New system...

[Alodar]

About to start upgrading computer. I.e. buy a new one, from parts. This will be my gaming machine, so I don't really need a lot of peripherals. I want to get a dual core, and some really fast memory, as well as an nforce4 chipset. A sli setup for future upgrades would be nice. Any suggestions on where to look, or motherboard brands, or price areas, etc?

[Fozzik]

Wow. A lot there to talk about... where to begin?

Stuff you mentioned:
Nforce 4 - great chipset... If you are thinking AMD processor there are lots of great choices in motherboards... MSI, DFI, ASUS come to mind first, although there are plenty of others that offer tons of features and solid performance/stability for the price.

If you are talking Intel, I'm pretty sure availability might be a bit of an issue for a while. Also, I'm not sure whether Nvidia SLI works on the Intel platform yet... I imagine it will... and supposedly ATI's AMR will also work. Might be a good choice, IF (big if) it actually does allow you to run either Nvidia or ATI multi-GPU. No way to know until everything hits the market and we can see some reviews.

EDIT: Ok, I was trying to overly summarize and I sorta messed things up a bit. The Nforce4 boards for Intel will of course run Nvidia's SLI. The new Intel chipsets (945 and 955 I think) will be offered in dual PCI-Express graphics slot versions, and the current info is that those chipsets may support both Nvidia's and ATI's dual-GPU solutions.

Dual core - you mention dual-core... I'm not sure when exactly you were planning to build this new rig, but there isn't going to be desktop dual-core chips available from either AMD or Intel for several more months.

On the Intel side -
When they do actually arrive, they aren't necessarily your best choice for a gaming rig. At least not in the next 12-18 months. There really aren't any games in the near term that will take advantage of dual core. With single-threaded games... a dual-core chip is just a single core at lower clock speed. If you are a heavy multitasker and like to do professional style encoding and graphics it might make sense... but understand that overall game performance is probably going to be lower than a faster-clocked single-core.

AMD didn't really have to lower their clock speeds very much going to dual-core, and their architecture is much better. Gaming performance, even in single-threaded games, will be almost as fast as it possibly can be on AMD dual-core chips. The problem is they aren't going to be available until late in the year, and all signs point to them debuting at a rather high price (i.e. $500 and up).

The cool thing about the AMD side of the house is that you can get an Nforce4 mobo right now with a single-core Athlon 64... And you'll be able to drop in a dual-core chip in a year or two when they are really being used by games. On the Intel side you'll need a new mobo to get the dual-core goodness.

As far as memory goes... Make sure to look at all four variables. Price, size, timings, clock speed. Balance all of those and you'll be happy. Without knowing how much you want to spend, it's hard to give recommendations.

Hopefully that helped in a general sense. Throw some specifics at me as you start the shopping process and I'll see if I can't help. :)

Where to look? Try these as a start...

http://www.pricewatch.com
http://www.newegg.com
http://www.monarchcomputer.com

From what little I can see in terms of the type of computer you want, You should probably be thinking in terms of spending $1500-$1800 US... that's for a complete system without monitor. If you already have the case/power supply/optical drives/whatever, cut those numbers down by about $300.

[Alodar]

Thanks Fozzik. I was looking at putting together a new system kinda soon, but not immediately. One thing I was thinking of doing was getting the parts pieces at a time, since I'm not in a huge rush to get it all together immediately. This is going to be the computer I want to use for Vangaurd, so I want to make sure I put it together right. I built my last computer, but when I did, I made the mistake of using SD133 ram, which slowed down a lot of things. At any rate, I usually go with Intel, because I've had a few AMD processors burn out on me in the past. Bad experiences I guess. However, I have been seeing a lot of reports on AMD being a better processor for gaming. Dual core is something I really like because I personally believe Vanguard will have support for it. Indeed, if you have seen chats with Gebron, back in the early unannounced days, I think he said something about that along with a 64bit client. I'll have to choose between AMD and Intel before i pick a mobo obviously. I have the cash to spend (yeay tax refund!) but I don't want to use cash on something that I'm probably going to be upgrading for Vanguard (obviously probably the gfx card). <shrug> we'll see. Thanks for the help/info though :)

[Fozzik]

If your plan is to build a computer for Vanguard's release, I would say wait and buy everything at the last possible moment. If you start buying things one at a time, it just means you are going to pay more. For instance, if you buy the processor tomorrow, and don't buy the rest of the system until two months from now, that processor you bought and haven't used yet will be selling for cheaper... you will have paid extra money and gotten no extra use out of the component.

I've heard several people talk about having AMD processors "burn up" on them... it always seems strange to me. I've been using AMD (and building computers for other people with AMD) processors for 10-12 years now, and I've never once had one of them go bad. I'm not saying it doesn't happen, but I think quite often people have bad experiences because of improper heat sink installation or because of motherboard issues. AMD doesn't really make desktop motherboard chipsets the way Intel does, which means you are getting a chipset from another vendor and the possibility is there (or was there in the VIA KT133 days) to get a bad chipset.

The other thing to realize is that every manufacturer is sometimes going to turn out a bad part. It doesn't mean everything they make is bad... and it's the reason why they offer warranties. Most online sites that you might order components from will exchange something for you if it's bad right out of the box, and both big names in CPUs (AMD and Intel) make quality products that will (all things being equal) last much longer than you will ever keep a computer.

