ChristensenCT
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Spider Platform 1 Comments
After surviving a semester at Mines, the Army finally gave me a nice fat paycheck which I am using to purchase a whole new system. My current configuration is a pathetic Athlon XP clocked at 1.6, 1 gig of SDR ( that's ancient single data rate RAM), but it does pack a Radeon 800XT, which is the only component that has allowed me to play modern games for so long. Although upgrades are impossible at this point, my motherboard has no modern interface, which calls for a whole new system.
So, I have ordered the first few parts: AM2+ 770 motherboard, 2 gigs of DDR2 clocked at 800, and Phenom 9500. The only part missing is the video card, which is going to be an AMD HD3870 as soon as I actually see one available. The combination of motherboard, video card, and processor happens to be a new "platform" from AMD called Spider. Apparently, having this set of similar products from AMD makes your system faster becuase they are optimized to work with eachother.
The whole package will be less than $600 once I buy the GPU, and I haven't even applied for the mail-in-rebates yet, which amount to $30 or so. Of course, it was all supplied by Newegg; the same computer from Alienware or another manufacturer would have ran into the $1,500+ region at least.
Anyway, I am really eager to fire this thing up. I am going from a Athlon XP to a brand-new quad core Phenom. I will have to use Windows XP until I can buy a new copy of Vista though, which shouldn't be more than a month away, it will probably take longer than that to get an HD3870.
So, I have ordered the first few parts: AM2+ 770 motherboard, 2 gigs of DDR2 clocked at 800, and Phenom 9500. The only part missing is the video card, which is going to be an AMD HD3870 as soon as I actually see one available. The combination of motherboard, video card, and processor happens to be a new "platform" from AMD called Spider. Apparently, having this set of similar products from AMD makes your system faster becuase they are optimized to work with eachother.
The whole package will be less than $600 once I buy the GPU, and I haven't even applied for the mail-in-rebates yet, which amount to $30 or so. Of course, it was all supplied by Newegg; the same computer from Alienware or another manufacturer would have ran into the $1,500+ region at least.
Anyway, I am really eager to fire this thing up. I am going from a Athlon XP to a brand-new quad core Phenom. I will have to use Windows XP until I can buy a new copy of Vista though, which shouldn't be more than a month away, it will probably take longer than that to get an HD3870.
sounds wicked cool. I will have to look up the AMD Spider rig you speak of.