First Athlon Box

Hello All,



In my first departure from Intel, I have decided on the following for my new
box:



AMD Athlon 64 3400+

MSI Model K8T Neo-FIS2R Motherboard

PNY nVIDIA Quadro FX1000 Video Card

2 Gigs of system memory ( in two 1 Gig sticks)

Windows XP Pro



Running mostly SW 2004 SP2.1, and MasterCam 9.



If anyone who has more experience with AMD than I (which is everyone BTW)
has any thoughts good or bad on my choices before I lay down my hard earned
money, I would be very grateful for your advice.



TIA,

Muggs

 

Muggs,

I am also going to build a similar box, but can't decide between the
Athlon 64 3400+ ($417) and the Athlon 64 FX-51($733) or Opteron 148
($733). How did you arrive at your choice?

Sincerely,
Jerry Forcier

 

$$$, and Dale & Eddy's reply to your post in the "Opteron system" Thread.

I don't know Dale, but...
"The Athlon64 3400+ is very close in performance to the AthlonFX-51, which
corresponds to an Opteron 146. It's cheaper to build, and should give
almost identical performance."
Seems pretty convincing coming from a guy who's obviously done more homework
than I have.

I'm trying not to let this decision paralyze me into not making a move, and
continuing to watch assemblies load, and toolpaths churn.

Muggs

 

Actually, they are all very close in performance. We're talking seconds of
separation in standard benchmarks, not minutes. I've seen it before with
graphics hardware; at some point, Solidworks can't benefit much more without
some software optimizations that it just doesn't contain. The AMD's are
sweeping the floor with Intel, with respect to SWX. But between the top AMD
chips there doesn't seem to be much difference. In other words, the 2Ghz
Athlon64 3200+ and above all seem to run SWX about the same, with obvious
but *minute* performance improvements as you go up in price. Based on
current information I would simply not spend the money on an Athlon64FX or
Opteron 246 (or higher). You'd be better off building a dual using two
Opteron 244 chips for nearly the same money. In a single cpu, the Athlon64
3200+ or 3400+ is the bang for the buck leader, hands down.

Muggs, you're hardware choices are identical to the systems I just built,
except the 3400+ wasn't available at the time I bought. Personally, I'd
save a couple hundred bucks and go 3200+, since you'll want to do it again
next year anyway when SWX 2006 is released But either way, you're system
is going to cook!!

- Eddy

 

This is a great article that explains the differences.
http://www.anandtech.com/cpu/showdoc.html?i=1941

 

There isn't much choice for AMD among the bigger players and those that do
carry AMD I wouldn't recommend.

If you want to build your own you can't go wrong with www.newegg.com. If
you want to end up with an Athlon64 (not FX) with 2Gb of ram you'll want the
Corsair CMX2048-3200 matched pair which you'll find at www.excaliberpc.com
as newegg seems to be out of stock currently. If you want to buy a pre-made
workstation then one of your best choices is www.monarchcomputer.com.

Good luck,

- Eddy

 

Well, Like Eddy said, I bought mine from newegg.com.
I might have been able to save some nickels and dimes by shopping around and
going to different places, but I found everything that I wanted at newegg.

HTH,
Muggs

 

http://www.cyberpowersystem.com/ is good too.