After a bit of browsing I decided to buy: AMD 64 3700+ ASUS 256MB Geforce 6800 (Pci exp) ASUS A8N-SLI Is there any way to build a better system for the same price? (This one will cost around 500£)
Your system looks fine to me. You could opt for a slightly cheaper Athlon64 3500 with a Venice core, it'll probably run a bit cooler and leave room for overclocking. But thats if you decide to overclock. Geil do very nice RAM, and you'll be able to voerclock a bit even with this value range: http://geilusa.com/proddetail.asp?linenumber=36
I'd say get an X800XL the price is similar but you get a lot more performance, either that or a cheapr X800Pro. Unless you're planning on buying another 6800 in that case stick with it obviously.
Yes thats another possibility, however, the 6800 goes at 450MHz GPU, lower than ATis cards and may give you more overclock potential.
Thanks for advice. I have two questions: 1. How is 3500 better at overclocking than 3700? According to amd website 3500 runs at 2.2GHz and 3700 at 2.2 or 2.4. I thought that the only difference is bigger L2 cache. 2. Does radeon driver support centering low resolution image on lcd screen instead of stretching it?
The 3500+ speeds depend on if it's a Socket 754 or Socket 939. The Venice core has a few improvements over the Winchester core and is a little faster. Now, if the core is listed as a San Diego, I'd stick with that. However, looking at what you have there, I'd stick with it. If you're not going to go with SLI, then you may want to look at an nForce 4 Ultra motherboard instead, like Asus A8N-E. 2.)Off-hand, I don't know the answer there, but I'd wager yes just looking at what it is.
I thought the 3500 was purely a s939 chip? The Venice core overclocks very well, a 3500 Venice, assuming you have very good cooling, ram, and a nice psu, can get up to about 2.8 or so. A SanD 3700 can supposibly hit 3Ghz+ It's very cooling dependant though.
