Mid-range gaming PC

[weringo]

This is the PC I am hoping to make, please rate it and give me some advice on where I can cut costs/increase performance. I already have moniter/hard drive/sound card/speakers/mouse/keyboard. Also, are there any US sites that ship to UK as everything seems to be much cheaper over there?

CPU:
AMD Athlon64 3000 Venice Retail £103.99
http://www.aria.co.uk/ProductInfoComm.asp?ID=18191

Motherboard:
MSI K8N Platinum SLi £82.19
http://www.aria.co.uk/ProductInfoComm.asp?ID=16832

Memory:
Corsair Value Select 2x512MB PC3200 £68.09
http://www.aria.co.uk/ProductInfoComm.asp?ID=10177

Case/PSU:
Phantom MIDI Tower Red 500W £46.41
http://www.aria.co.uk/ProductInfoComm.asp?ID=16221

Optical Drive:
Sony DWQ30A 16x DVDRW-DL Black £29.32
http://www.aria.co.uk/ProductInfoComm.asp?ID=19679

Video Card:
Will probably get a 7800GTX but do not know the good UK nvidia card providers. Also I might just wait for the 7800 512mb

 

[gaara]

Switch the 3000+ with an Opteron 144...pretty much the same processor except the Opteron has larger L2 cache and will most likely overclock higher

 

[weringo]

Switch the 3000+ with an Opteron 144...pretty much the same processor except the Opteron has larger L2 cache and will most likely overclock higher

If I get the opteron I will have much smaller choice in motherboards. The cheapest one i could find was the Tyan Tiger K8W which is £180. What does the L2 cache mean?

 

[Flanker]

The Socket 939 Opterons will work with any Socket 939 motherboard.

 

[gaara]

You have the choice of boards as with the 3000+, you can still use your MSI board you have selected with the Opteron...for clarity I'm talking about the 939 Opterons, not the 940s

L2 cache is basically a small piece of memory that is built directly into the core which can be accessed much much much faster than your RAM...comparing two AMD cores of the same speed yet one with 512KB less cache than the other will perform roughly 200MHz slower than the one with 1MB L2 cache

Little tidbit, if you end up with the Opteron, check the stepping to see if it's a CABNE...consider yourself lucky if you got a CABNE core as it will most likely hit 3GHz on air

 

[weringo]

Ok I think i found what you talking about
AMD Opteron UP 144 San Diego 1.8GHz 1MB Cache (Socket 939)
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/acatalog/AMD_Athlon_MP.html

Why do the athlons have such low clock speed compared to intels? What makes a athlon 3000+ 1.8Ghz on par with an intel P4 3ghz?

 

[gaara]

AMD has traditionally used much shorter pipeline architecture than Intel...the end result being that AMD processors have higher instruction per cycle rates than Intel

For example, 1MHz on an Intel processor may process 10 instructions, whereas 1MHz on an AMD processor may process 15...clock frequency no longer determines the power of a processor