Ok I have finally made up my mind and decided to go with a AMD San Diego Core chip unless the X2 come down in price. I have heard a little bit about Biostar Tforce4U 939 socket motherboard. The things I have heard is that it is a great overclocker with great bios tools, great bundle, and that it has both a pci-expressx16 slot and agp slot. My question is can you run both a pci express and agp card on the Tforce motherboard at the same time? I know that the Tforce is picky about agp graphic cards and only accepts certain ones. Also does any have experience with Biostar's N4SLI motherboard and the new Tforce SLI motherboard? I hear that the N4SLI doesn't offer great overclocking speeds with its bundled bios but if you download the latest bios that you can get better overclocking capabilities. My problem is that I can't find any online bench mark scores for any of the BIOSTAR motherboards that I mentioned earlier. Can anyone steer me in the right direction or atleast answer some of my above questions?
hold up if your building a new system, hold out a little bit longer and the new revised AMD processors will be coming out which support DDR2 so instead of the highest memory you can get being only 400MHz youll be able to have upto 1000MHz and perhaps more. this will be a significantly more capable and powerfull machin than one that only takes standard DDR. As for the motherboard im not to sure whether biostar are any good they even sound cheap to be honest. also if you do decide to not wait for the new cores take a look at some socket 939 AMD opterons rather than a sandiego core since opterons are apparently produced on the same line as the 64 FX series and there great processors. they also have a 1mb l2 cache as standard rather the the 512kb which comes on most standard athlon 64s
I would love to take advantage of AMD's new socket 940 with the ddr-2 support because you know that the memory controller will be built into the chip itself. Plus I hear that if you get a dual core chip, each chip will have it's own bus instead of sharing the bus speeds. But will all new technology the initial cost will be out of my range and the bugs I don't know if I am willing to deal with. I rather wait 6months to a year for all problems to be worked out. If I were to wait then I would strongly consider Intel as well. I know that Intel has some incredible technology coming out in 2006 and both Intel and AMD are moving to 65nm chips as well. Plus I hear that Intel will have a new flash bios memory built into the motherboards to decrease the amount of time software needs to boot up. Plus with the Intel Apple computers coming out this year I know that Intel will have to improve its dual cores. So both will probably be good choices if I were to wait and I may just do so. But tell me more about the Opteron option? Are the Opteron's supported by most major motherboard manufacturers that have the X2/fx/64 chipset support? Are the Opteron's have a reputation for being overclockable? Are they dual core? On the subject of the Biostar-I have only read good things about the Biostar Tforce4U motherboard. Actually if you go to newegg.com, most of the reviews from consumers is nearly 5 stars and get great reviews as an overclocker. I really want to know about the so-called AGP&PCI-express 16 support this board supposely has and I wish to hear from those that have purchased the Biostar N4SLI motherboard and the new Biostar Tforce SLI motherboard.
To Syphertek: Also there are faster DDR rams for AMD 64 cpu's. Just not officially supported by AMD and many motherboard manufacturers but if you have a good overclocking mobo it will be no problem. Right now DDR-2 have high latency so the performance over DDR-1 isn't really seen as of now. Now I do like DDR2 because of it's lower voltage needs, 8 channels of memory lanes and support up to 16gb of ram.
novicebb Try this thread for some great insite into Intel P4 vs AMD http://forums.afterdawn.com/thread_view.cfm/1/235934
