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**UncleMacro** · 06-22-2005, 01:38 AM

Going socket 939 makes a whole lot more sense than going with an Athlon XP. Socket 939 has a future ahead of it which includes dual core CPUs. Of course, no socket lives forever so eventually AMD will come up with something new. As far as going with an ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe, SLI doesn't really make a whole lot of sense unless you're a pretty serious gamer and even then SLI's benefits are debatable. If you don't intend to run two identical video cards at some point then you can save some money by dumping SLI. You'll get more benefit by having an extra PCI-Express x1 slot. When it comes to CPU cores, the Venice (512K cache) and San Diego (1M cache) are the ones to get. Don't get any of the older ones like Winchester or Newcastle. The Venice core has some fixes as well as an improved memory controller. Many of the Internet retailers like newegg list which core you're buying.

Since you listed video capture and manipulation as your main application, you should probably take into account that Pentium 4s tend to be somewhat faster than Athlon 64s at that sort of thing. Check here for a comparison. The Pentium 4s come out a little ahead in that sort of application but the Pentium 4s are also somewhat more expensive and when you take the price into account, they are pretty much the same speed. The Athlon 64s are as good a deal as Pentium 4s for folks who do a lot of video processing and the Athlon 64s have other advantages like running cooler and have 64 bits in case you need to add a lot of RAM someday.

06-22-2005, 01:38 AM	#11 (permalink)
UncleMacro TSF Enthusiast Join Date: Jan 2005 Location: San Diego Posts: 2,133 OS: Vista SP1 My System	Going socket 939 makes a whole lot more sense than going with an Athlon XP. Socket 939 has a future ahead of it which includes dual core CPUs. Of course, no socket lives forever so eventually AMD will come up with something new. As far as going with an ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe, SLI doesn't really make a whole lot of sense unless you're a pretty serious gamer and even then SLI's benefits are debatable. If you don't intend to run two identical video cards at some point then you can save some money by dumping SLI. You'll get more benefit by having an extra PCI-Express x1 slot. When it comes to CPU cores, the Venice (512K cache) and San Diego (1M cache) are the ones to get. Don't get any of the older ones like Winchester or Newcastle. The Venice core has some fixes as well as an improved memory controller. Many of the Internet retailers like newegg list which core you're buying. Since you listed video capture and manipulation as your main application, you should probably take into account that Pentium 4s tend to be somewhat faster than Athlon 64s at that sort of thing. Check here for a comparison. The Pentium 4s come out a little ahead in that sort of application but the Pentium 4s are also somewhat more expensive and when you take the price into account, they are pretty much the same speed. The Athlon 64s are as good a deal as Pentium 4s for folks who do a lot of video processing and the Athlon 64s have other advantages like running cooler and have 64 bits in case you need to add a lot of RAM someday.