athlon 3000 64

[whoreable]

it was 229 for that and the motherboard, i also got 2 wd 36gig 10krpm raptor drives for 70 each. I dont know if i should keep em though cause i also want a new case video card and memory now too

I dont know if i can justify it since i have an xp 2600 with 512 ram with 15krpm and 10k rpm scsi drive and it runs stuff ok. i dont know if it is worth having another computer for that much money :/

help me decide yall!

[MetalMilitia]

hmm, i think you should just get another 512 ram for your existing computer and a new video card. It would be best to wait for Athlon PCI express motherboards to start appearing before you upgrade.

[AChimp]

They're testing the 64-bit chips out at my work to see if they're worth it right now. There isn't a lot of software that's built to take advantage of them right now, though, so they haven't seen much of a speed increase.

I recommend more RAM, too. :(

[whoreable]

well i set it up. its pretty damn nice, installed windows from start to finish in 15 min.

its also noticably faster in windows.

[whoreable]

hey i spent a couple minutes overclocking it. I corrupted my registry 2x and have to reinstall, appears this motherboard doesnt have a locked pci bus :( At least i got it to 2.2 gig completly stable. now i just need a new video card

[ernasty10050]

wait so amd makes good processors


is that a good alternative to pentium 4 HT

or is it a piece of junk only useful for it's cost

[AChimp]

What kind of motherboard is it?

I can overclock my CPU to 3.0GHz, but I am scared to try it. :O

[MetalMilitia]

wait so amd makes good processors


is that a good alternative to pentium 4 HT

or is it a piece of junk only useful for it's cost

Basically a thread is an instruction sent to the CPU. A non HT CPU can only process a single thread at a time, so although it looks like all of your programs are using the CPU at once they are all actually taking turns to use CPU cycles.
Hyperthrading simply allows multi threaded programs to execute threads in paralell. A non HT CPU would have to execute the threads in series i.e. one at a time.
So this all means that programs such as Windows 2000 or Photoshop can treat the HT CPU as two seperate CPUs and execute multiple threads at once.
While this sounds good only a few programs actually take advantage of this capability.

The AMD equivilent, the Athlon64, is better for a number of reasons.
The main thing about 64bit computing is that it allows much larger number to be processed so you can get the processor to process a much larger chunk of code per cycle. Also they can access/use much more memory for example the maximum system memory of a 32bit processor is 4GB while a 64 bit processor can potentially use up to 18 billion gigabytes :eek .
The main problem at the moment is that there are still few programs that take full advantage of the 64bit features but this will change in time. For instance windows XP 64bit edition should be with us soon.

soo if you cant be bothered to read all that...
Intel < AMD

woo.. longest post yet :)

[AChimp]

AMD sucks compared to Intel. They just beat Intel by bringing their 64-bit chip out first.

XP 64-bit is out, too, but I think it's only available to developers and stuff. They're using it on a handful of computers at my work (obviously, only the new 64-bit machines).

Incidentally, a thread is a sequence of instructions. Hyperthreading is really just a hack for true parallel processing. It still improves performance a lot, though. :O

[MetalMilitia]

The beta of windows XP64bit edition is out. still buggy tho apparently.

Anyway AMD kicks intels ass at everything exept things like media encodeing. Personally i would rather have an extra 10fps in doom than be able to rip mp3s like 20 seconds quicker.

[ernasty10050]

hmmm....so then, i guess i'll be not buying intel's products because i have all the time in the world to be burning music

thanks.