TheWesDude said:
yea... looks like the best bet for the money is one of the 6800 cards not in SLI mode as the 7800s dont have the performance to justify their cost right now and the ATI cards while nice just dont do it right now.
If you ask me, 7800GTX is extremely expensive, but worth the cost. The new ATI X1800 XT supposedly outperforms it by a nice margin, but it will also cost $550. X1800 XL may be a more reasonable choice. Crossfire and SLI are nice if you have more money than you can spend, just don't expect the performance increase to leave you flabbergasted.
i was looking up some CPUs and ratings and it seems like doing a 64 bit cpu is a complete waste. while the intels put out some nice numbers, their heat and power consuption is just unreal. was also looking at some of the dual-core CPUs but they are exorbantly expensive but the drivers/programs dont really take full use out of them.
32-bit to 64-bit is a natural transition that had to happen eventually. It will be a while, however, until immediate need occurs for 64-bit data words and logical address space greater than present 4GB, so unless you intend to rent out your computer to NSA, those magical 64 bits really aren't something to cream your pants over.
Dual-core CPUs are a nice thing if you intend to use your PC for professional applications (modelling, design, cryptography...), otherwise they are a waste of money. They are still a poor choice for gaming platforms.
so i was thinking of like an AMD 2.8 ghz 64 bit single core but that just seems slow to me with intel doing 3.5+ ghz... or is that just more of the true-performance stuff? the amd 2.8 ghz performs as good as an intel 3.6 ghz?
As others have pointed out, clock frequency is a marginal stat that means very little nowadays. Really, kids who aren't old enough to remember CPUs made before 1998 appear to have this misconception that clock frequency is the ultimate indicator of system performance. Wrong. Clock frequency is an important performance factor for computers that use a synchronous or pseudosynchronous bus (like those based on Intel x86 architecture). What if I told you that in systems based on an asynchronous bus (such as Amiga) system clock wasn't even necessary to sustain bus cycles (instead, a technique known as "handshaking" was used to coordinate different modules) and was only used for timing purposes and to support certain modules that couldn't function without a clock signal? I know it's difficult to swallow, but there *are* more important factors to CPU performance, such as average instruction length, pipeline length, cache size, branching prediction capabilities, heat dissipation etc.
Oh, yeah - AMD >> Intel in the field of CPUs for desktop systems. Buying an Intel CPU now would be a huge mistake.
stop paying attention to CPUs and all of a sudden it gets horribly complicated
that plus some of these CPUs are running like $700+ and thats just sickening especially with the SCSI costs im looking at.
Yeah, that's another thing that puzzles me. Three 36GB SCSI hard disk drives? What, are you running a NASA server? For that kind of money you can have a RAID 5 with three SATA 300GB disks, each with 16 MB cache (a single such disk is as fast as WD Raptor, only 5-10 times more spacious). I daresay, I hope none of your acquaintances ask you for advice on what hardware to get, because you are like a human money sink.
i would be barely breaking 100 gigs of storage...
SATA compares to SCSI for blind read/writes but its nearly impossible to find a program that does those. if its not a blind read/write then SATA performs similar to SCSI 2 Wide which is 40 mb/s which is worse than my current SCSI 2 LVD which is 80 mb/s