I was thinking of buying a cheap barebone off of tigerdirect and there are two that i was considering buying around the same price. Both come with a case power supply and 512mb pc 3200 ram but the processors were different.Right now i have a 766mhz celeron so i need a upgrade badly.one is a... celeron D 2.93GHz 533FSB 256kb cache the other is AMD Althon 2900+ xp 2.08GHz 400FSB 512kb cache I already have a good video card and hard drive to put it in just wondering what would be the best was far as gaming. Both of those are far better then what i have now. I'm thinking the AMD would be better because of the cache but the celeron has better FSB and clock speed hah:
clock speeds mean nothing these days, I wouldn't be surprised to see that athlon score higher benchmarks than a 3.4ghz celeron. AMD's better for gaming.
Ninja's right, go with the XP, the cache will make a big difference here. Especially the L1 cache, that's where all the instructions will head first, the XP has 128Kb's,the Celeron has a mere 8k, big difference. AMD has been the gaming chip of choice for years anyway. Good luck dude.
Thanks for the reply.When i get the money i plan to put a a gig or two or ram in it so it should be an ok gaming pc.On the product review someguy said he played halflife 2 fine with that processor. I cant seem to find that motherboards max processor speed,incase i wanted to upgrade later but oh well.only thing it says is... The KV7-V motherboard is based on the VIA KT600 Northbridge chipset and the VIA VT8237 Southbridge chipset. It supports AMD Athlon XP and Sempron processors with a FSB frequency of 400/333/266MHz. From that it seems like it dont have a max speed but i would think there would be one. Anyway,thanks for the help -UnReaL
That motherboard should support it just fine. I believe Anti-Trend is running around with a KV7 in his main box. It'll support up to the XP3200+ even, unless for some odd reason Abit decided to remove the ability to run a CPU of that speed...and I highly doubt that. As for the Celeron vs. Athlon, the Celeron is competing with the Duron/Sempron and the Athlon is competing with the Pentium.
HL2 will depend much more on the graphics card, and the ram also helps too. If that guy had a 9800XT, a gig of ram and a Celeron at just 2.4GHz he'd still be able to run the game fine. It also depends on the setting though, I have a GeForce 6800, a AMD Athlon 64 3000+ (939) processor but I can't even play HL2 with the texture quality on meduim, it runs all choppy because I only have 512MB's of ram I imagine. So wanting to upgrade to a gig+ or ram is a smart move:good:
