Gaming Processors

Dooom

I'm in the process of making my own gaming pc and I was wondering what processor and motherboard would be best. I know the AMD Athlon's beat the Pentium 4's but don't the Athlon's have an overheating problem? Any help on the matter of this and any advice on motherboards would be brilliant.

po0k

this is a topic for the technology boards, as nothing is being tweaked or modified here.
You'd get a better response from that board tbh.

PPC

And if ya do a bit of searching on the Tech board its been asked quiet alot. And some views by people

Doodee

ppl often say that Athalons are better than p4 but that is still much debated.

either cpu will do and at good speeds you shouldnt have a problem, mobo will definitly be your problem, I currently have a P4 1.6Ghz, my porblem is that I have sd ram, teh mobo is an MSI one, I have a Radeon 8500LE 128MB and instead of the normal 6,000+ 3dmarks that other seem to get my performance is hindered down to around the 4,000 or even the 5,000. I have Catalyst drivers and all...

anyways my point is make sure you get a nice mobo regardless of the CPu.

Winters

Get a good bit of ram aswell. You will need a minimum of 256MB for any PC.. i would recommend 512 MB for games .. It should make it run better...

Doodee.. are you saying the MSI mobos are a load of poo? I was looking at getting one

PPC

I had an MSI (6340 i think it was) and it was a terrible board.
I've heard that they got better now but i won't go back to them for a while.
ATM i'd either go for Abit, Asus or Soyo.
I myself got a soyo board and am very pleased with it.

spooky donkey

Well for a gaming machine id say that the video card is the most important thing to decide, nvidia are best but the ati boards are comming on leaps and bounds and are a bit cheaper!

I go for athlon processors myself as I feel you get more power per eruo as they are far cheaper that P4`s with the same amount of clout.

And when concidering on mother boards look more to the chip set on the board rather than the make of board, get some chipset reviews. I barley rember that my board is made by Elite but i did a fair bit of research on its chip set sis737 which got good reviews.

Hope i dident confuse you too much, hope this helps

ThrAx

Don't get an MSI they're complete fucking shite i had one and all it did was not work and be slow (a lot like #meat# lol) Anyway get a nice Abit KT7 and an Athlon XP 2000+ and go for at least 128megs DDR (preferably 256 or above if u have the cash).

JustHalf

You obviously don't have a KT7 using DDR-RAM. Is it the KR7A, and the 'T' is a typo?

For a gaming machine where money isn't a problem, I'd go for a 2GHz+ P4 with 1066 RDRAM.

Which is what I'm going for myself.

Winters

Well. Ive finally decided on my Pc..

Im gonna get the Abit KR7A, XP 1700, 256Mb Ram.. was hopeing to go for 512 but ram is expensive at the moment...

AMD are a lot cheaper then P4.. from what ive heard 2.0 Ghz p4s seem to have a slight overheating problem... but wouldnt you at 2Ghz?

JustHalf

I'll see what it's like at 2.67, and give you a shout.

Gerry

Originally posted by Winters
Well. Ive finally decided on my Pc..

Im gonna get the Abit KR7A, XP 1700, 256Mb Ram.. was hopeing to go for 512 but ram is expensive at the moment...

AMD are a lot cheaper then P4.. from what ive heard 2.0 Ghz p4s seem to have a slight overheating problem... but wouldnt you at 2Ghz?

Erm, where did you hear this?

figures taken from www.sandpile.org

Maximum power ( all transistors switched on )

P4 northwood 2.0ghz

66 W (2.0 GHz 0.13 µm µPGA478 @ 1.50 V)

amd xp 1700+:

1466 MHz PM: 64.0 W

The athlon runs normally closer to its maximum power than the p4 does, this is because the p4 is better at shutting down units which it is not using at the time.

If we look at typical power consumption figures:

P4 northwood 2.0ghz

52.4 W (2.0 GHz 0.13 µm µPGA478 @ 1.50 V)

Amd xp 1700+

1466 MHz PM: 57.4 W

So for typical use, the p4 runs cooler, ( or certainly not any hotter overall ) and I would say a p4 2.0ghz northwood is faster in games than an xp 1700+. The only reason to buy the amd is price.

ThrAx

Yup, KR7 forgot the KT7 didn't support DDR.