Personaly I think that a Pentium 4- or an AMD equivalent- based computer will be good for many many years. Even my 1 GHz Pentium 3 desktop one with 256 MBs of SDRAM is capable of most of the tasks that a computer is called to do today, it isn't the same with i486 and Pentium or Pentium and Pentium 2 where the differences were important.
Perhaps the problem is that we are never satisfied with what we have. It is the same as with cars. The bigger the maximum speed the better the car is rated. But who and in what road will run at, lets say, 200 km per hour? In this way we can neglect things that are really important, as the contribution in air polution in the case of a car. We say that the 64 bit systems support 16 TB of physical memory. Who of us will ever need or use more than 4 GBs of memory or, even more, the 64 GBs of memory that my Amilo's Pentium M with the Physical Adress Extension suports? I think that better programs- and especially games- to use this memory is what we really lack.
Theres a big difference between a car that can go faster then the speed limit and a CPU which is much faster then you need for "general" useage. Your not allowed to drive the car faster then a preset speed by law, your computer can run as fast as it needs and in the end only save you time. For instance sure I dont need this opteron 165 clocked at 2.5ghz, but then again it will encode 2 hours worth video files from .avi to mpeg2 in about an 40 min or so whereas my celeron 2.0ghz (northwood) would take 4+ hours to do the same task. Sure they will both get you to the same place, but I can not only do 10:1 but I can also do something else while its workin (thanks to the dual core).
How pissed were people when you had to upgrade to 8MB of ram for windows 95??? 10 years later and 512MB of ram is the bare recommended minimum. I remember when a 10GB hard drive would never ever get filled up, now I have 440GB of hard drive space and im wanting to snatch up another 500GB SATA.
WB the Spammer.
I just upgraded myself.
Intel E6600 @ 3.4Ghz
2gig of ram
7950 @700/550
I am loving it.
Hey Shawn sorry I haven't got back with you just been working on my career. I'll send you an email on where I stand with that
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Nice, hows the Core 2 Duo treating you??? Did you overclock it at all???
QUOTE
OK Great news!!!!!
The parts have finally been ordered, and will be here today!!!!
I got the athlon 64 x2 4400
ATI 100-435801 Radeon X1900XT 512MB 256-bit GDDR3 VIVO
ASPIRE 680w POWER SUPPLY
Asus A8R-MVP Radeon Xpress 200 motherboard
and I already have the HDD's and 2 gigs of memory.
Nice, the prices have gone through the floor on both that X2 4400+ and that X1900XT... you will see the world of improvement. Hope you like it!