OK Heres the deal. I keep asking different people and its about 50-50 at the moment. so... heres the deal.


I am soon to be upgrading my computer to a...


AMD 64 4800+ Dual core (barton if i can find one)
2Gig Corsair Ram (2x1gb)
120GB HD Seagate?(or 2x 80GB resons for defrags / scans ect.. your thoughts please.)

Now what i need to know is.. should i go for a PCI-Express Motherboard or an AGP Motherboard.. Also if possible.. recommend a graphics card for the PCI-E (geforce 6800 /7800 in mind)

Please let me know what you think

Quote from franky500 :

AMD 64 4800+ Dual core (barton if i can find one)

are you sure you want to spend that much money on a cpu if you have such little knowledge about what youre actually considering to buy ?

Bad choice

Take the 3500+ instead. (cheaper, MUCH cheaper, top CPUs are insanely high priced whilst not being significantly faster)

And yes, go for a PCI-e gfx card.
HDD: 160GB Samsung. (GREAT HDD´s )

ya i'd recommand go down to 3500+
and get the dual PCI Express card

Choose the X2 processor if you want to do multi-tasking, like running a lot of programs at the same time. The "normal" AMD processors are more for gaming, and if you want to spend a lot of money. I'd go for a AMD FX55 or FX57.

about the AGP/PCI-E, PCI-E is the future, and not many AGP graphics cards are being built as we speak.

For graphics card choice i dont know what the main thing is you want to do with your computer, if your going to do some hardcore gaming, i'd suggest a 7800 or a X1800. For playing LFS a 6800 or x800 is enough to keep it running smoothly.

I think it's been made clear that the PCI-E is a given, but good luck on finding a barton X2.

Current cores on sale for X2s are Toledo and Manchester, with the later being the most recent revision. (Although the Manchester is actually a cost cutting revision)
For a price guide (Retail), you are looking at ~£620 for a top spec X2, and ~£240 for a bottom spec X2. The 3500 the folks above have suggested drops in at around£140-150 and will give you the most bang for your buck at this moment in time.

The X2s excel at multithreaded applications, so unless you have something very specific that is intensive in a multi CPU way I'd recommend the same as above.

With some of the money you'll save from not buying a silly priced X2, I'd also suggest a 74GB WD Raptor (10KRPM SATA) for program storage, and a 250GB SATA drive for storage (or 2 if you can afford them and think you might want to develop a video collection ). The reason for this is windows can swap to disk faster, read, write and load stuff faster from the raptor. 250GB is the minimum you should consider HDD wise if you want to get the most for your money.

80GB * 2 @ £41 per drive (£82) = 1.9GB per £
120GB @ £58 = 2.06GB per £
160GB @ £54 = 2.9GB per £
200GB @ £60 = 3.3GB per £
250GB @ £70 = 3.57GB per £
300GB @ £87 = 3.4GB per £

Defrag time is not too bad as long as you keep it regular.

As for GFX, card, if you want uber performance, by all means go for a 7800, but they have abundant amounts of overkill for most stuff out today. A 256MB 6800GT would be my weapon of choice :-)

Also, regarding the memory, most high end corsair sticks don't exceed PC3200. However, if I were you I'd avoid the gimmicky pro series and go for 2 sets of 1GB PC3200 TwinX-XL (ending up with 4 sticks of 512).
My reasoning behind this is mainly performance based. While you can get 2GB TwinX sets (2x1024), most of the latencies are a bit weak.
The PC3200 TwinX-XL is about as fast as it gets

Seeing as you seem to be building a whole system, I'd also recommend upgrading the naff on board sound with one of the soundblaster x-fi cards

Hope that helps some

This is a no-brainer. PCI-E!

64 bit motherboards with AGP were just for people who already had decent AGP cards and went for 64 bit systems, since Graphics cards are very expensive. AGP + 64bit is just a stop gap for people who didnt want to buy another expensive graphics card.

If your going for an all out upgrade, definately go PCI-E. There's no point in going AGP since its going to severely stem your future upgrading prospects, and its a hell of a lot better than AGP.

Another plus point for PCI-E is that the cards are slightly cheaper.

If you have the money, by all means get the 4800 X2, dont listen to these jealous mongrels! And another no brainer - get the 7800GTX PCI-E.

If you already have a pretty decent AGP card (like me with my 6800GT), then this is the board to get:

http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=2524

Keep your AGP card for now, install a new PCI-E one later. And unlike other boards that do a kind of AGP emulation, the performance difference between AGP and PCI-E with the same card on that board is nil. It's true AGP. Just look at the benchmarks.

No SLI support but SLI is prohibitively expensive anyway.

Lies. 7800GTX pisses over 6800's or x850's and they dont do an AGP version because AGP is too slow.

