AMD CPU Choices

[mrguitarguy]

As mentioned in my Harddrive Choices post I am building a PT system with an Mbox. Allen's under $600 system seems great due to it's price. And the Allenstein machine seems like it would keep up with most anything. I'm trying to have a system that will be used for PT and audio apps only (like those reason, etc). Any processor speed recommendations here? Any overclockers? I haven't tried overclocking and wondered how stable it was.

Thanks for all your help!

[mrguitarguy]

Anyone? Any opinions of Athlon 64's vs. XP's?

[jeroddumas]

I'm overclocking. It only get me a coule more tracks on the dave c though. I am running a variant of the under $600 machine. And it is running just great. If you use the A7v600 you can use an AMD 3200+ cpu.

[funkyghoul]

If you can afford it...go for the 64bit solution. Its more powerful and more upgradable. I used to have a XP system and my 64 craps all over it.

Further...go for the socket 939 series if you can afford it, because, I'm led to believe that there won't be any more revisions of the socket 754 after the 3700+. The 939 is up to 4000+ already.

AMD are going to move the 754 chips over to the Semperon Platform for the next couple of years etc.

[Captain_Pants]

I agree, go AMD 64, and 939...

[idunno]

Hi, I'd second that notion for socket 939, and you may want to wait for the new nforce4 chipset that will come out in another month or two. It will support SATA II (300MB/s transfer rates), and PCI express. Overall, it will be a bit faster. The 939's are supposedly going to be easier to overclock, if that is a goal of yours.

That being said, overclocking and new technology don't necessarily make for the most stable environment. If you've got clients depending on you, it may be best to go with tried and true.

I got my MSI k8n neo platinum/AMD 3000+ (socket 754) a month ago. I've dabbled with overclocking and have overclocked by about 10%. It's pretty stable, though I may back down since I'm not having problems running plug-ins. I don't know if I'd reccommend this mobo though, because many users have been disappointed with its performance; little bugs have been listed on their forums, and it doesn't really OC that well. A nice feature though is Nforce3's native sata support, which allows you to boot from an SATA drive w/o a floppy. The next VIA chipset will also support this.

[DUCHUNTER]

I've noticed a tremendous difference with my 64 vs my XP. Mine is also one of the 64's with the 1MB cache instead of 512k like all the new Athlon 64's have. It's so much faster than my XP.