Hi, at the moment I have an AMD sempron 2400+ @1.67Ghz, made a mistake with my last choice of mobo and ended up just running at 166mhz FSB instead of 333mhz. Anyway, gonna upgrade to this. P4 3.0Ghz prescott 1mb cache 800 FSB s478 Gigabyte Ga-8ipe1000PRO-G S478 dual channel ddr Kingston 1GB DDR PC3200 400MHz Non-ECC CL3 (3-3-3) 184pin DIMM's Think it's gonna be much better? I'm gonna keep the other system to run my games and stuff anyway.
I think it would be better than that AMD system, but if yer gonna replace it, are you sure you want to go with the 478 pin chip? Yer already at the top end of speed methinks with no room to upgrade. With new stuff coming out everyday 3.0 will seem old soon.
I'm not bothered if it's not new anymore... I had enough "keeping up with the joneses when I was younger" now I wait for things to come down a bit in price before buying them. The dual core amd x2 3800 is twice the price of the p4 cpu that I am getting. The main reason I asked if the cpu i am getting will be better than the one I currently have is because sometimes the amd sempron hangs a little while trying to multi-task... this could be down to the mobo though because as i said earlier it's only running on a 166 fsb. I think the p4 which will be running with an 800 fsb with 2gb's of dual channel memory should work out better... the mobo that I'm getting with this has good reviews too and seems to be great at overclocking and has a dual bios so that you can switch between settings depending on what you want to do...and also handy if one of them crashes or gets corrupted somehow. If I could afford it then maybe I would have gone with something a bit more lively... but as it is I do ok, I'll have 3 machines when I get and build my new one.. a 4 year old amd athlon 1ghz, a one year old amd sempron 2400+...and then p4 3.0ghz... just want to compare really... I ahven't had a pentium since way back in 1995 when I had a then brand new pentium 100 with a 250mb hard disc (can you imagine) LOL.
I understand building what you can afford, and without looking at your specs, can guess you probably have Hyper-thread with that chip and mobo so lagging or hanging should'nt be a problem. I have that same chip (in an intel mobo so probably not as good as your choice) and just wish I'd have left room for upgrade. Now I have to change chip and mobo vs. only the chip if I want to go bigger.
Yeah, I understand what you're saying about having a mobo with the ability to upgrade... but the way cpus are going at the minute whatever mobo you get chances are that next time they bring out a new cpu chip it wouldn't fit your mobo anyway... or you might not want anything that could fit in that mobo... does that make sense? and if I decide I want a dual core in the future, I think the price of a £60 mobo to go with the chip isn't that great a problem.. and I can still keep this system as a backup or use when I'm encoding on the new system or something. I've got so many parts etc that to make a new system I only have to buy the cpu and mobo anyway and maybe another case and harddrive every now and then... at the moment though I have 2 sata hardrives totalling 360Gb and 1 IDE harddrive of 160Gb in one system..so I'll just swap a few over to the machine I'm gonna be using the most mem on. I also bought a pci IDE card so that I can have all my dvd drives on seperate channels.
i think when getting these p4 3.x cpus u ned to get urself those premium hearsink and casing and extra fans and in the long run if u even it out i think the x2 3800 is worth the money.
I already have a premium casing and loads of fans... I have a chieftec dragon case and am running 5 fans. I already have more than enough hardware that I need for the build... I know it would have only been an extra £130 for the x2, but I can't afford it at the moment and also as I said wanted to try pentium again for a change. Thanks for the advice anyway guys, I think it'll be better than the system I'm currently using anyway and will last me a year or 2 before I want to upgrade and build myself another new one..by that time I think the dual core cpu's will have come down a lot in price cheers
A friend of mine bought an HP pavilion media center from the local store which the 3800 came standard with the system. It does fly, with DVDShrink encode about 25-40% faster than my system with P4 3.0. I was jealous cause I built mine and he pulled his from a box and was faster.
