New System - Feedback welcome

[Jeng]

Not really sure how you can say one mobo is a better oc'er than another. Most of the run the same northbridge chips. nvidia or kia. I think what you are referring to are cpu core (ie. venice, winchester). That is where you would see the most improvement depending on what core you had. Just curious..

Lots of boards won't give you the options you need to overclock to your hearts content.

Ram Dividers, Different Voltages(cpu, ram, chipset), Ram tweaking options (DFI gives a ton of timing options)

Another thing is being able to overclock from within Windows, whether useing a program like Ntune or a different program thats specific to your motherboard.

kia=via, sis is another option for amd northbridges.

Currently useing an ECS Nforce3-A motherboard. ECS has been notoriously bad for overclocking since it doesn't give shit for options, although on my current one I have all the options of 4 different dividers, think 5 different cpu voltages, 3 different ram voltages along with the normal ram timing tweaks. I also have limited Ntune support so I don't have to do it all in BIOS.

[|PoRn| Profess0r]

Abit an8-sli fatal1ity has all those options. multipliers, voltages, ram timings, etc. etc I could be wrong but any higher end mobo I've ever bought allowed me the options. Maybe it's just on the lower end market of mobo's that they don't allow it?

[Nad]

Made lots of changes, keep the feedback coming fellas, gonna order this thing in a week or 2.

[EatMoreLead]

still think you are making a HUGE gamble with buying a LCD from newegg:

**Dead Pixels Policy: Replacement or Refund for 8 or more dead pixels only.

Would you really be happy with 7 DEAD PIXELS? I've had 1 dead pixel before on an old laptop and it drove me crazy.

I'm guessing you didn't read the info I posted about LCD's so here is a recap. I'm telling you, 25% of the people on this board have Dell LCD's, and we all game with them without problems. 12ms respsonse with 75MHz = flicker and ghost free. Buying a LCD because it has an advertised (how reliable is their own rating) rate of 2ms is like buying a corvette with a huge engine and auto transmittion. 2ms respsone time will still give you ghosting if the sync rate is not above 60MHz. As long as the respsonse time grey-to-grey is under 20ms and your sync rate is above 75MHz you are going to be ghost free IMHO.

Listen, THIS is the LCD you want/need a 21inch WIDESCREEN for under $475:
http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna/Prod ... furbished=

$463.20 - with free shipping
1680 x 1050 @ 75/83 MHz (Vert x Hor)
12 ms response time
600:1 contrast ratio
high speed USB ports on monitor
3-Year Warranty - that means you get ONE lousy dead pixel in 2 years 11 months, you get a new monitor for FREE - newegg just can't compete bro

[Catalyst22]

I found some literature on Dell that makes me question your motive.



Linux has Tux the Penguin
Microsoft has the Windows Logo
and Dell has EML in a reindeer suit

[K2]

Nad, the monitor EML is listing from Dell is the one I've been planning on getting. Newegg is a great company (bought my Samsung 191T LCD from them back in 2003, still goin strong) but a fuckin 20.1" widescreen with those specs for that price with a zero dead pixel guarantee... fuck bro. Go with the Dell.

[EatMoreLead]

ROFLMAO cat

K2 speaks the truth, plus a frickin three year warranty. Listen, I hate dell laptops and computers, overpriced pos. But printers and LCD, I'm sold 1000% on them. Quality, Service, Warranty 4 teh win. Also, until Jan 5th, 20% off and free freight, great deal. You see 30% on occassion, but 20% is good enough, if I needed a new display, I'd buy that widescreen today.

[Nad]

Alright fuckers, i just ordered that dell monitor. Any other recommendations?

[K2]

Alright fuckers, i just ordered that dell monitor. Any other recommendations?

Yeah... suck my dick.

[Oreo]

lmao!!!

[Nad]

contrary to popular belief, having a guy suck your dick does make you gay. sX told me he knew from experience.

[Catalyst22]

nah, you are only gay if you are on bottom. Punter's never gay.

[Nad]

I am reading some places that the FX series processors are better for gaming. Is that the case or is it only because games do not utilize dual cores yet?

