Maximum PC

which would you prefer for gaming and why?, please explain the ups and downs of each, and between these two which do you prefer- a P4 3.4GHz 2mb cache, or an AMD Anthlon 64 fx 53.....the reason im writing about this is because i was ganna go with the Intel i mentioned above but then i read in the july pcgamer mag, about the radeon x800 xt P.E. outdoing the nvidia 6800 ultra in benchmarks by alot when ruuning on an anthlon fx-51, so my first settup for my new pc was running the nvidia card with the Intel chip, but now im thinking of getting the anthlon fx 53 which i assume is faster than the fx 51 and so coupled with the x800 xt would be a whole lot better in performance then my last choice. now, the nvidia features direcx 9.0c which is suppose the let developers do a slew of cool stuff with games, but the ati card dosen't have support for this. but when running 4x AA and 8X AF the ati card wins because it lose less frames per second than the nvidia does, for reviews on both cards read the july pcgamer mag, but im just confused now on which setup i should go for, because i heard that alot of people have problems running their games with ati based cards...so help me decide, the first setup is the intell p4 3.4 2mb cache with the nvidia geforce 6800 ultra, the second setup is the amd anthlon fx-53 with the ati radeon x800 XT P.E.........

something else just came to mind, should i go with the pci express versions of the two videocards or with the agp 8x versions??

and somehing else i left off, the intell bus speed speed is 800 while the amd is 1600, im not too much of a tech guru so i don't know exaclty how this affects things.

Athlon 64's are very good for gaming from a Cost/Performance standpoint. If you're on a budget, go with the Athlon64. If you are a rich sumbitch, spend your pocketchange on a P4-EE.


As to your question about bus speeds, whoever told you that the AMD runs at 1600MHz is smoking some bad crack. Athlon 64's and 64-FX's run at 400MHz buses. However, since A64's have onboard memory controllers, the controller operates at the CPU frequency (i.e.: 2.2GHz). This does NOT mean your DDR will also run at 2.2GHz, it still runs at the DDR400 speeds. The benefit of having the memory controller on the CPU is to reduce latency, which does give you a nice speed boost.

Be forewarned, if you want to upgrade your Athlon 64 system to DDR-2, you will have to buy a new CPU and motherboard to go along with the RAM.

Generally, the Athlon 64/FX is slightly faster in games than the P4. Plus, I expect games to be the first applications to take advantage of AMD64 (as games generally have the most cutting edge feature adoption), so when Windows 64 becomes available, you can take advantage of that.

As far as the 6800/X800 goes, I'd take the 6800 GT over the X800 Pro but it'd be a tossup between the X800 PE and the 6800U. nVidia's driver support is still better, and I like the SM30 support (as Far Cry has shown is helpful), but the X800 PE is faster.

If *I* were building a system right now, I'd get an Athlon 64 3500+ and a GeForce 6800GT.

Generally it's not worth it to get the top of the line anything (except parts that don't get obsolete immeadiately), since computer parts like CPU's, Videocards and ram depreciate so quickly it's kind of a waste to spend $400 more for a system that's not functionally any faster, but provides bragging rights for a few months.

1600 MHz, heh

Like most things in life, it depends.
If you plan to overclock a lot, the P4 is generally faster than AMD. If not, AMD is generally faster than the P4. I am referring to games and the top of the line CPUs for both companies. I also wouldn't get the P4 EE version because that's just a big waste of money; spend your cash on better things.

For vid cards, both x800 and 6800 and their variants are fast. Personally, I would wait til I see some benchmarks on some upcoming games (such as HL2, D3) before I unload over half a grand on a card. If price is no concern, I would wait for Alienware's split video thing or nVidia's SLI (end of year hopefully). Hmm, 2 x GF 6800 Ultra Extremes via SLI will run Solitaire real nice!