939 Socket. Whats Its Main Purpose?

[anthony]

I too would like to appoligize, my comment earlyer on was cruel and thoughtless, and expecially you were a new member... and one of the first comments you get is my picture indirectly caling you a "dummy"... and i would like to say sorry for that cruel comment.

[robAP]

accepted guys. i'm finding more and more good people here. i wont hold it against you. i prefer talking to you guys as you are the Dr. Frankensteins making the real monsters. you know what works and what breaks.

 

yeah with that $800 ive been looking over at www.mwave.com and could throw together something good. they have bundled chip/mobo/mem setups for ogod value. (3200+ is $250 bundled with a mobo)

 

check this sample out:

AMD 64-3200+

gigabyte ga-k8vt800, or MSI k8t-neofis2r

512 kingston ram

9800 128meg ATI

120 gig sata drive

cdr/dvdr

cdrw

3.5

windowed atx+400 watts.

 

this comes in right at about $800.

thinking about backing down to the 3000+ and going nvidia chipset and card.

[Shadowfactor]

i dont like Nvidia and Ati is kicking Nvidia's . right now in bench marks ( please dont hate me Nvidia fans )

[IoDd64]

i dont like Nvidia and Ati is kicking Nvidia's . right now in bench marks ( please dont hate me Nvidia fans )

actually in benchmarks the 5950 is beating the 9800XT...

 

i dont no how the 9800XT is getting the better of u guys...

[ravix]

I don't accept anyones word as fact, if you guys want to make wild claims about benchmarks, show me some sources or I'll take your word with a grain of salt.

 

That said, I DO recommend you get the nvidia chipset (abit nf7-s, dfi lanparty, etc), but not necissarily an nvidia video card. Do some research, but I think the best punch for your price is definately going to be with a 9800 pro video card for $220. It overclocks well pushes a lot of pixels for that price. If you are into gaming at all, it won't let you down.

 

Processor wise, a 3200+ is a great processor, but if you are looking to save money (and you don't mind overclocking) you could get a mobile 2500+ or 2600+ and overclock it like a beast. Granted, you'll need to buy some extra cooling as well if you take this approach. That'll be about $100 for the processor, $100 for the motherboard, and $30 for the heatsink (volcano 12 is good).

 

Memory, I'd get at least 512mb of good ram. I feel it is always worth it to get something you won't regret later when it comes to memory. It'll go a long way to making sure this system will last you more than a couple of months. I'd suggest some quality (ocz, corsair, geil, mushkin) pc3200 ram, which will run you about $110 +- $15.

 

Finally, for the hard drive, I recommend picking up 1 or 2 of the Western Digital 80gb special edition hard drives. If you don't mind rebates, you can usually pick these up for as low as $20 (granted the rebates take the better part of the year to get back to you). Otherwise, they are between $80 and $100.

 

That leaves you with about $250-$300 to spend on your case, speakers, keyboard, etc. With that setup I am sure you'll be pleased. Its what I would do with my money if I had $800 laying around.

[AYoKoNA]

actually in benchmarks the 5950 is beating the 9800XT...

 

i dont no how the 9800XT is getting the better of u guys...

Im with ravix, Can we see a LINK please.

 

Thats pretty interesting, I haven't found one benchy on the web beating a 9800XT....(And I OWN a 5900 currently , I know it sux)

[bigred]

5950 won in a few tests (specific games/apps) however overall especially in image quality the 9800xt dominated

[Trakfast11]

heres a benchmark link you can look over

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.html?i=1863

 

you'll see more benifits from mainstream or enthusiast directx9.0 in the long term over dx8.# card. video games that support dx9 will be able to look noticeably better on dx9 cards too (i decided to say "be able to" instead of WILL because that really depends on the extent to which developers implement dx9 features throughout their games).

 

and there are definately some top of the line enthusiast dx8 cards out there right now that can run games today at high settings with very nice performance, but if you are worried about the future and don't plan on making any major upgrades soon after this one, you might want to consider a highend directx9.0 card that is within your price range.

 

The rest does not deal with graphics cards.

i've deleted a nice amount of what i was going to say that wasn't nessasary and have also decided to highlight the questions i posed (blue) and possible solutions to think about (green). hope this helps if you are one of those people that are pressed for time and want to get straight to the point.

