I’ve been a bit out of the hardware game, I tend to ignore hardware specs and details until it’s time to actually get a new system, and I’ve been thinking that I should get an idea of what’s out there. I did some surfing today (partially because ScoobyD is speccing out a new system and asking me questions) and came up with some questions hopefully some of the hardware freaks/gamers out there can answer:
- AMD or Intel?
- Back in the day of the Athlon it was clear cut, but now an Athlon XP 3000 (2.17Ghz) is $159, a AMD64 $3000 is $179, a P4 S775 3Ghz is $219…. Hell, I hardly know the diff between the S929, S754, Semprom, S775, ATX, BTX, etc…. what’s “common” these days? Doesn’t look like much has happened in the SocketA boards (AthlonXP), is the AMD 3000+ really equiv to P4 3Ghz? Etc?
- What Motherboard?
- Again, back in the day it was the Asus boards that I liked, is the A8N S939 any good? Gigabyte vs Asus vs ?
- nForce X?
- My Mb has nForce2…. latest I see is nForce4 on the Asus site, is it good, bad, what does it give me vs what other chipsets there are?
- SATA
- SATA or SATA2? I’ve seen a page that basically said that even with SATA-2 you still are limited by the hard drives and you’re not going to get the 3G/s transfer rate anytime soon. Will the better HDs be coming out? Do those 10,000 rpm monsters (only 74G though which sucks) give you any real speed improvement? Are they even SATA or plain old IDE?
- Memory
- Realistically, does going from pc3200 to whatevers next really make a difference?
I think that’s it for now…. anyone with hardware-fu feel free to answer and help me kick my pocketbook just a little more 🙂