I want to upgrade to a new pc, but im stuck in a rut, my pc now is outdated, and am getting sick of no sse2 support, so which is better for gaming from a graphics point of view: Ati or Nvidia, ANd from a speed point of view: AMD or intel. And should i leap to a 512mb graphics card and 2gb of ram?
Ok so this will not be a top end machine. nVidia mid ranged cards like the 7600 GT and the 6800 GS are kicking major but for cheap, and the ATi X1800 GTO is kicking their but with a higher price tag. It all depends on your wallet. As for the top of the line, the 7900 GT is kicking but, unless you want to beat that in performance go for the X1900 XTX its cheaper than the 7900 GTX 512 by alot, and still is par. As for AMD vs Intel, AMD wins in everything excpet the top of the line, where Intel is destroying AMD in almost all the benchmarks.
Do you need peripherals? (monitor, keyboard etc) Those will bump up the price, the price below is for the 'tower' parts only. CPU - AMD Opteron 144 Socket 939 1MB Cache Retail - £117.44 Including VAT Motherboard - Asus A8N-SLi SE nForce4 SLi (Socket 939) PCI-Express - £76.32 Including VAT RAM - GeIL 1GB (2x512MB) PC3200 Value Dual Channel Kit CAS2.5 - £62.22 Including VAT Graphics - MSI GeForce 7800 GTX 256MB GDDR3 VIVO TV-Out/Dual DVI (PCI-Express) - £234.94 Including VAT HDD - Samsung SpinPoint P SP2504C 250GB SATA-II 8MB Cache - OEM - £63.39 Including VAT Optical - AOpen DUW1616 Chameleon 16x DVD±RW Dual Layer ReWriter- Retail - £29.32 Including VAT Sound - Creative Sound Blaster Audigy 2 Platinum eX - Retail - £46.94 Including VAT Case - Thermaltake VB1000BNS Soprano SuperMidi Tower - Black - £46.94 Including VAT PSU - Seasonic S12 500W Silent ATX2.0 Power Supply - £89.24 Including VAT Cables - these should be included with the motherboard, although they're not expensive if you do need to get them separately. That'll be a nice basis - total price: £766.75 Those Opterons are nice CPU's. Good overclockers and with a nice CPU cooler that should get up to a nice speed.
Current Intel CPU's don't have the gaming grunt of the current Athlon CPU's, therefore, we're recommending AMD. Now, if you wait about 6 months, sure, Conroe could be a viable option...and if Intel undercuts AMD in pricing, we'd favor them. ATi's Radeon X1900XTX is the top contender, with the GeForce 7900GTX 512 nipping at it's heels. However, these cards tend run $500-600 US (although prices will drop)...and for all but the extreme gamer, that's simply way too much to recommend the latest and greatest. I'm sure you've heard of nVidia's SLI and ATi's Crossfire multi-GPU solutions. If you're thinking of going this route, nVidia is a better choice because of their more mature technology. ATi will get there, but as it stands, Crossfire implementation isn't on par with SLI. What Matt555 suggested would be an excellent way to go.
I'm personally surprised that the price of that 7800GTX - XFX's 7800GT is the same price and that's only a GT and not a GTX - for gaming that GTX will help out a lot.
Yeah go 7900GT all the way. You don't really need 2 gigs of ram quite yet, yes in really demanding games like Oblivion and FEAR with all the bells and whistles turned on you'll see about a 5% boost possibly but just spend that 50 pounds somewhere else. Ram's real cheap for the most part so if you need it next year then it won't break the bank to order some.
The thing is, my pc now has an amd athlon 3200+ which is as i belive isnt overclockable, i want a fast pc with sse 2 and all, mabey even sse3 but im getting tired of amd processors with low clock speeds and poor prefromance, would i get blazing fast preformance on the cheap with intel or am i better of with amd?
AMD's current architecture does more work per cycle than Intel's. Clock speed is irrelevant. Some numbers. While the situations vary, the first graph you come to, AMD's 2.4GHz CPU is ahead of Intel's 3.8GHz Pentium, despite a 1.4GHz difference in speed. Intel hasn't been competitive for a few years, which is why AMD has been sucking away market share. It's not fanboyism, it's simply better performance at a lower cost. MHz/GHz really don't mean much outside of an indicitive figure. The 3200+ was the last CPU produced for the AthlonXP line, so, yes, it's probably not going to have a whole lot of OC headroom due to the 3200+ speeds being close to the peak of possible speeds for the core.
but you have to pay more for sse2, sse3 support on amd processors that is what annoyed me when i came to try and install mac os x86
That's not AMD's fault. The x86 MacOS X has very limited x86 hardware support out of the box. When you support Pentium II era technology like the i440BX chipset, and leave the newer stuff for 3rd party support, you can't blame AMD for that. Blame Apple. You can't hold AMD responsible for another company not programming something in or for only supporting a very limited area of hardware. Performance-wise, AMD pretty much kicks Intel's ass right now. So what if they don't have SSE3? MacOS X for the PC hasn't been anything more than a very niche market which has built it's base on a small collection of old hardware. I'm not saying SSE2 and SSE3 aren't worthless, but it seems like you're putting way more stock in them than you probably should. Sure, you don't have to buy AMD, and if this is all because of MacOS X not running on your AthlonXP rig, that's really silly to flip the bird to AMD. If you do work that requires SSE3 for programming, then, okay, you might have a point for your situation. However, if you're looking to game, AMD trumps Intel.
