Which is best for gaming

Hello i have posted a prob in the cooling forums if u can help but anyway its time to get my new pc

herd lots of different things with regards to AMD and P4 was just wondering which one u guys think is best for a gaming machine.

I am gonna build it myself so price is not too imporant as it will be done over several months "plenty of saving £££ time"

any suggestions on mobo and cpu's would be great

If cost is no object, the Athlon 64 is probably the fastest money can buy. On a more realistic cost level, The P4 might be a bit faster than a comperable athlon xp, but costs more. The P4c's are very overclockable as well, esp the 2.4 and 2.8.
For gaming, the video card is usually more important than the cpu, especially at higher resolutions. The nvidia fx6800 is currently fastest by a wide margin, though ati's newest should close that gap in a couple weeks. Slightly cheaper, the Radeon 9800xt. Cheaper still, but still very good, the 9800 pro can run any current game at high resolution, though farcry with "ultra high" settings will bog down a bit. (Hello overclocking again...)
Motherboard wise, I have built P4's with MSI and ABIT, both with good results. MSI has more clearly labeled pins, so if you're new to this, that might be a factor. A friend is using ASUS, also with a P4, and likes it a lot. No experience with amd's. Tomshardware.com has some big motherboard reviews, as does anandtech.com
HTH

Yo!

I would go for AMD Athlon XP 2000+ - 2800+, on a GigaByte K7 TRITON GA-7N400 Pro2 board, great for gaming.
SATA/IDE/ATA RAID, DUAL BIOS, Dual DDR400, S/PDIF, 5.1, LAN, AGP8X, ATA133, 6 USB2.0

Im in the same scenario. Im going for that example, and a ATI Radeon 9600XT 256MB.

Hope this helps ya!

buy at least fx5900!

I agree. The 5900 or radeon 9800 pro are the minimum I would look at for serious gaming, and both are quite inexpensive now.

i doubt he will find (Sapphire) Radeon 9800 pro for the price of new (MSI) fx5900... maybe some already used card in good condition, if he has luck... at least in my country prices are like that.

I would suggest that you get an Athlon xp as getting a 64bit processor is pretty pointless since there are hardly any 64bit applications around

I would suggest gettin an Abit mainboard and a Radeon graphics card

it is maybe pointless now, but when the time comes, he will change only software, which is much easier than hardware... i suggest a64.

regarding motherboards, Epox is my choice, although Abit is also very nice.

ditto on the 64. Not sure what you meant about pricing, vinyl. Newegg has 9800 pro for much cheaper than the 5900. Either one is a good card though.

On a side note, I recently upgraded my video card, motherboard and ram and found: absolutely no perceivable increased performance for any of my games. However, Reaktor is using about 1/3 of the CPU it was under the older configuration so I am nonetheless very pleased with my upgrade.

-- edit --

details: from P4-1.8 to P4-2.4; from a 32MB Geforce2 to 64MB Geforce4, 333 FSB to 800FSB, and 512 to 1GB DDRAM. I am at work (yeah yeah) so I don't have the actual model #s.

One thing that does work better: High Heat Baseball 2004. On the old system (which more than met the specs itself) it froze after the opening video and I had to reboot. It works now on the new computer (not that I really care, since MVP baseball also works and it's much better). Also worth noting: everything else worked splendidly on the 1.8GHz configuration just fine anyway, so what was I expecting to work better? Dunno ...

You're happy, so no need to change anything, but you still don't have much of a graphics card, which could hold you back from much improvement. That said, if it was running at good framerates, increasing the hardware won't make any percievable difference. It should, however, allow you to play at higher graphics settings with the same performance. Older games that worked fine would still work fine, its just when you try to install farcry or something that the small video card will hold you back.

Get a 3DLABS WILDCAT VP990 512MB, AGP8X

No thats not a typo, thats not system RAM, this card has 512MB Onboard memory, go see for ya selves, site dosent state weather its ATI or nVidia based chipset or not, its down to about $500 commercial

If you want to get a nVidia GeForce FX card, the FX5950 is the best at the moment, but some company has a card which is 6XXX, cant remeber though, could be Gigabyte, should check,

That is not a gaming card, it is a professional 3d workstation card, and is very unsuited for gaming applications look here: http://www.lostcircuits.com/video/3dlabs_vp990/6.shtml for a review. Don't buy it for play. The nVidia GeForce 6800 has just come out, its currently the fastest thing going, though ati has its next card coming out in the next couple weeks. Anyone thinking of a top-line gaming card should wait till then to see comparative reviews.