 

but i guess a good question would be, are you planning on playing games on your computer? and if so, what type? some gaming genres don't require as powerful graphics cards as others (or require a different aspect of processing then other genres) to make the game look graphically appealing. so it is a relavent question.

 

 

also, do you need to buy a new Operating System or are you using Linux? cause that can also factor into how much money you have to spend. if you have a full version cd of windows98 (or ME, NT X.X , 2k, etc... i only said 98 in the sentence cause a large amount of laptops that could be bought a while back came with win98. i'm not sure about win95 though) then in order to save money you should buy an oem windowsXP upgrade cd (i'm not going to get into the "Home" or "Pro" debate). the upgrade cd actually has the entire XP operating system on it. you don't have to first install win98 before upgrading to XP. you can just format your hard drive with the upgrade cd and install the OS. then at one point it will ask you to put a previous full version windows cd in the optical drive so that it can verify that you indeed had a previous version of windows (you don't have to have your win98 key on hand either cause it doesn't ask for it).

 

 

 

********* COMPLETELY OFF-TOPIC!!! DON'T READ UNLESS YOU WANT TO WASTE YOUR TIME!! ***

********* YOU'VE BEEN WARNED!! ***************

 

i need to finish my homework before this morning comes. i originally took a nap and planned to do an all nighter, but i lost track for a bit and really need to get back to it if i want to have a chance at finishing it (wow, and literally just a few minutes ago a friend on my floor came by saying that her contact was up behind her eye lid and it is freaking her out and shes afraid in my go to the back of her eye and stay there. she asked me how to get it out cause i wear contacts too {and my right eye has had a contact go up and behind my eyelid 3 times since i first started wearing contacts. that was over a period of 5-6 years. i was definately very worried when it happened the first time. i didn't actually get it out until a few days later. one of the times it came out more easily than the other times.} we weren't able to get the contact out, but now she is calling est cause shes really concerned and doesn't want to go to sleep with it back there, which is definately understandable. i'll get back to yall later about this in another topic. wander who else this has happened to and how he/she handled it. don't answer the question here, as this is not the place. sorry this wasn't relavent.)

 

*******OFF-TOPIC ENDED *********

 

hope everything works out for ya. sorry about going off topic. i would edit this more and put some more info in here but i really don't have time atm. gl

[bigred]

that one is OLD. driver updates have pushed both cards faster than that review.

[Trakfast11]

***** IMPORTANT TO NOTE *********

sorry if this post was a little defensive. later when looking back at your post after having a fun game of soccer (first time playing soccer since fall of 2002) i realized that you were only trying to help make sure that the information being posted was relavent. and since it was a relatively old article, you wanted to make sure that people didn't take this article as "how its going to be". I didn't have time to backup what i said last night/early this morning, but i feel that if i had then maybe the article, and its relavence to my post, would have been more clear. And forget about the defensive/aggressive tone that i had written below, because that is definitely not how i feel about the reply now that i've had more time to think about it. ATM i'm not quite up for going through this post and re-writting the tone of it, but wanted to make sure that you understood that i understand and all is good .

****** IMPORTANT TO NOTE END ************

 

 

yeah, i know the article is old and there are updated drivers that work better for the cards; it mentions that in the article itself, but even though the article is old, it is still very relavent to the point i made about highend DX9 cards being (in my opinion) being a better investment for the long term and that was why i choose this article to support my post. i didn't have time to actually go into detail about why i had choosen what i said before but i have more time now to back up what i said .

and this article was not made to tell you how well your graphics card will run HL2; the article tells you that its not that simple and later on gives you reasons why, which i'll get into later.

Unfortunately, the story here isn't as simple as how fast your card will perform under Half-Life 2; of course, given the history of the 3D graphics industry, would you really expect something like this to be without controversy?

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.html?i=1863&p=1

 

 

the optimizations that have been/and are being made by Nvidia, ATI, and Valve are most definately going to change how well they will perform in HL2 (but especially for Nvidia). The article even mentioned that the preformance numbers were gathered from tests done with Nvidia's Rel. 45 drivers and not Nvidias Rel. 50 drivers so the performance numbers are invalid

Regarding the Half Life2 performance numbers that were published on the web, we believe these performance numbers are invalid because they do not use our Rel. 50 drivers. Engineering efforts on our Rel. 45 drivers stopped months ago in anticipation of Rel. 50. NVIDIA's optimizations for Half-Life 2 and other new games are included in our Rel.50 drivers - which reviewers currently have a beta version of today. Rel. 50 is the best driver we've ever built - it includes significant optimizations for the highly-programmable GeForce FX architecture and includes feature and performance benefits for over 100 million NVIDIA GPU customers.

