In the likelihood that my motherboard has been fried, can anyone give me some good suggestions on a new motherboard and cpu with a budget of around $600? Should i go for a 64bit cpu? What are the pros and cons for that etc
Exactly. PCIe is about to take off and be adopted as the new standard, making all those expensive AGP cards obsolete.
It?s the general expectation that PCIe is the next big thing. Just look at the specs and you?ll see that it blows PCI and AGP away. I?d bet that in a year?s time it will be a standard format and we?ll all be throwing out the old AGP cards that cost so much ATM?
So what I?m getting at, since you already have a currently good AGP graphics card, is that it would probably be smartest to spend as little as possible now, because within 12 months you?ll want to throw it all away and upgrade to the next generation of hardware.
It?s sad but true - those uber fast AGP based graphics cards that some people are spending close to a grand on, will be pretty much worthless in less then a year. [:(] Goddamn computers suck.
PCI express isn't going to make AGP obsolete for a little while. I saw a benchmark a while ago (can't remember the site sorry), and the difference between AGPx8 and PCIe x16 was too small to really care about. Hell PCIe x4 wasn't much slower than x16 (this was to test out the preformance on dual PCIe Intel boards). The major pro about PCIe is that the cards are slightly cheaper than the AGP equivalents.
As for CPUs. There is as much difference between Intel and AMD as there is difference between ATI and nVidia video cards. One does slightly better here and the other does slightly better there. Look at some hardware sites, see what does better in what you want to do, and then look at price ranges. Either way you will get a good processor. It isn't like one is 10,000 times better than the other :)
PCIe is more of a case of future-proofing.
And packaging.
At the moment there is very little between the old and new standard in terms of performance, but you have to remember though, that most benchmarks (and definitely most games) don't really push the boundaries of the PCI bandwidth because most programmers recognise it as a bottleneck, and try to minimise utilisation as much as possible otherwise all games would run like crap. If benchmarks did rely heavily on PCI bandwidth then most computers would rank the same regardless of which processor etc you had.
In terms of economics I wouldn't go for a Athlon64, simply because with BTX on the way, 939 PCIe m/boards etc still to come there's no real reason to waste money on what is only going to be 'cutting edge' for a short time.
Its practically impossible to keep your computer in a state ready to be upgraded. Ram will change, CPU FSB will change, Video Cards will change. These days I will basically buy a Chip, Mobo and Ram to suit, then in a year or two time sell that one off and upgrade again.
The board in my Athlon XP 1900 could only support 266Mhz FSB. To support an Athlon higher than an XP2400 I needed to buy a newer board. This meant I needed to scrap my ram and get PC3200 to suit. People who grabbed 533Mhz FSB P4 Chips just before the 800Mhz came out can't buy new chips anymore without a motherboard upgrade.
I now have an Athlon 64 3200 with an ATI X800 Pro. I won't even bother trying to upgrade in a year I will just sell the board and card and buy some new components.
If you are looking at keeping your 9600XT Souri then obviously you'll need to stick to an AGP board. Don't bother with the Socket 478 P4's since they stop at about 3.4Ghz. 775 is out of the question since its PCI Express. An Athlon 64 939 Socket will at least give you a little more room to upgrade your chip in the future. They are up to around 4000+ at the moment.
In terms of performance the Athlon 64 is nice. The stories I hear from customers about them being incompatible with this and that shit me to tears. I've never, ever had a problem with my machine, friends machines, and the many we build at work. Being a 64 bit chip doesn't make it any faster as it is still running a 32bit OS, but at least some companies are looking at getting things moving in terms of processor architecture rather than just bumping up the clock speed. The chip does have an onboard memory controller so there isn't too much mainboard manufacturers can do to make their board perform better than rivals.
If you are interested in overclocking the K8T800 Pro chipset will let you lock the PCI/AGP bus speed when bumping up the front side bus. The normal K8T800 chipset won't, and you won't get far without that feature. The NForce 3 also supports it but I have read about some problems with the PCI/AGP lock on that chipset.
I'd go for a M/b that has PCI express.. which are currently offering bus data bandwidths that are in excess of 4x that of current AGP m/b's... unfortunately would mean getting a new video card...[V]
dunno about 64 bit processors.. cept to say there isnt any software that supports 64 bit.. so if you do your software will still operate in 32bit protected mode... which could be slower...
don't get cheap on memory.. good memory means more system stability...[:0]