You cant just keep ur AGP card for now and install a PCI-E one later, since you will have to change boards again. It's pretty simple logistics, GET PCI-E if your going for a full upgrade!

Ahem. Please do your research, vpr01. At the moment, there's no real-world performance difference between AGP 8x and PCI-E 16x.

If you click the link I posted above, you can see a board that has both an AGP and PCI-E slot. As the benchmarks on the following pages show, there is no difference in performance when using the same card (albeit with a different interface).

The reason why there is no AGP version is because they made the 7800 series native to PCI-E. In order to have an AGP version, they would need a bridge chip. The 6800 series did not require this for AGP because it was native to AGP. However, the PCI-E variants of the 6800 series had such bridge chips. By putting the 7800 series on a single interface, they can reduce their cost and increase profits.

I will agree, however, that a 7800GT is a much better buy than any 6800. The performance difference is pretty big.

didnt notice it had AGP too :o

there is real world difference between AGP and PCI-E anyway... but they dont make a 7800 AGP version so you can clearly see it, it'd be pointless. and it has the potential to be even faster, which is what intelligent upgrading is all about.

Quote from vpr01 :

there is real world difference between AGP and PCI-E anyway...

no there isnt ... there is no real world difference between agp 4x and 8x either ...

there is, it just hasnt been realised fully yet. when u get x16 cards come out, which actually use all that bus bandwidth, it will be.

How can a faster bus not make a difference?

ATM the additional bandwidth is not needed and used by the cards.
However, future gfx cards will use the available bandwidth.

All has been a great help...so what processor you think (yes its for gaming...)

http://www.dabs.com/productview.aspx?Quicklinx=3P77


http://www.dabs.com/productvie ... ationKey=11147,4294959319

the links are not working here, prolly my DNS doesn´t know dabs.com ^^

Maybe post the names of the CPUs pls?

Edit: nevermind, I added another DNS server to my list, it´s working now ^^
OK, I would say take the 3700+ because it has the bigger cache.
If you want you can overclock it afterwards, and it will always be faster at the same cock speed than the 3500+.

Quote from franky500 :

All has been a great help...so what processor you think (yes its for gaming...)

http://www.dabs.com/productview.aspx?Quicklinx=3P77


http://www.dabs.com/productvie ... ationKey=11147,4294959319

Ouchies; Talk about extorsion. Try these guys

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products ... o.asp?WebProductID=152503

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products ... o.asp?WebProductID=211678

I'd go 3700 if you can afford it (and by the sounds of it you can) because of the larger cache.

Ignore vpr, he is talking out of his chocolate hole. X2s are expensive, and you'd either have to be severly loaded, or just plain daft to get one now. PCIE has only demonstrated real performance gains in high bandwidth applications that use it such as SATA controller boards, and parallel Video processing etc.
Granted, it will eventually yield gains, but we are a long way off yet.

Here is 14 pages on the topic.
http://www.tcmagazine.info/art ... =show&showarticle=127

As you can see, negligable performance difference. As for the real reason they dont make a 7800GTX for AGP, see here.

http://www.cooltechzone.com/in ... &id=1463&Itemid=0

VPR; As for you question, "How can a faster bus not be better"?
Think of it like a pipe. AGP is like 50mm diameter, and PCIE is like 200mm diameter. What difference is there if you are just pissing in to them? None. However, attach a high pressure jet to each and you'll start seeing a difference.

Currently GFX cards are akin to pissing in to the pipe.

Thanks for the links there... as for the processor.. how about this one.. .worth the extra dough? http://www.scan.co.uk/Products ... o.asp?WebProductID=256882

This one will be slower in games than the usual 3700+ due to slower clock speed.
Only has advantages when you run many applications at the same time.

Not worth the money for gaming. If you are a regular photoshopper who likes to have illustrator, 3dsmax, a few copies of Firefox with loads of tabs open, a couple or three IEs and a winamp or three going while you are playing LFS, you will notice a difference. Otherwise, the only difference is likely to be negative because of the smaller cache per core and lower clock speed.

Quote from Anarchi-H :

Not worth the money for gaming. If you are a regular photoshopper who likes to have illustrator, 3dsmax, a few copies of Firefox with loads of tabs open, a couple or three IEs and a winamp or three going while you are playing LFS, you will notice a difference. Otherwise, the only difference is likely to be negative because of the smaller cache per core and lower clock speed.

LOL sounds like you run like that all the time.


Cheers for the advise all.. i think i have my specs sorted out.

Have fun then and post some piccies when you are done

Quote from franky500 :

LOL sounds like you run like that all the time.


Cheers for the advise all.. i think i have my specs sorted out.

lol, I do (except 3dsmax), but I left out the numerous other browsers and programming apps for brevity

Glad we could be of help