Recommend an A64 upgrade

Teasy · 5 May 2006 at 18:13

My current system is:

Asus A7N8X-X Mobo
Athlon XP 3200+
1GB DDR400 ram
BFG Geforce 6800GS OC

I've decided that its finally time to move onto a new platform and Socket 939 seems to be the one to go with. I'm not going for cutting edge, just something noticably faster then what I currently have (I'll upgrade the CPU later if I need more power). Also I'd prefer to be able to keep my AGP graphics card for now (are there any good mobo's with both AGP and PCIE?) I'm looking to spend a few hundred pounds on the upgrade, though if I do have to upgrade the graphics card or anything else then I can spend more if needed. So basically I just want to know what motherboard and CPU I should be looking at.

Oh and finally some benchmarks would be nice. So if anyone can link me to something that compares a lot of the new and old AMD CPU's against each other I'd appreciate it.

Teasy · 6 May 2006 at 23:14

Thanks for the reply.

Is that motherboard good quality? Or would you suggest getting a PCI-E only board and a new graphics card?

The dual core Athlons look like the ones to go for yes. But am I right in thinking that in games and apps that only support a single core the A64 3800 X2 will perform around the same as a A64 3000+ Venice CPU? If so how wide spread is dual core support now and what is support looking like in future games?

Oh and also I heard that Football Manager 2006 supports dual cores, is this true and what kind of performance boost does it give?

Teasy · 6 May 2006 at 23:45

Shootist said:
Why would you need a dual core chip when playing football manager games?
Do the newer ones have a lot of footy action clips?

No but they use a lot of maths intensive processing to calculate everything that's going on in the game. Depending on how many leagues you pick to run at once the game has thousands of clubs to simulate (transfers, results, management decisions ect).

Teasy · 7 May 2006 at 00:42

I checked out a review for the Asrock board you suggested Lee and it seems excellent. So I'm ready to order the Asrock 939 dual sata2 motherboard and Athlon64 X2 3800+ CPU.

Is there anything else I need? Will my ram be ok with this system? (two sticks of 512MB corsair DDR400), I'm looking to upgrade to 2GB. Also I currently have a 550w color-it Silent PSU, will this be ok?

Oh and P.S. does anyone know if my Akasa Carnival heatsink will work with the Athlon64 CPU? (I know the CPU will come with a heatsink but I'd prefer my carnival).

Thanks for the help

Teasy · 7 May 2006 at 13:37

For some strange reason I can't find an OEM 3800+ X2 for less then the retail version so I was just going to go for the retail one.

About Football Manager, it does have a "multithreading" option you can tick. Wether that's real dual core support I don't know, I'll find out I suppose

Thanks a lot for your help, looks like I know what to order now

Teasy · 9 May 2006 at 22:59

Just installed the new motherboard and processor. Just one thing I need to check when I open Windows Task Manager should there be two seperate windows for CPU usage, because of the dual cores. Because I only see one..

EDIT: Never mind, its working