If I were you, get a PCI Express mobo and PCI express vid card. Nvidia and ATi are pretty much neck and neck but Id go Nvidia cause there are usually a lot of problems wth ATi's drivers and games. RAM, get kingston or crucial, and for processor, AMD64 would be incredible

 

Get Nvidia faster for doom3! and will be faster for more games to come because ID loves Nvidia, which means Doom3 engine loves NVcards =) and I'm sure alot of next gen games will use the Doom3 Engine, and as for memory Get OCZ! or Crucial. Corsair good too

 

well, the current crop of Nvidia cards, the 6600-6800 excel in doom3. Really, these chips were built for doom3. In many other games, though, ATI is dominant and is expected to be in half life2 as well. You won't go wrong with either.

Now, Celerons, even clocked high, have a design problem...they have too little cache, and in games, this matters A LOT. The celeron uses the P4 core, but the P4 has more cache. The current P4s have 1MB of L2 cache...it sounds like a lot, but the longer pipeline on the P4 pretty much erased the gains the cache could have given it. basically, it NEEDS lots of cache to perform. You won't go wrong with the P4, but for gaming, there is better.

The Athlon64 is the KING of gaming cpus. In some games, the slowest model is on par or even faster than the FASTEST P4! The first Athlon64s had 1MB of L2 cache, but the current ones have 512K. This is a non-issue as the Athlon has a short pipeline...there is hardly a difference between the two. Also, the Athlon has 128K of super-low latency L1 cache. The P4 has like 16K, but it is non-exclusive, meaning that whatever is in L1 is mirrored in L2. Thus, you could say that an athlon64 with 512K L2 cache really has 640K of total cache.

Also, the Athlon64 has the memory controller on the die. This effectively makes the main memory a L3 cache as the latencies are VERY VERY low. The P4 has the controller on the chipset, and latency is piss poor and only worsens as clock speed goes up. The fact that P4s use DDR2 memory now only makes this worse. The P4 used to kick butt in video encoding. The A64 is now within 5%.

The new Athlon 64s on the 90nm process will be out any day now. I recommend one. They will be in the 939 pin package in 3000+ and 3200+ speeds. I highly recommend them. They run cool. P4s run super hot (the reverse USED to be true). As for a motherboard, get one with the 939pin socket. Asus, ABIT, Gigabyte, MSI, and DFI are all top notch. Newegg rocks, too.

You may want to wait a month or so for AMD64 boards with PCI express to come out. That will give you more upgradability.

 

couldnt have said it better, go with Steve's suggestion, you wont regret it.

 

Awesome advice guys. Price is almost not an issue but you all gave me some good places to start looking.

 

[QUOTE=steven975,Sep 23 2004, 09:45 PM] ...The new Athlon 64s on the 90nm process will be out any day now.

 

no, the semprons are on the 130nm process. Actually, the semprons are identical to the thoroughbred core AthlonXP with the exception of the 333Mhz FSB. The odd-ball sempron, the 3100+ is based on the Paris core and is on socket754...it is basically an athlon64 without the 64bit capability. All other semprons are on socket A.


The 90nm A64s are smaller (in core size) and cooler than the current ones (the current ones are cool already). Also, they are said to be 5% faster than the 130nm version at the same clock due to architecture enhancements. They should be able to overclock better as AMD is using both the strained silicon and silicon on insulator (SOI) techniques in making these chips; this reduces transistor gate leakage.