Quick question: Building a new PC, AMD or Intel?

[Trev]

My AMD 386 clone was a complete turd, but that doesn't say much about today's products. I'm still using an AMD Athlon 64 4000+, and my nVidia 8800 GTS 512 picks up most of the slack.

If you want stability, go with an Intel Core 2 Duo or Quad and an Intel boxed motherboard. Intel's boards don't have legacy connectors--parallel ATA, PS/2, floppy, etc.--or even PCI slots in some cases, so keep that in mind. i.e. If you want to a use a Catweasel, go with another brand. I like Asus.

Buy memory tested and approved by the motherboard manufacturer. If you're running a 32-bit operating system (not just Windows), don't install more than 3 GB or so of RAM, depending on how your motherboard maps your add-in cards and onboard widgets into the 4 GB address space. If you're running a 64-bit operating system, don't worry about it, and buy as much memory as you can afford. I'm still using 1 GB but could probably benefit from upgrading to 2 GB.

Buy a hard disk based on cost and warranty. (My rule of thumb: buy the disk just below the point at which the cost increases at a higher rate than the capacity. Seagate's 1TB "SATA-II" disks are reasonably priced, and they have a 5 year warranty.)

Buy a SATA optical drive that meets your needs. DVD+/-RW DL at minimum, Blu-Ray if you can swing the added cost now.

Buy a media-friendly graphics card--any of the midrange nVidia and ATI cards should do; however, nVidia is doing wonderful things with CUDA, PhysX, and general purpose programming on their GPUs, i.e. not just for gaming. The midrange cards typically have hardware-assisted Blu-Ray/HD-DVD decoding while some of the high-end cards do not. Do a bit of research before buying.

If you plan on watching high-definition video content, make sure your monitor supports HDCP over DVI or HDMI (or use something like AnyDVD HD--an awesome and easy to use program--to disable HDCP completely).

[Trev]

You probably won't see much of a difference between DDR2 and DDR3 today, given the slow refresh rates of current DDR3 parts. You can always buy faster parts when they become available. It really depends on what you plan to spend on the combinbation of motherboard and memory. You have two options: 1) buy DDR2 board and memory and upgrade to DDR3 board and memory later; 2) buy DDR3 board and memory and upgrade to faster DDR3 memory later. Option 2 should be less expensive long-term, but it depends on what motherbard you buy.

EVGA is an excellent brand. Both their products and their support are great. They do tend to be more expensive than other brands, though. Keep in mind that most nVidia-based products (video cards and motherboards) are rebranded reference designs. You're really paying for the reputation of the company and their warranty and support policies. EVGA does have a nice upgrade policy.

If you're going with an Intel processor, look for P45-based boards. Many of them should support DDR3.

[Trev]

Agreed. AMD has had very little to offer desktop users lately; however, their server products perform quite well. AMD has had the advantage in memory bus speed for quite some time, but Intel is quickly catching up.

[Trev]

Patriot Viper 4GB (2 x DIMM-PVS34G1333LLKN 2GB 240-Pin DDR3 Dual Channel)

Unfortunately, you may or may not see all 4GB, depending on how the motherboard allocates memory resources and whether or not you're running a 32-bit operating system. Don't get mad at the motherboard or operating system, though. It's normal. (If the motherboard and operating system support PAE, you can reclaim it.)

[Trev]

Supporting 16GB of memory doesn't mean 16GB will be available to 32-bit operating systems (XMP is a user-friendly overclocking aid). If your peripherals are 32-bit, they get mapped into the lower 4GB of memory. The leftover physical memory is then remapped above the 4GB boundary, inaccessible to 32-bit operating systems without some means of accessing it, like PAE.

Anyhow, you're running 64-bit operating systems, so it shouldn't matter. If you do decide to go 32-bit, use Windows Server 2003 Enterprise and add the /PAE switch to the appropraite boot.ini string.

I don't run 64-bit Windows for two reasons: 1) no DOS virtual machine (I know, I could use Virtual PC, VMware, etc., but I like NTVDM); 2) no 64-bit Catweasel drivers.

I use Cygwin and Microsoft Services for UNIX (the descendant of Interix, a replacement for the POSIX subsystem bundled with Windows) for most of my UNIX-like needs. Cooperative Linux (coLinux) is great, too, and I prefer Gentoo when I actually run Linux on x86.

[Trev]

@quarkx

If you look at any quad core, each core speed is (and I could be wrong) I think the highest speed is around 2.6-2.8. IIRC the fastest single core speed was 3.8- 4 Ghz. When you are running a multicore CPU, unless the software utilizes it, it will only run on one core.

Speed in terms of MHz doesn't necessarily correlate to real world performance these days, even when comparing like architectures.

The operating system's scheduler will make use of the extra cores. Even if your software is single-threaded, you can still benefit from other bits (interrupt service routines, antivirus software, etc.) running on different cores. You could, in effect, see a performance gain simply through a reduction of context switches on the active execution unit. Cache coherency can hurt performance regardless, but in most cases, not so much. Productivity software spends most of its time waiting for user input.

[Trev]

I think it's also often necessary to raise the memory voltage on consumer boards when populating more than two slots, regardless of whether or not you overclock. That's all dependent on the motherboard and memory being used, though.

[Trev]

@Piru

I've never heard of that before, and I've worked on a lot of systems. Is this something that is only needed for DDR3 setups?

Honestly, I don't know enough about electronics to say, but it predates DDR3 by quite a bit. I had an old Via Apollo 133 board that wasn't stable with four PC133 DIMMs installed unless the voltage was ramped up. It may have had something to do with the way power was chained to the slots. Obviously, you'd want to stay within the tolerances documented for the memory and the board itself.

@redrumloa

Try Crysis. It's a system killer, regardless. I'm enjoying Fallout 3 quite a bit. It's similar enough to Oblivion that getting into the gameplay was quite easy (assuming you've played Oblivion). Apart from Pipboy and other obvious visual cues, though, it's quite different in tone from the first two games. It's neither desolate nor desperate enough, despite the post-apocolyptic environment.

Speaking of Oblivion (Elder Scrolls 4), buy it, too. You won't be disappointed. Morrowind (Elder Scrolls 3) is still quite playable as well. For the casual gamer, both provide months of gameplay.

And finally, don't forget Half-Life 2 and its continuations. It's a few years old, but it's still awesome.

@all

Mark Russinovich has a good write-up here <http://blogs.technet.com/markrussinovich/archive/2008/07/21/3092070.aspx> on how Windows uses physical memory on both 32-bit and 64-bit platforms. Note that the parts specific to 32-bit systems are somewhat operating system agnostic (yes, even 32-bit Linux has limitations), as all x86 operating systems rely on the same technologies to access memory.

Trev