[Servo]

What case did you decide on? If you do downsize the case, loose that giant powersupply. You can downsize to a 400 - 500 and save 50%

[K2]

I am reading some places that the FX series processors are better for gaming. Is that the case or is it only because games do not utilize dual cores yet?

The Athlon FX-57 is still top-dog as far as processors go for gaming, hands down. There's a nice lil CPU comparison chart over at Tom's Hardware that shows benchmarks on several titles/programs features over 20 diff cpu's, and the FX series is on top in almost all of 'em. Reason being, it's not just the speed (some of the dual core amd processors are just as fast), but it's L1/L2 cache sizes, memory handling (that's the big one right there), etc.

Now, personally, I am gonna get the Athlon 64 4400 X2 - dual processor is king man, for obvious reasons. It may not be as fast in raw number crunching, but you can multitask efficiently, and you're already starting to see hardware vendors like nVidia and ATI make drivers that fully support multi-threading (read: can take full advantage of 2 or more cpu's). It's only a matter of time before game designers start writing their games to follow suit. When that happens, dual-core CPU's > FX series.

Side note - q3 was written to multi-thread. The performance gains were almost 50-60% in some cases. Only thing was, it wasnt very stable, and id software never followed up on it, saying it wasnt worth the time/effort. Things have changed however...

EDIT - knew I had this somewhere... a q3 smp comparison I did fuckin' FIVE years ago, even made the headlines over at 2cpu.com - http://www.hardfought.org/articles/benchmark.html

lol

[Oreo]

You could always get the FX60, its a 2.7ghz dual core FX processor, but its $1100. You can overclock the dual core processors to the same speed as the FX and beyond and get around the same performance for $400 less.

[Nad]

Ok, gonna stick with the dual core. I upgraded to the 4400x2 anyway.
Servo, im going with the huge PSU because i'm going SLI later on. Just no need to spend the extra cash on that second Video Card right now since the performance increase is like 5%, and until some better games come along it is a waste of money. I'd rather wait a year and save 200 bucks on the second card.

If noone else has anything to add to this, looks like im going with what is on my list. Next week when the student loans come in i will be making the order.

[|PoRn| Profess0r]

Make sure that ps is modular and supports sli... it's worth the money...

[GoatX12]

I recently built a machine close to this here is what I have:

Aspire Alien-X server tower
Thermaltake BigWater Cooling Kit (mounts nicely inside case including radiator and resivoir and the pump connects to a MoBo 3pin fan connector)
Thermaltake 550w Silent Pure Power (comes with a fan controller hook up also)
DFI Lanparty NF4 SLI-DR (has an optional sound card that can be removed)
AMD 4400+ X2 (OCed to 2530ghz (11x230) and still stable)
2x 2Gig OCZ Platinum DDR 400 (total of 4gigs which is why I am running Win x64)
XfX 7800 GTX OC Edition
4x 400GB WD Raid Edition II SATA drives (yea it's ove a Terabyte of space, MUHAHAHA)
Creative Audigy 2 ZS platinum Sound card
2x NEC ND-3550 DL Burners

As far as the difference between the opteron and the X2's is that the Opteron has 4x HT and the X2 only has 2x HT, that is the biggest difference, otherwise they are fairly close.
That and most Opterons are 940 pin and x2's and other AMD64 processors are 939, However there are some 939 Opteron's but I believe they are aimed @ workstations and not the home user.

BTW BF2 does take advantage of dual processors, with this set up I'm usually the first to load on maps the lowest I've seen my FPS go is in the 55fps while running max settings @ 1280x1024 75hz.

K2 Quake 3 actually supports and can take advantage of multiprocessors, just a bit of history

EDIT opps k2 just saw your post edit about the Q3 SMP review (matter of fact I think you helped me get it running way back when)

[Nad]

holy shit, back from the grave.

[|PoRn| Profess0r]

I would be pissed if my system ran at times in the 55 fps. It seems like your monitor is bottlenecking your system or you haven't sli'ed it. 1280x1024 @100 hz here everything high and 4x AA on. Mine never drops below 98 fps. I think a better investment would be getting a second graphics card rather than a dual cpu system. imo