Legit Reviews

Just paying tribute to the masters of this forum and websites. oh yeah, I am new and planning to building my second computer this summer. I have a dilemma as to what to do. I got my CoolerMaster CM Stacker case(not 830), but currently deciding whether to wait and buy conroe/AM2 and the new mobos. Or get the Asus P5WD2-E (975x) Premium and a Intel D or EE when the price drops, and upgrade to conroe in the future. I am neutral with AMD VS INTEL, price concern, but would like to get some insights. Here are the list:

CM Stacker
DVD writer
Seasonic 600 PSU
nividia 7900 GT
Western Digital Caviar 250GB (maybe Raptoer 150, depending on CPU/MOBO)
OCZ Gold PC2-5400 2 GB
XP pro.....I will wait for 1 year after release before upgrading to vista.

currently I have a dell 830 notebook and can't play Oblivion.

my advice for now is to get the ASUS P5WD2 and an Intel 920 processor and overclock it 4GHz+ with some good DDR2 800MHz memory.

I don't believe any company has labeled their board Conroe "ready", so buying a board now and waiting for conroe might be silly.

If you can wait for conroe then wait, but if you want something for a decent price I'd go the overclocking route

Oh and welcome to the forums! Hope you stick around and post often.

I agree with Nate here. The 920 at $+GHZ will scream, and give you plenty of CPU power until Conroe comes. Conroe looks VERY promising indeed, I am hopeful that the release will be sooner than later. It is the first Intel chip in awhile that has me thinking about switching back to Intel.

Welcome!

Thanks for the input. on Asus (you have to go to P5WD2-E Premium page) and especially Gigabyte website, they are posting some boards that are supposed to be ready for conroe.

AMD is also suppose to release more info on AM2 next week. I can't wait till someone do a sidebyside comparison betwn AM2 and Conroe without interferance from Intel/AMD.

I will probably go with the route Apoptosis pointed out. Overclocking is the way to go.

I've heard mixed stuff about socket AM2 this past week. For starters AMD canceled their Rev F editors day and then a friend of mine was telling me about how the memory latency on DDR2 impacts AMD more than Intel due to the Cas Latency and the memory controller being on the processor. Since the majority of DDR2 is CL4 and CL5 that means the AMD processors would have this cas latency hit on the die. My source says that for AMD to overcome this hurdle they need low latency DDR2 memory and 800MHz memory speeds to get the performance numbers they desire. This all makes since to me when I think about it. I have contacted a number of memory companies that do have socket AM2 platforms and have been testing them for months and they say this is not the case.

On one side people in AMD are playing down their upcoming part and giving reasons why and then when I go to confirm those reasons other companies say it's not an issue....

Socket AM2 will be interesting and like you stated in your post I can't wait to do my on benchmarking and see what exactly the deal is. When I can talk about it I will.

I'll shoot a guess out there and say moving over to DDR2 will yield a 2-5% difference in perfomance when using the latest enthusiast grade memory.

Anyway welcome to the forums again I'm done with the rant.

Welcome to LRForums!!!!

It's always great when new members take the time to introduce themselves!!
Stick around.........

good. something to chase. how can i case u if i cant hear u?

Welcome
The hatter is not mad!
Don't forget the water cooling for that stacker