What you've been hearing about AMD Athlon 64 processors is correct. They are hands-down the better gaming processors, and the latest versions (Rev. E) include SSE3 support, a suped-up memory controller, and an even cooler running die.

The possibility is there that Vanguard will make real use of dual-core for things like physics and maybe AI. Getting a socket-939 mobo and single-core Athlon 64 will give you top gaming performance now, and the easiest upgrade path when Vanguard releases if it turns out dual core is utilized. Like I said, though... if your intent is to have a new machine for Vanguard, I would say wait as long as you can. Things only get cheaper.

[Alodar]

Dont you feel that the new nforce4 chipsets for intel side are better than the currently out/revised chipsets for AMD of the same brand (nforce4)? It seems to me from articles I've read that that's the case. Maybe I'm reading too much into it, or there's some 'interesting' journalism going on, I'm not sure.

[Fozzik]

As far as I knew... it was basically the exact same chipset. The only real difference I guess is that it has to have a memory controller in order to work with an Intel chip.

What were you seeing that looked better? I haven't read overly much about it, to be honest.

EDIT: Ok, I don't like saying "I don't know", so I went and read up on the Nforce4 Intel edition. Basically, it's the exact same chipset as on the AMD side, with all the same features. The only differences seem to be the memory controller as I mentioned above (because Intel processors need an external memory controller the Intel version of the Nforce4 is made up of two chips instead of one like the AMD version), and the inclusion of software RAID 5 support. RAID 5 is certainly nice... but much nicer when it's a hardware implementation and doesn't use your CPU to do its parity calculations.

Also, the software RAID 5 will be coming to the AMD version in a driver update sometime soon.

As far as performance goes, the Nforce4 chipset for Intel can't come close to making up the performance deficit that their CPU's suffer in games.

[Alodar]

As far as performance goes, the Nforce4 chipset for Intel can't come close to making up the performance deficit that their CPU's suffer in games.

Everyone says this. AMD > Intel for gaming applications. What I don't understand, is WHY. I thought I knew, but then someone came along and disabused me of that situation. (Maybe this should be it's own thread at this point, I dunno).

[Fozzik]

The short answer: AMD's architecture lends itself to the type of calculations done when playing games. Probably the biggest factor is the onboard memory controller. Games really see a benefit from the lower latency.

Intel's netburst architecture (Pentium 4 and all it's derivatives, including their dual core chips, all use this design) is very specific. It is good at handling long streams of small chunks of similar data. If you want to take a million 8-digit numbers and add 1 to all of them, the Pentium 4 will do it incredibly fast. Because of this it handles audio and video encoding very well (dealing with tons of data which comes in sizes that fit in the cache on the CPU).

The netburst architecture contains extremely long pipelines, which means they can (or could, before they hit the wall) ramp up the clock speed very high. Pretty much everything else in the architecture is designed to cover up the huge penalties associated with a long pipeline. Mispredicted branches cause a loss of many clock cycles due to flushing and restarting the long pipeline... so cache memory that handles small chunks extremely fast was added, and a level 2 cache which is large enough to prefetch enough data to keep the pipelines fed. They also played some amazing tricks with branch predictors and various other parts of the processor to get them running amazingly fast, all to cut down the penalty of the massive pipeline.

The front-side bus and memory system for the Pentium 4 are designed to provide as much bandwidth as possible... the more the better for this CPU. Early on Intel went with Rambus memory with the Pentium 4, and now are on to DDR2, to increase the bandwidth available to the large caches and long pipes. Ironically, the netburst architecture would probably benefit greatly from an onboard memory controller... but Intel doesn't have anything like that for their desktop chips (at least not so far).

AMD's Hammer architecture, in contrast, is designed to be very agile. It has a much shorter pipeline, and can handle many more instructions in a single clock, which allows the clock speed (and therefore temps) to remain lower while still delivering the performance. The onboard memory controller cuts out the middleman... instead of memory accesses having to do this:

CPU - front-side bus - northbridge - memory bus - memory

And then back again. With the hammer architecture we get this:

CPU - bi-directional high bandwidth bus - memory.

Because games often have data that won't even fit in the RAM, let alone the cache on the CPU, having faster access to the RAM can only speed things up.

The netburst architecture is always butting up against its available bandwidth, which is the reason they developed Hyperthreading and their quad-pumped front-side bus. Hyperthreading makes an attempt to better utilize processor resources instead of half the CPU sitting around waiting for something to do, and although some high-end Pentium 4's now have a front-side bus effectively running at 1066Mhz. the front-side bus is still a bottleneck (most of their CPU's still use the 800MHz FSB). This is one of the big problems with Intel's multi-processor and multi-core designs... That single bus which is bottlenecking a single processor is used for two, four, or even more CPU's. It's an absolutely perfect illustration of a bottleneck. Take a look at the database performance of a quad-Xeon server vs. a quad-Opteron... the Xeon's all share one front-side bus, whereas the Opterons each have their own link to memory, and separate links to each other (i.e. bandwidth heaven).

Intel's first dual core chips have the same problem. They will be feeding two Prescott cores using the same single 800MHz front-side bus that was already saturated by a single core. AMD's dual core was part of the original design of the Hammer architecture. The second core is added to a crossbar switch which allows the two cores to access each other's cache at full processor speed, and gives each of them access to the onboard memory controller and the nice wide bandwidth of the hypertransport bus.

Ok, this is getting long. I probably could have just stuck with the short answer. More instructions per clock and lower latency memory access = happy game performance.