To buy or not to buy

[imported_Achilles]

To put it simply, I want to build (or have someone else build) the best gaming system I can for $2300 - $2800. This does not have to include a monitor or a mouse or speakers or anything like that. Everything I'm reading makes the athlon64 the obvious choice for a cpu. The part I'm not sure of, is should I go with say a 3800+, 6800u combination now, or should I wait for pci-e and the possibilites of SLI. I don't want to wait more than a couple months. I've read a lot of benchmarks and reviews, but still cant make a decision. Any advice is greatly appreciated. If anyone has a lot of time and wants to price out a system for me, that would be awesome. Thanks in advance.

 

[Sonic587]

Welcome to AT!

Make sure to check out Jpeyton's system buyer's guide. It's great.

My advice is to wait for NF4 if you want to. That's what I'm doing. It should definitely be worth it if it turns out the SLI performance they say it will.

 

[n7]

Welcome to the forums!

My advice is never to wait unless you have to.

If you wait for everything in life, it will pass you by...

PCI-E will be great, especially if SLI does take off, but there's no use waiting another 6 months for things to pan out fully unless you have a great computer already.

You can get an awesome rig for that price, so i would just go for a good 939 mobo + CPU like the 3500+ or 3800+, & grab a 6800 Ultra or X800XT PE, depending on what flavor you like.

Just my $0.02

 

[klah]

We don't really have a good idea when this chipset will be released yet. Kristopher said this month, The Inqroll: ) says Q1 '04.

The only good news is that NV demoed SLI @ IDF and said 100% improvement in pro apps and 80% in games (Inq again :roll: ).

 

[fuzzynavel]

You are on a budget so there is no point in waiting for SLI.....SLI is only for those with cash to burn!

PCi-X and AGP performance are roughly similar at the moment

S939 and S754 also have similar performance....don't the S754 chips usually have more cache which helps speed them up?

The dual memory doesn't make too much difference at the moment cos the A64 isn't that memory hungry and it is all controlled very nicely by the on-chip memory controller!

Although not very helpful, the choice is entirly yours and you shouldn't be disappointed with whatever you buy.

 

[imported_Achilles]

Other than the price of a second video card, what added costs will there be for SLI? An expensive motherboard?

 

[Geomagick]

The m/board will most likely be a little more expensive, but most of this cost will bring features the demanding user will probably use.

I think it will be unlikely that we will see these sort of boards and the PCI-X high end cards in the next couple of months though.

Good luck with your purchase and welcome to the family.

 

[CJP]

If you're fairly happy with what you have now wait, if not upgrade as the new video cards are pretty amazing. I've got a 9800 that's still pretty good so I'm skipping this generation.

 

[araczynski]

i agree with n7, if you were going to wait a month or two then MAYBE i'd say wait, but anything past that and you're quite frankly just wasting your life with.

if you're into serious gaming and love eye candy, and your system isn't making you happy now, upgrade it, forget half a year from now.

i just bought a leadtek6800gt a week ago, best 400 i've EVER spent on a pc part, don't regret it for a minute, don't care if 2 month from now it will cost half of that, i'm enjoying it right now

1600x1200 in everything i've thrown at it so far, (armies of exigo/wh40k demos are beautiful), can't wait to reinstall (and finish) morrowind expansions

i had the 5900 previously, and while it was nice, it wasn't half the card the 6800gt is, especially overclocked past ultra speeds.

anyway, if you can afford it, splurge, life's too short.

 

[raildogg]

PCI is all hype and not enough performance over AGP

 

[Dman877]

I'm waiting for the NF4 chipset, cheaper 939 cpu's (possibly .90 nm too) and SLI 6600GT's personally . However I might break down soon and just got 754/6800NU, we'll see.

 

[epsilon9090]

The chipset may add some performance, but man if you want to wait until that comes out and buy the first board available I can almost garantee you it wont be worth waiting for. Get a 939 and a 3800+ with a gefore 6800 ultra extreme and youll have fun...oh yeah you have a ton of money why don't you also at a Dell 2001FP flat panel 16ms 20.1 inch flat panel to it.

 

[ku]

It's really up to you whther or not you should wait. PCI-E won't be out until at least beginning of 2005 for AMD motherboards. If you really think that you'll need SLI, you're going to have to wait a bit. If you don't care much about PCI-E and SLI, buy it now. And see if you can afford a AMD FX... I think you should be able to with that budget =\

 

[NightCrawler]

Your always going to want to upgrade to the next level so I would just buy a socket 754 Athlon 64 and save the money for another year and wait til things mature.

You can upgrade every year if you want and some people do.

I would get this right now:

Athlon 64 2800 ( overclock it )
Epox or Asus MB
Corsair DDR ½ gig to 1 gig PC3200

then in a year you could buy a faster socket 754 cpu or buy a socket 939 system because they will probably be more mainstream and the cost will be a lot lower in a year.

You will always want to upgrade, keeping a computer for 2 to 3 years is very hard and only for people like me who are broke and unemployed.

 

[flexy]

same boat...but i still hold me back and wait for NF4. I heard they 'announce it' middle of September, no idea when it will be available then.

It might be sooner than expected...AND...the NF4 boards WILL have pci-ex...and i am almost sure that with the coming of nf-4 there will also be pci-ex 6800GT cards and you can use SLI and everything. I am waiting soooooo long to upgrade - another month (or two, or even three) doesnt really matter.
I just dont want to buy NOW...and a month later everyone is raving about NF-4/pci-ex, SATAII etc..etc... my $0,2...