CPU Choice
Posted by John-Erik | Filed under Hardware
For the CPU choice, I’d say save your money now and get a 2.66 GHz part, then when the 800 MHz FSB and Prescott with 1 Mb L2 cache come out in late summer/early fall, you’ll be able to do a hot-drop of a new motherboard and keep your CPU, then upgrade the CPU … all with the money you saved. Remember, 800 MHz FSB is out there, just expect it for competition with the Hammer, not with the K7 cores. If 2.66 is too slow, the 2.80 GHz part is a nice split … not the uberhighend pricing but nearly there. Oh, and just as a tip, make sure you get HT. It really will be important in a few years.
As for the motherboards, I’m going to give you a quick rundown of each, but which you pick really depends on the rest of the system. For DVD ripping/burning/encoding though, you need ALOT of bandwith with as little contention as possible, much like MCAD rendering and whatnot. So I’ll put special emphasis on that, plus some general reliability comments.
The Abit IT7-Max2 V2.0 is an i845 chipset board and has only 2.1 Gb/s of RAM bandwith … 2.7 if you get 333 MHz DDR SDRAM. The E7205 chipsets sport 4.3 Gb/s of bandwith with their dual channel DDR design. Otherwise, looks pretty good. Keeping in mind that while it has all of these wonderful features on the board, with the exception of the ATA/100 and USB 2.0, all of it is sharing a single 133 Mb/s PCI connection to the system, and for DVD ripping/encoding/whatever, if it involves more than one device on that PCI bus it’s going to create bus contention issues that will make performance choppy and sluggish. Oh, as wonderful as your past Abit experience has, I’m sure, been (mine was too), they do have the highest failure rate by quite a bit. So keep that in mind with Abit.
The MSI MS-6730 (the one I assume you’re talking about) is a wonderful little board, but, again, with S-ATA RAID and all of those features, you’re performance limited by the 133 Mb/s PCI bus, so bus contention is an issue here too. The memory controller is dual channel though, so you don’t need to worry about bandwith limitations there so much. In addition, it is a SiS chipset, and while SiS has made major strides recently, their chipsets still have the highest failure rate (not by much though - Via isn’t far behind).
The Gigabyte 8IN1XP is a very, very nice board. Again, the bandwith will crop up, but is good provided you don’t actually do RAID with the onboard RAID controller (which is notoriously finicky - as are nearly all onboard RAID controllers, btw). This would be my pick, as currently the E7205 chipset is THE highest performance Intel chipset around.
Onto onboard sound, the ICH4 has a great AC97 interface for playing MP3s or watching movies in stereo or even gaming - so long as it doesn’t exceed Dolby Surround (L,R,C,R). As bad as AC97 used to be, it’s actually quite good now if you don’t need/want the advanced features. For Dolby Digital/DTS/SDDS/Dolby Digital EX/etc, I’d recomend add-on cards. The Audigy original is nice but does have some issues with sound accuracy in movies (I know, I own one). The Audigy 2 is THX certified as to accuracy, so you can expect the best and most accurate movie sounds with the Audigy 2. You can definitely hear the difference, I tried my hardware MPEG decoder with DD out against software with his Audigy 2 and the Audigy 2 was better - that’s the first time my hardware ZV MPEG decoder has been beaten by anything in the sound/picture department, including dedicated DVD players.
Oh, the Audigy 2 also has a refined DSP with true 24 bit support and better drivers than the original Audigy, and here it is definitely worth the price to get the Audigy 2 over the original Audigy.
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