thinking of a new computer
 

anyone out there running the new athalon 64 yet? if so how do you like it and what MB are you running?

Steve

Hey there Steve if ya lookign for a new computer or any one is lookign fora newe computer ,My brother has a company in Richmond B.C

If anyone wants good deals pPM me for his number

MIKE

His name is Peter.
Any his sales are really good cheaper that i have found he is going to build me a PC for 1300 and the main price is around 3500 so you do the math

STEVE check your PM"S
ok


MIKe

I have an athlon64 running on an asus k8v deluxe board.

installed xp, works fine. havent managed to get my video games running on it yet, but I dont have much time to play around lately.

I would say, dont expect massive speed increases :)

at least, its no faster then the p4's out..

thats real weird as all the independant benchmarks show it to be way faster than the P4's or the barton athlons.

how much ram are you running and which athlon 64?

Steve

alright, let me qualify my above statements.

running windows xp, vs a p4 3ghz HT machine (both with dual channel ram, 2 x 256mb strips, western digital sata raptors and an ati 9800 pro) there is no difference in anything I use on a day to day basis.

I really havent had much chance to play with the athlon machine, I am intrigued by the new techology, and purchased the system because of the benchmarks being so much nicer then the p4's.

Unfortunately, I dont do video rendering, massive db accessing and other such things that they use for bench marking, so while the cpu does bench higher, from a user standpoint, it doesnt run windows xp any faster :)

perhaps if you ran linux, you may see a difference. I know that the older amd's running linux were smokin machines.

these amd's are also not cheap....

ahh ok, you need to load up UT and do a fram rate test aparently it rock for games also and is blowing everything else out of the water. not to bad only 300ish for the cpu.

Steve

well, I would load up UT, except it wont load :)

it installed fine, detected everything fine but when loading it gives an error and wont start.

****ing me off, but I dont have time to mess with it and get it running (probably a sound card driver or something dumb).

Are you actually using a 64bit version of windows? Without 64bit compiled application there's isn't going to be much of a difference.

there is a good difference, it is blowing the bit P4's out of the watter by up to 10% with 1/2 the speed. next year the winXP for the athlon 64 will be out and I can only imagin the speed increase then.

Steve

Just curious Steve. What's the big rush? :razz:

no big rush starting to lookin to it. my computer I have no is no fun suz even my laptop is faster :rolleyes: so i am starting to decide what to build. so far the AMD 64 is winning out. mind you I would never build a intell anyways so it will be some sort of AMD system at least.

Steve

I go AMD just because of the price. They may run hot and depending on the benchmarks are slower, but for hundreds of dollars cheaper...

Steve are you familiar with http://www.genericcomputer.bc.ca? I get a lot of my hardware there.

umm, that sounds too good to be true. i wanna see some specs.

anyways, back on topic. IMO, i wouldn't get an amd64 just yet. A lot of the newer technology which will be appearing this year isn't available yet. Mainly, 64bit windows, PCI Xpress, DDR2. another thing that bugs me is the pins they have. What was appealing about socket A was the same pin count starting from a few years back to even now. Upgrading mobos was a lot easier cuz you can always use the old cpu.

but if your pc is ailing for an upgrade, i guess go with it. however, i read from some place that a new case standard called btx is coming out soon, so i don't know how re-usable your parts will be once the the new standard comes out.

just as a side note, computer hardware doesnt have a big margin - we are talking 3-5% on most items, several are sold at cost to get customers in the door.

When it comes to computer parts, I suggest buying from a company with an excellent return policy and intelligent staff as opposed to saving $2.50 on a strip of ram :)

ram and memory has little profit but cpu's, drives, and other accesorys have a fair markup, I used to run my own computer store while I was posted ashore.

Steve

cpu's I am not sure about, altho I do not think they give much profit. My supplier and I have a really close relationship and he tells me that his profits come from the things like hard drive fans, case fans with led's in the, cathode tubes, fancy cases, funky cpu coolers, etc.. Basically the "accesories" that are impulse buys give him the majority of his profit. ram and drives right now are both pretty competitive, so his profit is low.

Or, so his story goes, as I have been bugging him for discounts on my hard drives (I have purchased 30 this month so far, at that kinda volume I expect a discount of some sort) and he says he cant do it. oh well, prices are low enough anyways :)

What are you paying for a 120 gig?

If you buy that much stuff, you should open an account with supercom and get wholesale pricing.

I just got one for 150ish but that was walking into a store and grabbing one of the shelf.

Steve

Yeah I am finding that generally a gig is worth about a buck.

I was thinking of switching to an Apple because they seem to have fewer issues with security when connected to the internet, can anyone comment on this. I am not so confident with my Windows machine hooked up by ADSL, anyone can snoop onto my machine, get my confidential bank account information, etc.

they got fewer issues as the mac users are a very small persentage on internet users so the script kiddies don't waist there time writing virisus for them as much.

BUT you pay a lot more for the same thing, you have the advantage of not being able to run the software you like cuz no one wrot it in mac language.

I was looking in to Mac's also and decided that the lack of software choices and paying almost 1.5X the price for the equal computer was to much for me.

If you have your antivirius software and a firewall set up properly you don't get virius.

Steve