I have got £250 burning a hole in my pocket, and I'm thinking about upgrading some hardware, but what do I do? I'm stuck for ideas, as there is so many possibilities. My basic hardware setup is: Lian-Li PC60 Asus A7N8X Deluxe Athlon XP 2500 Akasa Silver Mountain 2Q HS&F 1024Mb Crucial DDR400 CL=3 Leadtek GeForce FX 5900 XT Any ideas greatly appreciated
Looks like a reasonably mathced system. Maybe look to a different cooler and get that cpu running at 200 fsb to match the ram, but other than that it looks fine...
Hmmm ... good idea ... perhaps a touch of water cooling is in order - what kind of price would I be looking at for cpu, video and motherboard cooling, using water?
water cooling would look very attractive if i were in your situation you could probably build your own kit at dangerden and maybe even get a peltier too? not sure but def watercooling and as some1 said, push up that fsb!
Im in the same boat, with about the same amount of cash to spend. But have decided against watercooling for now. Spending all that money on cooling is a good idea for the future, but for about £300 you can buy an A64 3500+ (939) and a motherboard for it too. Which is ultimatley going to bag you more bang for buck as they say.
Nice ideas ... In response to DanMcr's suggestions - can I run my DDR400 ok with an A64 processor, or should I be looking to change that too? Also, I see 939 and 754 pin versions - what's the difference?
Socket 939 is the latest a64 socket type. The 939 cpus have a lower cache than the 754 chips, but sport a 128mb on die dual channel memory controller. Your existing RAM will work fine, in fact in dual channel mode at 3200 speed it will be going like hot snot! Read this for more info about the 939 chips http://bit-tech.net/review/319/ Basically its all the good points of socket 754 and 940 brought together.
754 CPU's come in 3 flavours, Sempron which is the budget solution and then Athlon64's with either 512k or 1MB cache. It doesn't really matter as the cache is factored into the Athlon64's perf rating, so you don't even need to know how much L2 cache there is. 939 comes in 2 flavours, Athlon64 (512k Dual Channel) and Athlon64-FX (1MB Dual Channel). All 754/939 CPUs have an integrated memory controller which gives them a lovelly speed boost. The diff between 754 and 939 is Single Channel vs Dual Channel which offers a nice boost, this again is factored into the perf rating so is in effect again more than you need to actually know. 754 is still fast but 939 is faster and is likely to have the longest life. However 754's life should still be pretty long, it's there to offer the new budget line-up from AMD and offers great 'punch for pound'. PC3200 is all you need (2 sticks for 939) but if you want to o/c then it's much better to have faster RAM.
