I decided to upgrade my desktop a little bit. I am waiting another two years or so to upgrade to dual core or quad core or whatever will be out. My dilemma is that I have 2 gigs of PC3200 ram with an AGP video card and an Athlon XP 2100 chip. I am thinking of upgrading my chip to Athlon XP 3200. The other option is to upgrade the chip and motherboard to a socket 939. As for the chip I would buy a regular 64 bit Athlon chip, and then down the road hopefully 939 will still be around and I can upgrade to whatever is best, dual or quad core or whatever. So my question is, should I upgrade to the XP 3200 for about $160 or for a little more upgrade to get the best motherboard with a low end 64 bit amd chip. (that would require me to buy a pci express graphics card too) I guess it wouldn't be just a little more money. The 3200 would save me money for the future, and what if I buy a 939 mobo and then they come out with another socket in two or three years. That would defeat the purpose of upgrading to the 64 bit chip this year. What do you guys think? Let me know if my explanation is not clear.
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As a personal opinion, I'd go with the XP3200. Who knows what nice things are available in a few years, your new 939 motherboard might already be outdated by then (and of course the evil chip mongers will have invented at least three new sockets in the meantime
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In my experience, you will never stay completely up to date with hardware. So if you need more performance now then upgrade. If what you already have is working for you, then save up the cash and build a "super system" in a couple of years.
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Thanks for the oppinions. I figured thats what I was going to do, so I am going to order an XP 3200 this week.Comment
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Yeah, good choice. AMD is migrating to an M2 socket--due later this year I belive-- June or July was mentioned at one point. It is set to replace all current sockets for consumer mobos ie. A, 745, 939 etc.
Plus you really don't want to upgrade to a 64-bit mobo without moving to PCI express graphics. Nvidia has put out a new high end AGP card (7800 GTX or something) but that is very likely their last high end AGP. I believe ATI is already done offering new high end graphics chipsets in AGP. Although, running linux, I suppose you'd probably want to go with a Nvidia graphics card anyway. I understand they have better driver support.
Besides, if you've gone up until now with a 2100+ that 3200+ should feel very nice. Also, don't forget that storage is typically a system's bottleneck. If you want a nice speed boost and don't have yerself a raid 1 array it might be something to look into. drive space is cheap and raid 1 is insta-backup
--raid 0 if you're brave and/or enjoy doing back-ups yourself.
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