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Hardware Recommendations for April 2007

04.11.07 - 12:59pm

We are nearly a third of the way through April and not a whole lot has changed. AMD’s R600 is still hiding in the closet, AMD’s Agena line has yet to be seen, Intel’s price cuts haven’t taken effect yet, and Nvidia hasn’t released a mid-range G8x video card yet. There haven’t been any new chipset launches either, hard drives haven’t made any revolutionary changes yet (solid state drives still cost an arm, a leg, two kidneys, and your liver), and powersupplies are just plain boring. With that said, let’s make this really quick.

Processors

Nothing has changed in this area yet except with a few new processor launching from Intel. Earlier this week I heard an Intel marketing VP mention that they don’t plan on just outproducing AMD, they plan on smacking them back to their pre-k7 position. With this goal in mind Intel has/will be releasing a slight refresh of their lowend and flagship processors. The E6420 and E6320 are essentially E6400 and E6300 processors with the full 4MB of cache enabled. Two additional megabytes of cache is rather huge and can provide up to 15% in increased performance. These chips will clock in at 2.133GHz and 1.86GHz, just like the chips they are replacing. The E6400 and E6300 should go EOL soon but this shouldn’t be a concern with the replacements maintaining the same price points. Intel’s budget 4xxx series was met with mixed reviews, while stock performance is less than desirable, there is a lot of gains to be made by the overclocker/enthusiast. Intel will be releasing an E4400 which will operate on the 800MHz FSB, feature 2MB of cache, and clock in at 2GHz, right above the 1.8GHz from the E4300. These chips are the entry-level Core 2 products and have disabled VT(virtualization technology) which shouldn’t be an issue for budget boxes. Last is the QX6800 which is simply a QX6700 with the stock multiplier bumped up to 11 to yield a quad-core at 2.93GHz. Intel is just rubbing salt into the wounds, AMD sadly has nothing to compare. It’ll be a few more months of Intel crushing AMD, the good news is that prices will keep dropping so we win in the end. My recommendation this month would be to wait, hold your cash tight to your chest as you will lose money immediately if you purchase a processor now.

Memory

All I can say is “wow”. We have finally reached the point where DDR2-800 2 GB kits are shipping for $115 and less. Memory used to be the most expensive component going into a system with 2 GB kits routinely costing $250+, now it is possible for a complete midrange machine to be built for under $650. For the average user you won’t notice a difference between DDR2-667 and DDR2-800 but with there being little to no price difference it makes no sense to not opt for the slightly faster DIMMs. DDR2-800 FBDIMMs will be launching very soon which is good news for those select few individuals that run MP Xeon systems as workstations. The biggest boon that DDR2-800 chips will provide is a slightly higher overclocking headroom, current DDR2-667 FBDIMMs absolutely hate running out of spec with chips usually hitting a wall around DDR2-720 or so. With prices so cheap it makes no sense to not purchase 2 GB at minimum, your daily experience will be much smoother, guaranteed.

Motherboards

There hasn’t been a new chipset release but motherboard manufacturers are getting better and better at pulling out every last bit of performance from these aging chips. Of great interest is the new range of P965 motherboards featuring user selectable FSB straps. Basically this lets users select the latency timings between the processor and the chipset, the lower these latencies the higher the memory subsystem performance. Boards of great interest for this would be the Abit QuadGT and the DFI Infinity P965-S. I have a QuadGT in my possession and I’ll be doing a comparison between the Gigabyte DS3 and the QuadGT to compare the differences between the straps and how they relate to overclocking potential, just waiting on a videocard to show up on my doorstep. 975X motherboards have effectively stalled as P965 is much more exciting but if you want true Crossfire support then 975X is the only way to go, RD600 from AMD is an absolute nightmare to setup. Nvidia’s 680i chipset for Intel is still the best way to go for SLI support, I’d highly suggest the Evga 680i motherboard as it has been shown to overclock quad-core processors much higher than the competition. For AMD’s AM2 all I can say is go with Nvidia, The NF5 chipset has been solid for AMD and I don’t believe you can find a terrible board amongst the crowd.

Video Cards

Nothing new here, if you are a gamer then you are effectively stuck with Nvidia’s G80 cards (8800GTX and 8800GTS). In the near future budget G80 cards will be launching but initial benchmarks look terrible for the price points they are targeting. The 8600GTS was looking very promising but with performance that is often eclipsed by the previous generation’s upper-midrange cards, the 8600GTS is looking very weak. I’d immediately suggest spending the additional $60 to pick up a 320MB 8800GTS if you can’t spring for the 640MB version, otherwise you are probably better off finding a 7900GTO or X1950 Pro/XT. For budget cards DX10 shouldn’t be a requirement so the X1300 and X1600 series are great choices with their VIVO technology for DVD decoding. Otherwise the 7600GT and 7900GT are great options that’ll hold you over till more midrange DX10 cards hit the scene. Once again though I’d highly suggest holding on to your cash, I’m sure that Nvidia will be dropping prices when R600 launches and there are rumors that the flagship 2900XTX may land around $400 with the rest of the line falling in place meaning AMD may bring a powerhouse to the midrange DX10 arena.

Peripherals

The rest of the components for a desktop should be built around your own desires. If I had to make a case suggestion though, the Antec P182 is looking hot right now along with the entire Lian Li line, I’ll take a V1000A please. Powersupplies can make or break your system so don’t skimp on this portion of your system, a faulty PSU can completely fry your entire system. I’ve got to plug jonnyGURU again, if you want to see a person push a PSU to the breaking point then go check him out. Hard drive prices continue to follow the pricedrop trend and now I’d suggest purchasing 500GB drives over 320GB drives simply due to the price ratios. 320GB drives are averaging 26.6 cents per gigabyte while 500GB drives are averaging around 28 cents per gigabyte, while you pay a little more per gigabyte you are also gaining a slight performance boost, consolidating your harddrive farm, and reducing the amount of loud spinning objects in your case. 750GB drives are still up in the 34 cents per gigabyte range, once they drop down to 28-30 cents per gigabyte they’ll become decent investments. Higherspeed SATA drives are still a very limited field with Western Digital’s Raptor line being the only drives you can currently purchase. Seagate announced that they planned on entering the 10K RPM HDD field soon which should be very interesting, if the price is right I’d like two in RAID 0 for benching.

Overall I’d say hold on to your cash unless you absolutely need an upgrade, prices will continue to fall and with the upcoming Intel/AMD price drops and the Nvidia/ATi product launches it makes little sense to purchase hardware that’ll either be obsolete or overpriced in the near future. The Q6600 is looking very promising at ~$500, that’s a little over $125 per core which is a huge savings for those that need high density processing. May should be much more interesting, hopefully AMD won’t stall again in the R6xx family launch.

edit: Wow I’m an idiot, original post’s title was set for March, not April, corrected.

Category: Articles, Hardware