Gaming Buyer's Guide - November 2004

AMD Budget Gaming System, Part Two

We cut several corners in order to reduce the price as far as possible on the first AMD system, but if you can afford a few upgrades, we would suggest the following instead.

Budget AMD Athlon 64 939 System
Hardware	Recommended Component	Price
Processor	AMD Athlon 64 3000+ 1.8 GHz (939) 90 nm	170
Motherboard	Abit AV8 (939)	103
Memory	1x512MB Mushkin Basic 2.5-4-4	75
Video Card	XFX GeForce 6600GT AGP 128 MB	229
Hard Drive	Seagate Barracuda 80GB EIDE model 7200.7	59
Optical Drive	NEC DVD+/-RW Drive Model 3500A	72
Case and Power Supply	Athenatech A602 Black/Silver with 350W PSU	62
Display	Samsung 793DF 17 Black/Silver CRT (1280x1024@75 Hz)	139
Speakers	Logitech Z-640 5.1	52
Keyboard and Mouse	Logitech Optical Desktop Combo	26
Bottom Line		987

Click to enlarge.

Abit's K8T800 Pro based AV8 motherboard has dropped about $20 in price since its release, and it still offers great features and performance. Coming with support for the socket 939 platform, it should have more longevity and will also provide more performance than comparable socket 754 systems. This is especially true in games, where the dual-channel RAM and other performance tweaks can add 5% to 15% to the overall speed. For the RAM, we recommend starting with one 512 MB DIMM and upgrading to a second DIMM and dual-channel when you can afford the extra $75. You could also just add in the RAM right now and push the price over $1000.

The recommended CPU is AMD's cheapest socket 939 chip, the 1.8 GHz 3000+. This chip uses the new 90 nm process and can overclock very well, but more importantly, it has dropped in price about $50 since it first launched. It seems that since the chips were in such high demand, many resellers bumped the price up quite a bit for the first few weeks. Our tests have shown the 90 nm parts to actually be slightly faster than the older 130 nm parts, although the precise details of what changes were made remain largely unknown. What's more impressive is that even the 2.2 GHz 3500+ 90 nm part requires less power and generates less heat than even the slowest 130 nm Athlon 64. If you want to try your hand at overclocking, these chips have shown a lot of potential, with some people reporting overclocks of up to 2.8 GHz. At that speed, performance is very close to that of the FX-55 chip that costs over four times as much. Talk about bang for the buck! You would certainly want better RAM for such an endeavor, though. For the extra $75, then, the socket 939 platform offers quite a few desirable upgrades.

Click to enlarge.

We also changed the graphics card for the 939 platform. Yes, you can use the more expensive card on the less expensive system, but we were really looking to cut costs as much as possible while still maintaining a decent level of performance. For $30 more, the GeForce 6600GT is now available, and performance ranges from being slightly faster than the 9800 Pro to being significantly faster. Doom 3, in particular, shows a huge advantage with the 6600GT. You might also wonder about the GeForce 6800 cards. While they have 12 pipelines, they are also clocked slower, so it ends up basically being a tie in many situations when compared to the 6600GT. At higher resolutions, however, the increased memory bandwidth of the 6800 almost always wins out - a 256-bit interface running at 700 MHz is still about 40% faster than a 128-bit interface running at 1000 MHz.

If you want to try your hand at overclocking, we would also go with the 6800. There have been many reports of success with using a utility like Riva Tuner to re-enable the last four pixel pipelines, and combined with an overclock to 400 MHz, it will definitely outperform the best that the 6600GT can put up. While the list price of the 6800 is $300, there are a few locations that have them for $250 (plus shipping and possibly tax). That's only $20 more than the current price of the 6600GT, so it's definitely worth considering. Once the price of the 6600GT drops - as we assume it will over the next month or two, judging by the price of the 6600GT PCIe parts - the 6800 becomes less attractive.