I always envy people who post about having to make *difficult* decisions on which gadget to spend their cash on. Luckily this time it’s me; and boy it’s a tough decision...
I have R3800. I need a new motherboard, new CPU and new RAM.
Here are the options I’m considering:
1 X AMD Athlon64 3200+, 800Mhz FSB 754-Pin Processor (128 L1 + 512 L2 Cache)
1 X MSI VIA K8T800, VIA K8T800 Chipset
2 X 512MB PC400 DDR SDRam Memory Module (Dual Channel)
1 X Intel Pentium 4 - 540 ® 3.2GHz CPU, 800Mhz FSB, 1MB L2 (Hyper Threading)
1 X Intel® (Rocklake) Desktop Board D865PERL - Intel® 865PE Chipset
2 X 512MB PC400 DDR SDRam Memory Module (Dual Channel)
There is better stuff out there, but it will end up costing me more than the budget allows. I'm quite happy to avoid PCI-Express for the moment and move to it when it's mature in about a year.
This machine will be used for gaming. I will use my old machine for a proxy, firewall and fileserver.
Any advise/comments from out there?