Avian Gamers Network

So I've started to do a bit of research on the ultimate gaming rig...and come up with a couple questions.

1) Dual Intel processors versus AMD64 bit processor. Which is better? Most of the rigs I am seeing right now are either dual Intel processors on the 925x chipset / mobo's, or an AMD64 bit processor.

2) Do I need dual processors if the extreme edition processors can do multiple processes at once?

3) There doesn't seem to be an AMD mobo out there that does dual processors except of the Opteron line. would 2 of those CPU's work better than one 64 bit processor for games like SWG, EQ2, WoW?

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Can I borrow 20 bucks?

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- Wiegraf Terrik
SWG: Human Commando/Pistoleer
WoW: Dwarvish Rogue (Herbalism/Alchemy)
EQII: Alazin, High Elf Wizard

Former Section 4 Director

"Please, if anyone were to play Obi-Wan it would be me, with the 'Luke, Luke save me' and the lightsabers going 'Vvvwiinnngg, vvwinggg, vvvWING!' -- Professor Frink

I'm no technical genius but I think dual Opterons is not going to show any real performance impact for 3D gaming.

I usually check out www.tomshardware.com for this kind of stuff.

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Dr. Golga Bolg
SWTOR - Golga
Rift - Gnarlwood: Golgar Golgantua Golgate - Retired
WoW - Dalaran: Bolg Golga Virrok All Retired
SWG - Golga Bolg - Doctor (Resident) Retired
Eve - Edge Finn - Limbo
Section 2 - (Former) Director
What am I playing now?: The waiting game

LOL!

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"Perhaps the sentiments contained in the following pages, are not yet sufficiently fashionable to procure them general favor; a long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defence of custom. But the tumult soon subsides." - Thomas Paine, Common Sense

If you are running XP, its a waste to get duel processors...XP doesnt use them efficently. I would just goto www.alienware.com and see whats in there top of the line. There usually is not much better than what they offer. I personally love my Athlon 64
Single processors are cheaper, and you can add an uber video card...... IE ATi X800 XT!!!!!!!

A lot of rig makers aren't doing dual cpu rigs...the only 2 I've found so far are Alienware...but it's expensive...close to 5 grand with no monitor, etc. I know, I know...what's a few grand among friends...but I am trying to find that magic point between performance, upgradeability, and cost.

Elite PC will configure dual opteron 246 processors on an MSI K8T Master2-FAR Mobo which is upgradeable to the 64 bit athlon processors that are so expensive now. The opteron processors are 2Ghz which is fine. I don't need 3Ghz. The rig also comes with the 256MB DDR x800 which i agree is top of the line. The price comes in at $3,400 well below the Alienware ALX rig.

I'm currently running an okay system: 2.4 overclock to 2.6, with a 128 Radeon 9800 Pro and a gig of memory. My current mobo is the 845MaxGL from MSI with the 478 socket processors. I couldn't find a single mobo out there that would run these processors with 2 cpu's.

I could upgrade my mobo to support HT, get a new cpu, add a gig of ram, but thought the dual processors would really be a plus.

I do run XP so that's good to know that it doesn't handle it efficiently, but that will change in the future with the next windows release hopefully. The only thing that I don't like about the elitepc rig i configured is that it still runs on AGP not PCI - Express which the Alienware rig has...

Oh and to respond to others:

No, you can't borrow 20 bucks, but if you are old enough to vote for Bush and can prove you did...I'll pay you the 20.

I have used tomshardware a little bit. It's a good site. I thought I read on the official forums somewhere that SWG for example runs really well with dual cpu's? Anyone confirm that?

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Nothing below has anything to do with gaming… but I know my brother loves his duel processor PC that he uses at work.

My brother does power grid simulations for Louisiana and the surrounding states. Some of his multi outage (doomsday) scenarios took forever to compute, and any multitasking greatly increased the risk of his PC crashing…. Until they bought him a new duel processor setup. Now what took him over 24 hours to calculate can be completed in a matter of hours… and he can multitask anything while the doomsday scenarios are running.

He loves his new work PC.

Just a thought. I am running an:

Athlon 64 3000+ on a K8T Neo MSI Mobo
1 Gig RAM
ATi x800 PRO 256

and I can run Doom 3 full bore with no problems. I have thought about duel processors, but I think I am just going to wait til intel gets there duel processing chip (two processors in one) ready to go. Or maybe just wait for AMD to do it the duel processing chip better (you know they will).

I've read a little bit about the VIA K8T890 and it looks to be a SWEET mobo given that it supports the Opteron chipset running dual cpu's as well as the new 64 bit chipsets along with supporting both AGP and PCI-X.

The problem is I can't find any custom rig makers that are using it.

Building my own rig is not really an option right now.

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Why not?? its pretty easy.

I'm running a P4 3.2 with a gig and a half of ram and Nvidia 6800? 256 card. I am gettign great performance, nothing is overclocked and I got it for 1600 when my last computer crapped out a few months ago. If you can build your own rig I would just say use the standard parts and of as high a quality as you can find. Upgrading will be easy and compatibility should never be an issue.

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"Chatfield, I think there's something wrong with our bloody ships." Admiral David Beatty, upon watching the battlecruiser Queen Mary explode at the battle of Jutland.

My name is Tobias Smith and I approved this post.

yeah, I could go the easy route for now and get another Gig of memory - I've got PC2700 DDR 333MHz and upgrade to the x800 video card. This would only be 20% of the cost I'm looking at if I try and get what I've described above...

