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Hardware Recommendations for March 2007

03.02.07 - 01:23pm

I figured now would be a great time to try and impart a little bit of hardware wisdom to you guys considering how I doubt the majority of the world tries to keep up with the everchanging hardware industry. These early months of 2007 have been rather interesting and with a surge of new hardware releases to occur over the next 9 months it should continue to be exciting. Some of the important launches to look-forward to will be the price cuts from Intel in April, the launch of ATI/AMD’s new R600 graphics processor, and ATI/AMD’s new line of processors starting with Barcelona.

ATI/AMD have been very close lipped about the performance of Barcelona by only telling the press that Barcelona will give “double digit” performance boosts over the competition. We have yet to see any tests performed with actual benchmark scores which is highly unusual considering how close the projected April announcement date of Barcelona is. I am hoping that we will see some leaked benchmarks within the next month or so with engineering sample chips hitting the underground market soon. ATI/AMD’s R600 graphics card and derivatives were once again delayed till an April launch also, not sure if this was done to coincide with the launch of Barcelona but I sure hope they have their act together considering how the 8800GTX/GTS have been available for nearly 5 months now with no competition. Intel will be slashing prices by upwards of 40% in April, just another round of standard price cuts from Intel but the good news is that it brings the quad-core Q6600 down to ~$500 from it’s current $800+.

Processors

The paragraph above explains my hesitancy to make any recommendations in this department. If you seriously need a computer upgrade and you have money burning in your pocket then I’d suggest picking up the Intel E4300 for $160 to hold you over for the next wave of pricecuts. With the prices about to drop in roughly a month it would be worth your while to wait it out. Once the price drops occurs then I’d suggest going with either the E6600 for ~$210 or the Q6600 for ~$500. I personally think the Q6600 is a better purchase as you’ll be set for years in regards to processor performance unless Barcelona decimates the Core 2 architecture. If you are sitting on a s939 Opteron or X2 then I would urge you to hold off purchasing a new motherboard till when AMD’s Barcelona launches, you won’t see phenomenal performance jumps from a K8 to Conroe so keep your wallet closed and wait it out. If you are sitting on a single-core processor then I urge you to atleast make the move towards the E4300 to wait out the wave of product launches, you won’t regret it.

Motherboards

Just like the processor recommendation, these motherboard recommendations come with a warning about the future. With Intel we won’t be seeing a new chipset for a few months with the launch of Bearlake so your decision will lie with your desire to either go with single or multiple GPUs. If you will be using a single GPU then I highly suggest the Gigabyte DS3 Rev 3.3, you won’t find anything more stable. If you are going for SLI then I suggest either the Asus P5N-E SLI with the 650i chipset or the Asus P5N32-E Plus with the 680i chipset. Between the two boards, the P5N-E is simply the budget chipset while the P5N32-E features slightly better memory and processor overclocking, both are great boards. If you are going for Crossfire then I would suggest sticking with a 975x motherboard as the RD600 board from ATI has proven to be both very picky and difficult to get running stable. The Intel BadAxe2 is actually a great suggestion along with the DFI Infinity 975X/G.

In regards to ATI/AMD motherboards you have a huge selection to choose from and a decision to make. It is hard to keep up with all the rumors but I believe current AM2 motherboards will support Barcelona with limited functionality such as HyperTransport speeds being dropped to 1GHz but these shouldn’t affect the processor that much. With that being said it is very hard to find a good recommendation for AM2. For a Crossfire board I think you are limited to the MSI K9A Platinum motherboard which I have heard is a bit buggy but otherwise a decent board. With SLI you have a much larger selection to choose from with the Nvidia 590 and 570 chipsets available on AM2. From what I have heard nearly all of these boards are dependable but then again I don’t hear much about AM2 as it isn’t the performance leader at this time.

Memory

The second half of 2006 was marked by an era of unnaturally high DDR2 prices with mid-range DDR2-800 kits running as much as $300 whereas the same kits sold for less than $250 before Conroe launched. Prices have finally settled back down atleast temporarily so the market is ripe for the taking. With Vista now available and quad-core processors becoming mainstream it only makes sense to have atleast 2 GB of ram, I personally am running with 4 GB and everything runs smooth as butter. Last month I did a test comparing various ram frequencies and timings and I basically came to the conclusion that ram speed doesn’t help performance much but it doesn’t help more than timings, or atleast on Intel motherboards. AMD processors tend to respond better to tighter timings so DDR2-667 4-4-4-12 sticks will do the trick on AM2 while DDR2-800 5-5-5-15 sticks would be excellent for Intel. If you plan on overclocking then you will want to find sticks with a large overhead, look for sticks with Micron D9GMH or GKX modules. This website has a listing that is pretty up to date so I suggest checking it out and comparing available modules with what is on the market. One thing to note, some performance memory modules won’t boot below 2.0 or 2.1 volts so you may need to purchase a cheap 256mb stick to enter 2.1 volts within your bios and then boot with your standard sticks.

Video Cards

DirectX10 is finally out and in full force with a slew of titles launching that fully support DX10. That being said, you choices of DX10 cards are limited to 3 current cards, the 8800GTX, 320MB 8800GTS, and 640MB 8800GTS. Nvidia will be releasing their 8600 series cards the middle of April which should bring DX10 to the mid-range market but for right now you are stuck with G80 cards. R600 from ATI/AMD will be out in about 45 days so you could stick it out for that card but I make no promises on performance. I myself and waiting to see what happens between ATI/AMD and Nvidia and may pick up a DX10 card or two in May or June. Some exciting cards that will be launching will be the 8600GTS and possibly an 8800GS. For right now if you don’t plan on gaming then I suggest picking up either an HDMI capable X1600 or a 7600GT, both are solid cards and both have great prices for the non-gaming performance.

Peripherals

Cases, powersupplies, and hard drives are all essential to a computer’s operation however here a lot of the choices fall to the consumer’s taste. In regards to powersupplies I would recommend checking out JonnyGuru’s reviews as he does a damn good job stressing powersupplies and delivers a great review. For hard drives I have and nearly always will recommend going with the Seagate 7200.10 drives unless you can land a deal on the 150GB Western Digital Raptors. The sweet spot for hard drive capacity is slowy pushing up past 320GB but 320GB drives can be had for as low as $80 shipped, so about 25 cents per gigabyte. If you look hard enough you can find the 500GB drives in the low $100 price range but those are more rare than the 320GB drives. Computer cases tend to be a highly personal field with many flame-wars resulting over someone insulting another persons case. I myself don’t even bother with a case but I’m unique/special. If I had to buy a case though it would surely be a Lian Li creation, nothing like an enormous ATX case on wheels with handles.

As always feel free to drop a comment or send me an email if you have any personal questions. I’m always available to discuss hardware questions, my contact information is available in my contact page (which will be updated later today, I’m a slacker). Now time to implement a few of the “features” I have been talking about for months. Oh, and yes Supreme Commander has taken over my life.

Category: Articles, Hardware