08-10-2004, 05:51 PM
Refrigerator,Aug 10 2004, 10:19 AM Wrote:That's $292.10 difference.:blink: My 2 cents:
Ouch :(
Do you think it'd be worth it? That's a lotta money there...
Go with your original system except see if you can get more RAM. 256 is certainly not going to cut it.
The reason:
Socket 754 is going away (looks like the Athlon64 platform will be stable on socket 939--when that becomes 'one notch down from the top' it'll probably be a good investment). You will not have a significant upgrade option in the future with it. You probably have no need for 64 bit, so why pay the premium for it if it doesn't have significantly longer life? 32 bit performance of the Athlon 64 is good, but not really much better than a similarly rated Athlon XP (unless you spend even more to get server versions of the chip, which have better memory bandwidth).
If you don't mind overclocking, the best bang for the buck right now is an Athlon XP Mobile 2500+/2600+. They overclock really easily and well (my 2500+ is rated at 1.83 GHz, and is running at 2.4 GHz... I've not heard of one that couldn't do at least that, and if you are willing to spend time tweaking many people can get more).
Athlon XP, of course, has an even shorter upgrade path than socket 754, but it's likely next time you upgrade you'll be getting a new motherboard either way. That's why I'm recommending the cheaper option.