You mentioned having an Enermax case that you are looking to use for your
new system.  If it comes with a power supply, you might want to take a look
at who makes it and what the power ratings for it are.  While Enermax makes
some very nice power supplies, they often use some other no-name brand in
the cases that they sell; otherwise, they sell their cases without a power
supply.  (Why they don't bundle their good power supplies with their good
cases, like Antec does, has never made sense to me.)  Ideally, the power
supply should be new enough to have the special 12 v connector for the
motherboard that the Pentium 4 motherboards use.  This is a little square 4
pin connector.

I suspect that your final choice for a motherboard and processor will come
down to how much you want to spend, so, I'll mention some possibilities and
you can see how this works for you.  I'm using NewEgg for prices on
individual components.  Most bundles of processors and quality motherboards
that I've seen don't seem to be any lower than NewEggg, anyway.

At the top end, I would be looking at the Pentium 4 2.8C processor, which is
a Northwood core running on a 800MHz bus.  The alternative would be the new
Pentium 4 2.8E which uses the Prescott core.  This means it has more
internal cache, 1 MB compared to 512 KB, but it also uses a longer
"pipeline" for processing its instructions.  So, which one is actually
faster on today's motherboards depends on the programs you run, but for
games, the Northwood still seems to have the edge.  Since both processors
are very fast, we're really quibbling, at this point.  The retail version of
these processors is $179.

The 865 chipset motherboards save a little money over the 875 based
motherboards.  They give up support for ECC memory and are very slightly
slower in the performance area.  Asus makes the P4P800 SE for $109 and the
P4P800-E Deluxe for $115; the deluxe model adds firewire ports and
additional SATA RAID support.  I mention these because of your interest in
Asus.  Gigabyte would be another top tier maker that I would eqaully
recommend.

For good performance and better savings, the Athlon XP 2600 (Barton core,
512 KB L2 cache, 333 FSB, and 1.9 GHz clock speed) that your orginally
mentioned is a good choice in terms of getting the good bang for your buck
from this product line.  The retail version of this processor is going for
$90.  In terms of how this processor would stack up against Intel's P4 line,
I think it would be a bit slower than a Pentium 4 2.4C (with hyper threading
and running on a 800 MHz bus).  AMD seeems to have inflated their model
ratings with the Barton processors, perhaps because they saw themselves
falling behind the performance Intel was getting out of their 800 MHz bus
Northwoods.  Although the retail Athlons come with a heatsink and fan, many
people prefer an aftermarket cooler over those provided by AMD.  If you are
inclined to overclocking, take a look at the mobile version of Athlon XP,
such as the 2500 (OEM $90) and the 2600 (OEM $99).  These have unlocked
multipliers and tend to run cooler, because of lower voltage requirements,
than the standard Bartons.

A basic Nforce2 400 Ultra chipset motherboard can be had for around $55,
such as the Shuttle AN35N-Ultra.  The Abit AN7 adds all the extras, such as
firewire, SATA RAID, and Nvidia's soundstorm audio, and it seems to be the
darling of the overclocking crowd.  It sells for $105.  The comparable Asus
board would be the A7N8X-E Deluxe, selling for $113.  Some of the little
details that separate out these Athlon motherboards is whether they have
mounting holes around the socket, so heatsinks can be attached directly to
the motherboard (just because the holes are present doesn't necessarily mean
it will be compatible with this kind of heatsink, so check the heatsink
makers compatibility list) and whether they can make use of the 12v
connector that Pentium 4 motherboards require.

Since you mentioned a possible interest in trying some games, such as flight
sims, I'm skipping over the P4 based Celerons.

This leaves just the Athlon 64s to consider.  These newer processors seem to
be AMDs best answer to the Pentium 4s running on the 800 MHz bus.  Their
performance ratings are not inflated and give you fair idea of how they
compare to the latest Pentium 4s, too.  Unfortunately, there is no money to
be saved here.  The Athlon 64 2800 (512 KB cache and 1.8 GHz actual clock
speed) runs about $187 for the retail package.  For motherboards, the KT800
based boards, such as the MSI K8T NEO-FSR ($96) and the Aopen AK86-L ($98)
might be a good place to start.  They do not have integrated firewire, like
some more "deluxe" models do.  So pricewise, these are very close in price
to the Pentium 4 800 MHz FSB systems.

John

----- Original Message -----
From: "Michael Eisenstadt" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Wednesday, May 12, 2004 12:53 PM
Subject: Re: [PCBUILD] AMD XP vs Pentium 4


> I have a nice new never used Enermax midtower case
> bought from a friend. I would like to install a computer
> in it, at the least for redundancy and to have a network.
>
> I would prefer to buy a newer generation of PC where
> there would be some headroom for something down
> the road but naturally I can't say exactly what. That
> runs at a speed that gives me mild bragging rights if
> only to myself ;-). I have always fancied that I might
> enjoy airplane piloting simulation on a sufficiently
> powerful computer for example.
>
> So I am looking for a very fast processor bundled with
> a quality motherboard available at a greatly discounted
> price because it is one or so generations older that the
> latest and fastest.

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