new AMd cpu - which do I get?

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Albatross_1

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My athlon64 3200+ venice CPU has bit the dust. Faulty PSU took it out.

So I'm looking to upgrade. What socket 939 CPU will give me the best performance for gaming, and also be able to give photoshop CS2 some juice to handle extremly high resolution images? I'm looking at spending no more than $300 or close to it.

here's my current hardware (including the bad CPU):

- Asus A8N32-SLI Deluxe Motherboard
- AMD Athlon64 3200+ venice CPU
- 2x eVGA Geforce 7900gt in SLI
- OCZ 2gb of PC3200 2-3-3-6 DDR400 ram
- Antec 550w PSU
- Ancient Maxtor 80gb IDE hdd, 7200rpm ata133
- Windows XP Home Edition SP2
- Lite-on DVD-RW drive
- Floppy **** drive
- 19" LCD running at native 1280x1024 for games

here's the games I play:

- Oblivion
- Hitman: Blood Money
- Battlefield 2
- Quake4
- FEAR
- HL2 / HL2DM
- AoE III
- and other various titles

Ok. So what CPU should I upgrade to that won't cost more than $300? I heard that dual-core is needed to get the most from SLI, but I'm using XP Home edition, which doesn't support multithreading so that sounds kind of pointless.

No matter which cpu I get, I plan on overclocking it to the best of my ability on air.

Besides gaming, I do a lot of photo editing on extremely high resolution (45 megapixel raw files) in photoshop CS2. Right now, the editing is too 'laggy' for my tastes. I know that a dual core CPU would help tremendously here, but like I said, XP home doesn't support multithreading. So what kind of an upgrade besides CPU should I do to improve photoshop performance. Get another 2gb of ram for 4gb total, or get a new SATA 3gb/s HDD which would be like 30x faster then the IDE ATA133 one I'm using now?

thanks for the help.
 
I say get an Opteron, a Dual core one will be good too. Probaly cost you around $300 like you wanted to spend. Do you really have dual 7900GT's? wow thats a watse in my opnion. If you're willign to pay for to 7900Gt's, then why would it matter what cpu you get? Any cpu will run good in that machine

-Aaron
 
nice system.

2 gigabites of ram is plenty. don't get 4GBs.

i like the SATA idea.. but if you're not desperate for space, i'd put the money into a really good cpu.

as far as i know, xp home DOES support multi-threading.. (putting stuff on one core, and other stuff on a different core.. not sure if thats what you meant..)

sucks for you your cpu didn't last till end of next month, cuz you would save $$ cuz AMD plans price cuts.. but you can't stay another month w/o computer, so you have to get one now..

get dual core, either the X2 3800+ or the Opteron 165, or if you can afford it, the Opteron 170

good luck.
 
Yes I very much need a cpu asap since it's my main work machine, only other thing I have is my laptop but I can't really do my work or play my nice games on it.


As far as CPUs go, how does the opteron 165 perform compared to like the X2 4200+ Manchester?
 
Albatross_1 said:
Yes I very much need a cpu asap since it's my main work machine, only other thing I have is my laptop but I can't really do my work or play my nice games on it.


As far as CPUs go, how does the opteron 165 perform compared to like the X2 4200+ Manchester?

the opteron 165 is 400mhz slower than the 4200+, but it overclocks very well, and can easily reach those speeds, and higher! when you do reach those speeds, you also have double the L2 cache of the 4200+!
 
hmm... i would say go for the opty

BTW: do u really need a new proc?
I have p4 and i am laggless on any of my games on high settings
 
alexsabree said:
hmm... i would say go for the opty

BTW: do u really need a new proc?
I have p4 and i am laggless on any of my games on high settings

refer to first post
 
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