considering the system you have right now, you’ll be rather disappointed with the performance you get for the money you spend. The only thing that might be worth it would be going to a GeForce 6800GT, and maybe going to 1GB of DDR. Otherwise, hold it, because while the Athlon 64 is fast, I think you’ll get a better boost in performance going with a video card upgrade if anything.
but its about patience, cos if we / you get one now, i suspect come xmas or around then, you’ll regret it)