need sound advice on new PC (1 Viewer)

[Eric Samonte]

OK..I have decided to try and build one. I'm going Pentium, and looking closely at a P4 2.2. But I've read u can get 2.13 out of a 1.6A. Is there much of a difference between the 2? I will be doing gaming as well as DVDRW in the near future.

Oh and if u guys know of a good mobo to go with it, too? The Asus P4S333 and the ABIT BD7 look good.

 

[Rob Varto]

The 1.6A is the Northwood processor and can be overclocked to achieve 2.0+ GHz speeds - from what I've read. As far as overclocking goes, I don't know much about it other than to make sure you have plenty of cooling!

Im in the process of buildng my own computer. I ordered most of my components from newegg.com and my mobo/processor bundle from Mwave.com. I went with mwave because they test and burn in the mobo before they ship it. I was going to go with the Asus P4S333 and 1.7A processor but for the money and reviews I read, I went with the Soyo Dragon K7+ and Athlon XP 1800+. The 1800 performs at 2.0 GHz level compared to the Intel and is much more cost effective. Im pretty sure most Intel mobo's get their best bang for the buck using RDR Ram - which is still kind of pricey compared to DDR PC2100 ram. Still, user preference... I feel comfortable with all the reviews I've read on the XP processor and the mobo I bought.

 

[Masood Ali]

I personally like the Asus P4B266-C, because it uses an Intel chipset. Not to knock on other chipsets, but not many people EVER have reliability issues using an Intel chipset (and its fast too). It uses regular PC2100 memory (Crucial.com would be a good place to get some).

P4s do perform incremently better with RDRam, but RDRam based motherboards are generally harder to overclock. However, RDRam is getting cheaper everyday (its costs about 50% more than DDR ram now), so its a very viable option.

And, as far as bang for the buck, 1.6A P4s have the lead in that category. They almost guarantee a 533MHz overclock, often times more. You can get an Athlon 1800+ for around the same price, and probably overclock it somewhere around 1667MHz, but that would require either running your front side bus speed out of spec (which sometimes causes instability), or unlocking the Athlon processor (which is a pain in the behind). Athlons also need a better (read louder) heatsink to overclock to higher speeds, while most people with a P4 1.6A overclock with a Sunflower heatsink (read quiet).

I'm not bashing the Athlon, because I in fact own two computers running Athlons; I'm just letting you know about any issues ahead of time.