What cpu, mobo and ram combo? Amd

[Rhyth]

Hi guys,

I'm selling off my current platform a P4 3.4 with AA8 Duramax and 1Gb of value corsair (going into a build for a friend) and now want to move over to a good amd gaming platform. What cpu,mobo and ram combination would you suggest for me? I have £450 but I would like to put £150 towards a new widescreen tft but we'll see.

I'm not an overclocker really, but I'm learning.
I have a Zalman CNPS9500 LED for cooling cpu
x2 PCIe 16X would be nice should I want to go duel (x1 7800GT at the moment)
Sound not important as I have a good sound card.
nvidia at moment but could go Ati in the future

All items to be provided by scan ofcourse Any advice would be great cheers Rhyth.

[Rack]

On that budget:
asus A8N SLi Deluxe ~ £100-110
AMD X2 3800+ for Dual Core (or the Opty 165) ~ £220-240
Or on a leaner budget: Opty 144/146 ~£120
And 2 x 1GB of value RAM from the likes of corsair, etc, ~120

So £350 for a single core, or £450 for a dual core.
To save a couple more ££ you could go a 3000+ venice, but you would have to overclock it.

[Lee H]

Basically What rack said is a good suggestion apart from if you want 2 x 16x PCI-E you'll need on of the newer A8N32-SLI motherboards.

Here's the minefield though, you'll really need to decide which graphics you'll want to use as the SLI boards don't support the use of 2 x ATI cards in a crossfire configuration and as such you would be better looking at the newer ATI "crossfire" motherboards if you plan to use ATI cards.

You can however, use just 1 card on the motherboards fine, it's when you want to start going technical and using 2 cards for even better performance, the problems start arising.

[Rack]

From what I've seen of SLI and X-fire, you are better off going for a next gen card than trying to get SLI. Generally next gen cards have better support/more features, give you less of a headache with drivers/setup, and will cost you about the same as if you just sold your existing card and used the funds to buy, rather than investing in a second card.

eg an X1900XT 512MB will prob. outperform 2 x 7800GT's. 256MB's, or be so close it prob. wouldn't matter. Just my 2c

[Rhyth]

Thanks for the advice fellas, a great help.

From what I've seen of SLI and X-fire, you are better off going for a next gen card than trying to get SLI.

This makes sense thanks.

Basically What rack said is a good suggestion apart from if you want 2 x 16x PCI-E you'll need on of the newer A8N32-SLI motherboards.

Well spotted matey, will check

[herulach]

Basically What rack said is a good suggestion apart from if you want 2 x 16x PCI-E you'll need on of the newer A8N32-SLI motherboards.

But you dont, theres no advantage in it, im not saying anything about the board or chipset specifically, but itll be a long time in the future before even 8x is a bottleneck, think about it, thats 8x250MB/s, ie. two gBytes, not bits, every second. thats higher than the bandwidth of most ram.

[Rhyth]

Ok the A8N-SLISE (out of stock) looks like a bargain (£77) over the deluxe if I'm not going to go overclocking loads, Just without the funky heatpipe affair and two x16 PCIe.

[BUFF]

Basically What rack said is a good suggestion apart from if you want 2 x 16x PCI-E you'll need on of the newer A8N32-SLI motherboards.

or an Abit AN8 32X.

if you don't need x16SLI the standard Abit AN8 SLI is a good value SLI board (as indeed is the KN8 SLI)

[FatalSaviour]

Yep, I'm not totally convinced that 2 7800GTs are gonna max out the bandwidth (at least no significantly). However, it does have very nice heatpipe cooling (me pets my one).
I've just realised your case choice though....so possibly best not to risk any heatpipe based mobo

[Rhyth]

Does someone know if a CNPS9500 LED will fit ok with the heatpipe gubbins on the LN12107 Asus A8N32-SLi Deluxe 939 NF4 Dual x16 SLi DDR400 SATAII Raid 2xGbE Lan 8Ch Audio?

[Lee H]

According to the systembuild team the zalman cooler will not fit as the fan is too big and touches components on the motherboard I'm afraid.

Best Regards,

[Rhyth]

Ok thanks for checking mate

[Cmot]

Well whatever you do, don't nuy any nvidia chipset based mobo! I have just built a brand new system, using an ABIT KN8 SLI mobo and the drivers are giving me no end of problems with corrupt downloads and dropped connections. In fact if you buy one of these, make sure to get a decent pci network card and disable the onboard nvidia based one. This simple exercise will save you many a wasted and stressed hours! And I'll not bother going into the chipset's built in firewall!!!

How on earth a world class firm like nvidia could get it so bad with these drivers is beyond me! Had I known then what I know now, there is no way I would have bought one of these boards.

[Rack]

Well whatever you do, don't nuy any nvidia chipset based mobo! I have just built a brand new system, using an ABIT KN8 SLI mobo and the drivers are giving me no end of problems with corrupt downloads and dropped connections. In fact if you buy one of these, make sure to get a decent pci network card and disable the onboard nvidia based one. This simple exercise will save you many a wasted and stressed hours! And I'll not bother going into the chipset's built in firewall!!!

So basically 80% of people who bought an aftermarket A64 motherboard must have this problem too? I beleive of the 40 or so people I know with A64 setups, all use NF4-Ultra chipsets mate. Post a thread about your problem rather than flaming.

There are some simple things to do: Don't install the Nvidia IDE Drivers. Don't install the Nvidia networking software (ie the firewall stuff). That should solve your problems. Don't use NCQ on your harddrives (I beleive you can disable it on most). I have an NF4-Ultra, I've been using the networking port fine. I've never had any corruption problems.

[Lee H]

I've used the Nforce4 SLI chipset for a while now and while there was a few issues with the firewall at the beginning, these seem to be rectified now with the latest BIOS updates and latest drivers from Nvidia.

Certain operating systems, i.e MCE2005 did have an issue with the firewall when it first came out and caused a few BSOD's under certain operational circumstances, but again - a newer driver release fixed these flaws.

[Agent]

Well whatever you do, don't nuy any nvidia chipset based mobo! I have just built a brand new system, using an ABIT KN8 SLI mobo and the drivers are giving me no end of problems with corrupt downloads and dropped connections.

User error or faulty board.
If this was a widespread, unfixed issue, it would be all over the net.
nVidia just wouldnt be able to let somthing like that slip through.