64 bit PC

[DEEP]

I got hold of some money and now I want to built a new computer(64bit). Should I go head and build one or it will be good idea to wait unilt it gets little cheaper. AMD Athlon™ 64 FX Processor is about $700. And 64 bit version of window xp comes out end of this year.

[shawners]

if you hold off.. they may release more chips that would make the one you want go a little lower in price. as far as the software =) Thats free.

[Miniver]

The longer you wait, the cheaper and better the hardware will be. The only question you have to ask is, can you wait?

[notbob]

The only question you have to ask is, can you wait?

since there is nothing available that can actually take advantage of a 64 bit system, you can wait a while (unless you also have a hummer in your driveway, and new and expensive is a good enough reason to buy stuff to you)

[Malakai1911]

Grab a nice Socket 939 motherboard, as 939 is the future for AMD (as far as the roadmaps go, so far).

I reccomend the Gigabyte GA-K8NSNXP-939, as it is based off the nVidia nForce3 Ultra chipset. What that means for you is good performance, and an integrated hardware firewall bound to the 10/100/1000 adaptor (it's both stateful and stateless, and tcp accelerated).

I also reccomend a socket939 athlon, anything from the 3500+ or up is good.

And finally, find some low latency ram. Two sticks so you can run dual channel mode. DDR400, and as low latency as you can afford ( "2-2-2-5 T1" is the best latency made ).

[isus]

from what i've heard so far about nvidia's athlon64 chipset (nforce3), it could use some work and you'd be better off with a via chipset.

[Malakai1911]

The nForce3 150 was an underperformer, but the nForce3 250Gb is on par (if not faster than, which is usually the case) with the Via K8T800. Plus the added features.
Lets take a look at the things the nForce3 250Gb supports that the VIA K8T800 does not support:
- A functional AGP/PCI lock, so you can safely overclock the 250 without ruining your data.
- A hardware firewall, that cant be shut down by rogue processes, and is suprisingly robust because it was designed by 3COM and is even has the honor of being ICSA certified. It is both stateful and stateless, and is highly configurable (while being simple for "newbie" users through wizards, and allowing fine-grained control through complex dialogs. It even has easy to use pre-configured templates for today's most common games.)
- Gigabit Ethernet that is TCP Accelerated (Yes, 10/100 is TCP accelerated also), reducing CPU load even when transferring at speeds over 800KB/s.
- Robust, Integrated RAID support (the K8T800's southbridge only supports SATA raid, not PATA raid).
- The fact that nVidia chipsets have a longer record of stability on the AMD platform than VIA. Many more users have problems installing VIA Hyperion drivers than do nVidia users using Forceware drivers. (Be sure to check out the Forceware remix).

I think thats it. :-P