[Pc_Support] Staying with 32-bit: PC3200 or PC4000, 166 or 200MHz Athlon?

[Jason Boxman]

Bryan J. Smith said:
> Jason Boxman <jasonb at edseek.com> wrote:
>> Or I'll need $150 PSU,
>
> ?!?!?!  Are you buying an SLI setup with dual-GeForce
> 6800Ultra or 7800GTX cards  ?!?!?!  You only need to spend
> $150 for a P.S. with triple or quad +12V rails and (2) 6-pin
> WS/PCIe connectors.
>
> If not, then try about $50 for quality, split-+12V P.S.  If
> you absolutely want the 6-pin WS/PCIe connector, then maybe
> $75.

My bad.  I know PSUs like the Antec True Power series are rather pricey, but
are supposedly of superior quality.  When I looked for decent PSUs two years
ago the one I bought for $50 was about entry level I think.  It would seem
prices are more favorable now.

> I'm running with an Athlon64 3200+, 1GB RAM, GeForce 6800GT
> 256MB DDR3 (100W!), (2) hard drives, (1) DVD-RAM/RW/+RW with
> a _measly_ 300W power supply (around ~345W max) that is an
> ATX2.0 with split +12V lines (only 15A and 10A).

Nice.

>> $150 CPU,
>
> Okay, I agree there.
>
>> $100 board,
>
> Try $80 these days.

But does that get you anything interesting?  Granted I don't have any
FireWire devices, SATA seems standard now, and I have few effective uses for
GbE.  The later would be nice to have, though, as GbE becomes more common
place.  I recently saw a switch, unmanaged, that claimed support for jumbo
(9KiB) frames for about $60 AR.  Then again, it may have been crap. 
Overtime I suspect the quality of 'consumer' GbE switches will increase,
though.

> And with the SLI X16, the nForce4 Standard/Ultra mainboards
> are going to drop to $60 very soon.
>
> And if you go nForce3, you can use AGP instead.

I'll have to.  I already dropped the cash for the VC thinking that would be
all I was going to buy, my current board being an AGP board.  But then I
realized one game in particular is rather I/O intensive and is too boring to
play on my old system.  (It takes 30 minutes, realtime to get anywhere on
the world map playing Silent Hunter III, a subsim, using full in-game time
compression.  That makes it quite boring.  It's much faster for players who
own modern systems, though.)

>> and $150 VC (-$100 Ebay'd value) versus $65 for a board,
>> $100 for a CPU, and ~ $70 for a deal on paired 512MBx2
>> PC3200.
>
> Why are you upgrading your memory???
> Didn't we discuss this?

We did.  I would have upgraded the memory on an nForce2 Ultra 400 so I could
run the CPU and RAM in sync.  I understand that with an nForce3 or nForce4
solution the memory speed no longer matters relative to the CPU, since the
concept of the FSB is no longer there.

>> As I've probably made clear before, I am very cheap.
>> I'll probably never even notice the difference between A64
>> and an older highend A32 setup for the activities I perform
>> anyway.
>
> Why not Socket-754 because Socket-462 is _dead_?!
> Socket-754 is still very much AGP.

Mostly, because I am out of touch with modern hardware and the initial price
of the A64 3000+ is quite a huge sticker shock to someone who's never paid
more than $60 for a CPU, save my Cyrix P150+ for about $150 back in '97.

What you've said makes sense and is reassuring.

I am definitely going to move to either 754 or 939.  I may do the former and
get the absolute least expensive quality mainboard and lowest end CPU I can
find, perhaps one of the 64-bit Semprons.

I found this Sempron to be pretty inexpensive.  The newegg listings indicate
you can buy both 128K and 256K L2 cache models of 64-bit Semprons.  I'm
shooting for the 256K variants, of course.

AMD Sempron 64 2800+ Palermo 800MHz FSB Socket 754 Processor Model
SDA2800BXBOX - Retail - $76

I am getting the impression I shouldn't settle for a mainboard with any
chipset other than nForce3 (for 754) or nForce4 (or better, for 939)?

I see the prices on the 754 stuff is very, very inexpensive as you said. 
I'm definitely moving to 754 on the cheap then.

754 is about to be dead though, too, isn't it? ;)