Upgrading my shizzle I'm currently runnin' The Sims 2 with a MSI K7 266 mainboard with an Athlon XP 1.4 GHz processor. I've got 512 MB of RAM and a GeForce 4 TI 4200 graphics card. I'm thinkin' it's about time to upgrade my CPU/MB combo. But, like any fellow consumer out there, I want to make sure I'm gettin' the best bang for my buck. I'm thinkin' I should go to an Intel system with a P4 3 GHz or higher, and also with that tasty 800 MHz front-side bus... Any recommendations? And my cash flow is fairly limited, so if anyone knows of a really good but inexpensive online computer store, let a playa know! Thanks in advance, y'all.
Try www.topmicrousa.com If you need discounts email this guy -> josh@topmicrousa.com (he's my sales rep)
If you want the most bang for your buck, definitely go Athlon64 over Pentium4. It has clearly outpaced the P4 in benchmarks for a long time, while being priced lower! I'm not quite sure why P4 is still outselling Athlon64, but I suspect it's simply some insidious agreement Intel has made with computer manufacturers... For more evidence look at these game benchmarks: http://www20.tomshardware.com/cpu/20041221/cpu_charts-13.html AthlonFX/64 beats P4 in nearly all the game tests. And it's cheaper.
I recently upgraded to an Athlon 64 2800+ (with a new MB, of course), and I have to say that I am overjoyed at how much faster everything is running. I also went from 512 MB to 1 GB PC3200 RAM, and I'm sure that by itself helped quite a bit. But I am a bit concerned about some graphical issues I've been having... TS2 runs great most of the time, but tends to "jerk" when I rotate the camera and zoom in and out. Also, I just picked up Far Cry and it jerks a lot and there seem to be some other graphical problems that I can't really explain. It's not "choppy". It's more of a subtle, less prounounced "jerk", similar to what happens in TS2. I still have my GeForce 4 Ti4200 w/ 128 MB of RAM, and it's an AGP 4x card, and the new motherboard I have is AGP 8x... Could this possibly be a culprit to my graphical problem? Any thoughts would be appreciated.
they have SAID that for a long time, sheesh, I dunno what it is with you amd lovers, theyre no better, just run at a different speed. thats a biased test. and they have compatability and dependability issues. anyways- you cant beat newegg.com prices for building your own bud- you also need at least a gig a ram nowadays, and that processor is getting there.
