Could you guys advise me regarding mobo & cpu choice?

Gowater, you made a good point about the memory. It doesn't make sense to go with 256 sticks, since I'm probably going to be limited to 2 or 3 banks of 3200 by the motherboard. So I cancelled that order...no sense in jumping the gun. As far as the AMD64 goes, I'm a poor grad student...I'm not even buying at the high end of the 32-bit cpu's, so I don't wanna wait until these are in my price range. :lol:


Rickenbacherus, thanks for the paint and ms4me links. I like the looks of the 2 sticks of Samsung 512MB deal they have. I think a Gig of memory will be plenty for me, and I've seen some sites that recommend you use multiple pieces of RAM instead of going for one big stick in case one of them goes bad. I don't know how true that is...sounds logical though.

Arkaine, thanks for the powersupply recommendation. And I'll definitely boost my cooling some...what's the cheapest I can safely go on that? I assume I could add more cooling mechanisms later if I decided to overclock my board right? At this point I'm just going to stick with the stock settings I think...though I'm sure I'll change my mind at some point. I did notice one review that showed that the Samsung memory couldn't function at anything under 3 CAS, which they implied was bad for overclocking I believe...but I don't really understand exactly what this means or if it's a major concern. :?

I appreciate all the pointers and suggestions.

nforce2 chipsets do get a small benefit from running two sticks of ram (dual channel), but its not nearly as much as they'd like to claim... something along the lines of +5% memory bandwidth. Not a big concern really.

Cheapest is to use the stock heatsink that comes with the retail 2600+. It'll work fine if your case is not stuffy and you are not upping the clock speed or cpu voltage. You could always upgrade the cooling later.

The memory cas rating is a factor of timing, or rather delay between certain memory operations. Running at cas 2.5 is pretty standard, running at cas 2 is even better. Make sure to get PC3200 so if you ever do want to overclock, you can take that CPU up to 3200+ speed by upping the FSB to close to 200.

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Originally Posted by gowator

knoppix supports 4GB out of the box (or off the cd to be accurate) and this leaves you a further slot....

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When did they add Himem in the knoppix kernel? I've been playing with 3.2 all this time which only support up to 1GB, unless you recompile it... Is himem built into the kernel used in 3.3?

Yep, HIMEM support was added in 3.3

However I question whether its really worth it for 1GB since you gain 1024-868 MB which adds the extra overhead for the paging...

Still I paid for a GIG ill use it :D

So far as I know the HIMEM is EITHER 4GB or 16GB ....
Running with a GIG implies implicitly the 4GB HIMEM support was compiled in....

champagnemojo: The price is dropping fast and the AMD64-FX is pushing down the price of the non-FX stuff. The mobo's are still a bit more but the lower end 64 bit ones are not much more than their 32 bit cousins.

Give it a month or so and they 'should' be less than your paying right NOW....

The perfomance hit on not threading the mem is prety minimal and IMHO well worth leaving yourself an option later.... my appt is littered with redundant small chips!!!

Thanks alot gowater...thanks to your post I did a little searching on Athlon 64 cpu's and now I'm beginning to think I should just wait a little and go with the 3000 version of that. It's double what i was gonna pay for the 32-bit processor...but I guess it would be nice to be a little ahead of the technology game for once. :lol:

I'm guessing that the motherboards that are new enough to support 64-bit are not going to be likely to support my ancient 4x AGP nVidia TNT2 video card though. So I'll probably have to upgrade that too. :roll:

Shouldn't be a problem ??
They will probably support PCI-X but also support AGP....

I's give it another month, the prices are dropping real fast...
This way will at least give you a bit more future proofing...

My thoughts are why buy now andkick myself in 6 months when everone but me (OK not everyone) is using 64 bit.

Im actually thinking of getitng an Operteron 2m way... possibly the cheapest, or next to cheapest available so I can add a second when the prices start to drop further....

The 64 bit is a prety big quantum leap so its not like changing from a 2000 to a 3000 .... its going to be like 486-pentium ....
If you remember (or are old enough) this was also when vesa bus gave way to PCI bus. Although PCI-X has been available on servers for a while its likely to be more common place.... and it will be like buying old RAM, you end up paying more for a obsolete RAM than you do for the latest and greatest.... (try buying 72 pin RAM now and youll see what I mean :D)

Champagnemojo- One thing I'd to mention is I checked your two choices and I noticed one of them has a mail-in rebate, personally I'd avoid those like a bad disease, or if you do buy something with a mail-in rebate assume the price without the rebate. I used to work for a large chain and they pushed mail-ins like crazy. Also watched a program and the bottom line is that only 40% of rebate customers do actually get their money. All it is is a legal scam IMHO. As far as CPU choices ....AMD, AMD, AMD. Right now I'm building a Celeron 2.4 system, just to try out. Then it's Athlon64 here I come!!! Right now the Athlon64 3000+ is looking pretty good and in a month it'll look even better!!!! :D .

gowater, though I'm pretty young I remember back before the 486 actually, but I've never looked into hardware. I've always just bought pre-built systems from a local shop and such. So I have a lot to learn in that department...and appreciate any recommendations. As far as my old video card, it seems like some mobos support older AGP cards and some don't. I didn't see any notices about it on the 2 Athlon64 motherboards I've looked at so far. So maybe I'm ok.

desire, getting back rebates depends on what center they go to and how persistent you are at making sure you get them. I've had good luck, but you do have to get on them if they try to suddenly "lose" your entry. :roll: There have been cases where I've forgotten to send them in though. :x

Yeah, the 3000+ does look good...do you guys really think it'll go down in price significantly in a month or two?