need some advice

[Alex Zbyslaw]

Benjamin Lutz wrote:

>If price is important, why not go for a Sempron 3100+ using the Palermo
>core? Granted, it's a bit slower than the Athlon64 3000+, but it does
>have an advantage: Under load, it outputs 62W of heat instead of 89W
>like the 130nm Athlon64 cores. And of course it only costs half of what
>the Athlon64s cost.
>  
>

A64 90nm under 3500 are 67W *max*, only larger are 89W max 
(http://www.amdcompare.com/us-en/desktop/Default.aspx).

Modern A64 are 90nm (look for Venice core).

I have no experience of Sempron, but I can say that I would be very 
surprised if you can get an A64 to actually *use* all those watts.  The 
highest temperature I can get is by running a CPU exercizer designed to 
drive up temp.  That gets ~5 degrees C above the maximum I have ever 
seen otherwise (and it's still cooler than an XP).  At 19 degrees 
ambient, the CPU is at 27 degrees under low load (89 W theoretical max).

Prescott core will use *more* than the specified watts under load 
(possibly up to 120 IIRC).

See http://www.silentpcreview.com/article169-page2.html

dick hoogendijk wrote:

>My options are:
>
>Athlon64-3000+ (Newcastle) on a MSI K8T NEO-FSR board (1Gb 3200 mem)
>Athlon64-3400+ (Clawhammer on the same board
>
Why are these your processor options?  The Venice core has been around a 
while now and the 3000 is *fairly* cheap (and pretty much identical in 
price to older cores when I looked a couple months back). 
I'm pretty sure this is Venice but you'd have to check the part no at 
AMD http://www.komplett.nl/k/kl.asp?bn=10483

>I.e. the intel MB has a PCIe grahics slot. How important is that (or
>not). I will buy a Geforce-6600GT videocard (offer most for less
>money..)
>
PCI-E will give you much better performance on modern games and you can 
have two cards IIUC, but I do not know about FreeBSD compatibility.  I 
went for 6600GT AGP which I am more than happy with (but I tend to buy 
games 2-3 years after they were popular :-)).

>I will run FreebSD on it (compile a lot of ports) and (windows-xp/98se)
>for gaming.
>

Are you sure 98se will support A64?  Also just about to run out of 
support from MS (if it hasn't already).  XP does have 95 and 98 
compatibility mode for games etc. but I can't say how well it works.

--Alex