Crossing Enemy lines... Suggestions?

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am I seeing things? mac_mogul is getting a PC?
lol

okay, here is what I recommend
I would try and get an Athlon 64 3000+ or 3200+ in socket 939 - not socket 754 because it doesn't support dual channel RAM and has a 1.6GHZ FSB rather than a 2GHZ FSB

the Abit AV8 3rd eye, the Asus A8V Deluxe or the Gigabyte K8NS are good motherboards in that socket

the 9600 pro or XT is a good card, it is not very expensive now, and gives you descent performance in games. the 9800 pro is another step up, but is not really necessary
at the very max I would say go Nvidia 6600 because it stomps all over most cards today, and is medicore in price

for an optical drive, DVD burners have goten pretty cheap now
I recommend a 16x dual layer burner from Pioneer or LG

for monitors, personally I would get a second hand 21" CRT; you can get them for $150 US. I would suggest trying to get a Sony Trinitron

Kingmax, Kingston, Corsair, Geil, Transcend and OCZ are prolly the better brands of RAM out, some more expensive than others, and a lot of them promise extreme performance, but they all should be good quality modules
for mid range gaming, 512MB should be okay, but for heavy gaming 1GB would be advisable
I would recommend getting 2x256MB or 2x512MB modules to run in dual channel
PC3200 value RAM should give you descent performance; lower timings make very little difference to higher timings, so you shouldn't spend money you don't need to on RAM
higher frequency RAM makes a lot more difference than lower latencies. at the max go PC4000 for price
Kingmax PC4000 is really good RAM, which is relatively lower priced than other PC4000 modules but can be overclocked really well. people have got it to 550MHZ at CL2.5 stable

for hard drives I recommend Seagate or Western Digital, they are really good quality
personally I like Seagate, they are very quiet and have a 5 year warranty

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some info on AMD processors:
they don't run at as high frequencies as Intel processors, but have similar performance, often better.
AMD has done more with their CPU's than just making higher clock speeds, they have made their CPU's with shorter 'pipelines' so it takes less time for them to complete an instruction than an Intel CPU, so they do more per clock cycle
with shorter pipelines, a 2GHZ Athlon processor will give about the same performance as a 3GHZ Intel processor
that's why AMD use figures like 2800+ or 3400+ or whatever rather than the frequency to show its performance

also something I have learned is that Intel's processors cannot process all 32-bit instructions; this is something else AMD has better than Intel, their budget CPU's the Semprons can process all 32-bit instructions
the Athlon 64's can process all 32-bit instructions, and can also process 64-bit instructions (although they came after the G5's 64-bit processors) and when they do, their performance should theoretically double

Macintosh processors do sort of the same thing, their processors do more per clock than X86 processors, so they get better performance than higher frequency CPU's
 
I don't think 64bit is really worth it right now. You can build a damn good PC with the current 'mid-level' hardware and just stay in K7. If you get that mobile chip it can be OC'd quite easily even to people who've never done it before. There's like 4 of us here that have the NF7-S v2 and XP-Mobile combo so there's plenty of advice if need be. 64bit wont be utilized until approx. 2006 so why jump to it already? Plus they are pretty powerful CPU's so they arent that easily overclocked because it takes fairly decent cooling as it is.

Buuuut...if you're looking to not even to go into the overclocking scene, although I assure you it's really easy, then yeah the best route would be to just get the AMD64 3000+ as it's only like $150 or so and then you just need to pop it in with a good board which apokalipse recommended a good brand as it is and you're off. Even getting the XP-Mobile to 2.1GHz would probably outperform a AMD64 3000+ at 1.8GHz although it would have more L2 Cache.

Anyway all in all it's up to you on what you want to do as far as messing with your system settings and whatnot, I just think 64 isn't really worth it quite yet.
 
I have heard that the R9200 did better than the fx5200. I had a 9200, but i got a 5900xt it works well. you said you play games, when i first buuilt my computer i went with a value card ( the 9200, I got my comp in sept of 03) getting a values card was a big mistake. you would be better off spending money on a 9800/ 6600. it will last you longer and you will be satisfied with the results. also, you could get the Athlon 64 2800+.
 
I would say the FX5200 is much better than the 9200, but the 9800 is a bit better than the FX5950, so Nvidia is in between ATI's top and bottom cards in their 5xx0 series against the 9xx0 series
 
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