Should I wait?

[Hero2]

dual channel is faster....but thats all I know

[quiet mike]

I think you are rushing it a bit. You are buying a top end computer of the generation that is dying. Look just what's new now and will be standard in 6 monts:

- Fully DirectX 9 videocards: NV4X, and ATI4XX chipsets (2 times the 9800XT) and soon in PCI Express interface
- (The death of AGP) PCI Express (more bandwith, more independence from other cards on PC, and faster)
- Athlon 64 with 1000 HiperTransport bus AND Dual Channel controller on 939 motherboars which will soon be cheaper.
- P4 with 1066 FSB and who knows when 64 bit support (already implemented in Presscot, but locked like hiperthreading in the begining).
- The new Sis, nVidia, VIA chipsets for AMD, and the new VIA and Intel shipsets for Pentium.
All these will become mainstream over the next months and will be the begining of the next 5 years. I would VERY STRONGLY recomand puting the money in the jar and wait untill you can buy the PC all at once, or at least all the important things (motherboard, processor, videocard, RAM, and audio card). Not only will you be able to get better things, but also if you get something that you would get right now, it would be cheaper then. Also, since you are building a PC from scratch, it's very important to know where the industry goes, so you don't have to build a new PC in 2 years. If you buy a motherboard with PCI, AGP, ATA and 266 FSB you'll find that next year you can't stick anything new in your PC because all these will be extinct.
AMD 64 is maturing into the 939 chipset, PCI Express is coming and accesories for it will follow soon (ATI already has native support, and nVidia has a bridge adapter to use PCI Express) Gigabit Ethernet, motherboard chipsets with separate bandwith lanes between RAM, PCI Ex, USB and Ethernet and probably soon an upgrade to the SATA interface.

Again, this is the worst time in my opinnion to go all out on a PC. Go to Anandtech, TweakTown, 3D Guru, and many other hardware sites and get ready for next generation. By the time your checks add up into a PC you will know what to do.



P.S. Dual Channel RAM DD SDRAM is ram that allows two lanes of traffic between it and the CPU at the same time. old ram only alowen one lane that would go to CPU ->RAM and then RAM->CPU. This is actually a motherboard chipset problem and not RAM. but you do need 2 sticks of identical RAM to work. By identical I mean the exact same type of RAM (same manufacturer, size, S/N)

[GiMpY-wAnNaBe]

thanks, thats a lot of good info to know, +rep

likei said, i'll be buying the pieces with each paycheck, not all at once. I recently heard of the PCI express, so that kinda gave me doubts but in anycase, i'm getting my new monitor, keyboard and mose first....thats taking up about a months work (i'm getting the monitor on thursday)....after that point, i'm not so sure anymore. i was planning to get the new motherboard and videocard, buuuuuuuuut, i don't know now... i guess i'll buy the RAM and then wait for changes in the industry, i was looking into the 940 socket (i'm assuming thats what you meant, and not 939). But the only processor thats using that socket is the Fx-53 which at $1000 is more than slightly out of my price range.

when you say that ATI has native support does that mean you can stick a radeon 9600XT or 9800XT into a PCI express? ( i highly doubt that).

I guess i can buy everything but the motherboard and its add on components. hmmm...when do you think the price would go down for all the new technology? because i doubt its going to start in the same range as the current stuff.

once again thanks

[quiet mike]

Right now AMD has 2 tipes of 64 chips; the 940 pin Opteron (servers) and entusiast market FX version of it using buffered RAM and Dual Channel, and the 975 pin or something like that. This one is a little faster and allows for the much more cummon and sligthly faster unbuffered RAM, but with only half the L2 cahe and no Dual Channel.
Now AMD is moving both of these chips to a new 939 pin version that allows for buffered or unbuffered RAM and supports Dual Channel on any RAM. (AMD bus controller is on CPU not on motherboard, so here is a chip design not motherboard, like I was explaining on Dual Channel coment)

Yes, ATI will make the older versions native on PCI Express as well as the new versions. They are not out yet, but will be soon. nVidia said that for the moment it will use a bridge controller instead of a native chip. We don't know if that will trully impact performance or not. Well have to see once they can test a full PCI Express package.

Happy buying~!