My main interest was creating a killer rig that would really allow me to see what they've done on EQ2 and also max out on my SWG Settings without being in the 5-8 FPS that I get when I try that now...lol.

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If you can swing the extra money go for the X800 XT, it has 16 pipelines compaired to the 12 of the X800 Pro, but both are still uber. BTW I picked my X800 Pro up on ebay for $360.00

Well that's it for now - got the additional memory and the 800 XT. Thanks for the advice folks.

This may be my mobo of the future though: 2 cpu, 32 as well as 64 bit support and PCI-X, and it runs using my current memory PC2700.

TYAN Thunder K8W S2885ANRF, Dual Opteron, 800MHz FSB, PC-2700 DDR up to 12 GB

But we'll see... about that one another day.

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A ram upgrade from 512 to 1.5 dramatically helped me when I played SWG. Buy as much as you can afford.




Ow!

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"Chatfield, I think there's something wrong with our bloody ships." Admiral David Beatty, upon watching the battlecruiser Queen Mary explode at the battle of Jutland.

My name is Tobias Smith and I approved this post.

Thanks Rho!

I'll be going from 1 GB to 2 GB. I've got 4 DIMMS that I think can support up to 1 GB chips.

Fairly cheap upgrade though....coming in at $700 bucks for a gig of ram and top of the line vid card. I couldn't price a dual cpu, 2 GB, x800, dvd/cd +r/w, 2nd optical drive, 2 36GB 10k drives, w/o keyboard, mouse, and monitor for less than $3400-3500.

My next move will probably be on the mobo front. The other reason I like server boards like the Tyan's are they have more DIMM slots so I won't have to "throw away" my old memory. As it is, in my current config I'd have to ebay my 512 chips and buy 4 new 1 GB chips...

That VIA mobo I mentioned btw is only being marketed at this point...still in production stage.

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Would you mind linking your ebay auctions? I am debating buying some RAM, but am not 100% sure.

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Retired Weaponsmith

I bought my RAM from buyxg.com.


http://shop.store.yahoo.com/cyberpowerw ... 00512.html

Okay, my x800 XT is back-ordered. But I have a question: the one I bought supports both AGP and PCIe. Do they all do that? I've seen a lot out there that are either AGP or PCIe and don't expressly state that they support the other platform.

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I really suggest before buying, just try pricewatch.com I purchased both my memory upgrades from companies found there and they blew away everyone I found shopping around on my own. I am in Vegas for five days but when I get home I could tell you the company I last used. Best price I found around Northern VA for my Rambus ram Upgrade was 600 dollars (Damn you Dell for using the most expensive ram) last year. Got it on Pricewatch for 400.

Pricewatch is basically a price comparison engine. I always find a good deal there. Just remember to price the shipping as well. Sometimes that's not included and sometimes it is so the best price may the second or third company down the list.

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"Chatfield, I think there's something wrong with our bloody ships." Admiral David Beatty, upon watching the battlecruiser Queen Mary explode at the battle of Jutland.

My name is Tobias Smith and I approved this post.

Yeah, I do check pricewatch. Ebay is good for used stuff though. But used stuff is iffy if you know nothing about the seller. What I meant was, that if dbakke decides to sell his RAM, I might be interested. Depending on my financial situation, phase of the moon and other things......

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Retired Weaponsmith

Well the saga continues...

I ended up canceling my initial order for the x800 xt because I erroneously thought that some companies like Sapphire were make a dual platform card - one that could run PCI Express and AGP. That is not correct, though. It's either one or the other. Plus, the site I had originally ordered from had it on back order. Needless to say, I am good to go now from newegg with an AGP based card as that is what my mobo runs.

Speaking of mobo's....!!!!!!

As I think I mentioned previously, i have the 845G Max L MSI board. It's solid, but the documentation both that I had and some of which was online says the board supports up to 2 GB, yet it only has 3 DIMM slots. Doh!!!!

I am a lucky SOB though as the online site I had ordered the RAM from (2 sticks...which would've been 1 too many) said it was discontinued. BTW, buyxtremegear (site I bought my comp from 2 years ago and used for memory order) is difficult to deal with...I don't know how many times they said we can't help you figure this out we're an internet company?!?!?!? Ohhhkayyyy.....

Anyways, I ended up ordering the RAM I needed direct from Kingston(only 1 stick this time) which cost me 100 bucks. I thought about upgrading to two sticks of 1 GB each, but that would've been close to 1k, plus the 5 bills for the vid card...and by then I'm almost half way in price to a new rig.

So the net of it is I'll have an x800XT and 1.5 GB of RAM total.

Working with PCELITE...which had a great salesperson by the way, they are going to manually - read not by computer intervention, but with an actual person - call me in mid december when MSI releases their mobo based on the VIA K8T890 which has all the flexibility with AGP / PCIe and dual processor transition issues I was concerned about.

At that point, I can address whether or not I get the new comp. Hopefully I can reduce my cost point further by cannabilizing the memory, video card, 19inch CRT, keyboard, and mouse I use currently.

EDIT:

Oh, and Matija I will definitely give you a heads up if/when I go the new comp route. I know the specs for that new mobo may still be in flux and if for whatever reason it doesn't support the RAM I have or the DIMM slots require me to get new RAM, etc. I'll let you know.

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Well for those of you still interested in my running saga...I can't use the memory after all. Basically the MSI 845G Max L board I have supports only 4 banks of memory...if you use DDR SDRAM memory that actually takes up 2 banks for each stick of RAM...so that 3rd DIMM slot is useless unless I want to swap out all my memory which I don't...

This is why I don't want to build my own computer...

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