A8N-SLI deluxe suggestions an help.

[Harald]

HI

Have just sold my P4 and am about to buy a new CPU, MB and RAM.
The board that seems attractive is the Asus A8N-E Deluxe or MSI K8N Ultra
with a 3500 Winchester
CPU. I will be using the machine for Video / Photo work so I need 2 MB RAM.
Is there a performance gain in buying 4*512 MB modules instead of two 1024MB
mudules?
Is the 3500 a lt faster than a 3200, have heard that the 3200 is a lot
easier to overclock.
I will not use the machine for games, don't even own a game apart from the
ones bundled with XP so I plan to buy an ATI 700Pro graphics card. Is this a
wise choice or am I better off going for a Nvidia based card such as the
6600GT or will the cheapest ATI (300) card do just as well and I can spend
the extra cash on a faster CPU?
Any suggestions welcomed.

Thanks.

 

[Henrik Tived]

Hi Harald,

regarding RAM, I would go two 1Gb sticks as you can add two more later, when
you realise that two gigs are nice but four is much better

currently looking myself for two more gigs to add in my system. where two
isn't enough.

as you are not a gamer , just like myself, I would look at Matrox cards - no
they will not play at 100+fps but they do provide you with the best image
quality + the good features for multiply monitors.

get a good harddrive sub system - RAID, scsi and or perhaps RAPTORS as a
cheaper solution. hmmm, jeg ser at du er dansker?! jeg er i australien!

remember your system is only as good as your weakest link.

best regards/hilsen

Henrik
A Dane Down under

PS: is there any evidence that SLI is more beneficial for 2D imaging then
the traditional single vga card?

 

[Ed]

HI

Have just sold my P4 and am about to buy a new CPU, MB and RAM.
The board that seems attractive is the Asus A8N-E Deluxe or MSI K8N Ultra
with a 3500 Winchester
CPU. I will be using the machine for Video / Photo work so I need 2 MB RAM.
Is there a performance gain in buying 4*512 MB modules instead of two 1024MB
mudules?
Is the 3500 a lt faster than a 3200, have heard that the 3200 is a lot
easier to overclock.
I will not use the machine for games, don't even own a game apart from the
ones bundled with XP so I plan to buy an ATI 700Pro graphics card. Is this a
wise choice or am I better off going for a Nvidia based card such as the
6600GT or will the cheapest ATI (300) card do just as well and I can spend
the extra cash on a faster CPU?
Any suggestions welcomed.

Thanks.

The Asus K8N-SLI was completely stable at 2-2-2-7 memory timings. We did
have to lower the Command Rate to 2T, but this is a function of the
on-chip Athlon 64 memory controller. It is rumored that upcoming Rev. E
chips will have an updated memory controller capable of driving 4 DIMMs
at 1T command rate, which would definitely improve memory performance
when running 4 DIMMs.
http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=2358&p=5

Does Ram Latency Matter?
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1558,1637762,00.asp

The 3500+ and the 3000+ (90nm) both topped out at about 2.6GHz with
default or modestly increased CPU voltage and air cooling.
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2242

The maximum frequency we managed to achieve by overclocking AMD Athlon
64 3500+ on Winchester core appeared 2.618GHz.
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/athlon64-90nm_4.html