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.html?i=1863&p=5

 

 

This article also doesn't fail to mention that Valve has been working on a Mixmode path for NV3x GPUs which will also bring performance increases for NV3X GPUs.

We briefly mentioned the Mixed Mode of operation for NV3x GPUs that Valve implemented in Half-Life 2, but there is much more to it than just a special NV3x code path. In fact, the mixed mode NV3x code path was really only intended for the GeForce FX 5900 Ultra (NV35). The mainstream FX chips (5200/5600) require a slightly different code path.

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.html?i=1863&p=6

 

We know that Valve wasn't close to being finished and neither was the coding for the graphic cards. They made sure to let us know this, and thats also another reason why the writer said that this article is not about how well your graphics card will run HL2.

 

 

 

Gabe mentioned that the developers spent 5x as much time optimizing the special NV3x code path (mixed mode) as they did optimizing the generic DX9 path (what ATI's DX9 cards use). Thus, it is clear that a good attempt was made to get the game to run as well as possible on NVIDIA hardware.

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.html?i=1863&p=3

 

Valve is the only company we know of at the moment that is working optimizations specific to increase performance on NV3x GPUs and it sounds like they've been putting a lot of time into it. So although HL2 may run very well with the combination of optimizations made on both sides, we don't know how other future DX9 games will run since they may or may not decide to take the extra time that is required to code paths specificly for NV3x cards.

Gabe also cautioned that reverting to 16-bit floating point values will only become more of an issue going forward as "newer DX9 functionality will be able to use fewer and fewer partial precision functions." Although the theory is that by the time this happens, NV4x will be upon us and will have hopefully fixed the problems that we're seeing today.

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.html?i=1863&p=5

 

 

and as mentioned in this article, we don't even know if future games based off the HL2 engine will have shader-specific optimizations for their games.

One thing that is also worth noting is that the shader-specific workarounds for NVIDIA implemented by Valve will not immediately translate to all other games that are based off of Half-Life 2's Source engine. Remember that these restructured shaders are specific to the shaders used in Half-Life 2, which won't necessarily be the shaders used in a different game based off of the same engine.

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.html?i=1863&p=5

 

The future games and how games will be coded in the future seems rather iffy ATM {At The Moment} so in order to be ensure your card will be better suited for the long haul (if you aren't planning on making upgrades to your graphics card again anytime soon), i'd suggest considering purchasing a highend DX9 based card within the users price range (most likely a 9800pro).

 

In my original post i said:

you'll see more benifits from mainstream or enthusiast directx9.0 in the long term over dx8.# card. video games that support dx9 will be able to look noticeably better on dx9 cards too (i decided to say "be able to" instead of WILL because that really depends on the extent to which developers implement dx9 features throughout their games).

 

and there are definately some top of the line enthusiast dx8 cards out there right now that can run games today at high settings with very nice performance, but if you are worried about the future and don't plan on making any major upgrades soon after this one, you might want to consider a highend directx9.0 card that is within your price range.

So even though this article may not be recent, it still has relavent info that is very useful to know. it tells you the issues at hand and lets you know that this article gives you information to let you know that these performance numbers are definitely going to change by the time HL2 is released so you shouldn't take these numbers as "this is how it will be". but something that is important to note is that Valve is playing a nice part in the performance increase that NV3x GPUs will see in HL2 before it hits the shelves. But as far as we can tell, it is only HL2 the will have optimizations for these cards ATM. Since there is uncertainty about what other gaming developers will do, i was suggesting what i believe is the safest route to take at the moment to keep a video card compatible and running well for the longest time possible at the price range. Also in my original post, i never mentioned anything about how the graphics card would run HL2; i was talking about future dx9 games in general. but i did bring up the point that the gains we will be able to see in games with dx9 support in the future will really depend on the extent to which the developers decide to implement the features throughout their games. sorry about any vagueness or confusion there might have been about how this was relavent in my original post. i hope this makes my reasoning much more clear.

Edited April 10, 2004 by Trakfast11