bitsa box, which base should I use.

[thegoonden]

I'm lashing together a half decent browsing/video watching box for my GF, based on some old bits, myself and her brother have.


What I cannot decide, is whether to base the new machine on.....

My Athlon2800+ on an asus a7v600-x
Or
Her bro's Pentium 4 2.4 on an asus p4s800 (hard to see through the smeg).


either unit will be fitted to a gorgeous new Lian Li case, with 2GB of DDR400 and a Geforce6800Ultra (or pro, can't remember, but it's a scary weapon for an AGP card).

My gut tells me the pentium will be quicker, but the choice is further complicated by the AMD board being fitted with SATA and the Pentium one being only IDE, and I do have a 200GB Sata drive doing nothing.

 

[Topitoff]

As both will have single channel RAM, I'd go with the Athlon as it will be quicker than a 2.4 P4; but how much quicker depends on which P4 it is - 400/533 or 800 fsb, the later will have the smallest difference.

 

[thegoonden]

Well, because, on closer inspection, the AMD board had not done too well in a poorly ventilated, 24/7 Linux machine with 6 hard discs in it (it looked half cooked in places), I decided to try the Intel. Turns out it's running at 2.8 (seems to be stock, judging by the number of "autos" in bios. So that would make it about even I suppose.

Didn't know they didn't do dual channel RAM, both motherboards do, I never actually considered the CPU might not support it, ah well.

One other thing that was going in the AMD's favour was that the Linux she's getting (keen to try out, so she's getting dual boot), was actually grown on that board. But as it turns out, it booted on the P4 board, and the only thing it complained about was "Oi, where's that Sis900 network card I used to have".
Ah well, I'll keep the Athlon, you never know when both those sods in my sig will blow up in stereo, sending my laptop into shock.

 

[Justintime]

the cpus will work DC just fine. Hes just assuming since its a VIA socket A and SiS chipset on the PIV machine that they won't do Dual channel, not quite 100% as its been a looong time but almost positive hes right.

 

[thegoonden]

Nope, you were 100% correct, neither of the boards do it, I was confused by the fact that although they have 3 slots, they only support 2 sticks of DDR400. Somehow, in my brain that meant they must use DC.
Doh!

Well the Intel turns out to be a 2.8 with that weirdo hyperthreading virtual logical CPU thingy, so I figure it's probably quicker than the AMD after all (2.1GHz ish if I recall, so even accounting for the "betterness" of AMD's of that era, I'd say the P4 would have it).


Build went a treat, Lian-Li's even little cheap ones, are very nice to work with. Didn't shed a drop of blood
It's zinging along, running Doom3 (GF is former quake mistress), timedemo at 40fps in ultra at 1024, the 6800 pretty much browns it's trousers if you go much further on the res.
Couldn't clock the card either, it used to do 420/1150 (stock 350/1000) without missing a beat. Clocked it to 380/1080 and it stank, and went into full on acid mode in 3dmark.

Only after handing the box over, did my bro remind me that I'd unlocked the extra shaders on it to help with his FlightSim exploits, and that with those unlocked, although it can do more at stock speeds, it throws a complete fit if you touch the clocks.


And of course, I still have an AMD2800+, an asus a7v600-x and a gig of RAM, and PSU's and vid cards fill every inch of free space round here, so I can always knock up another junker for my nephew if needs be

Cheers BTW, for the advice.