I knew I should have stuck with Intel.

So I purchase a brand new AMD X2 3800 processor - right? Making the uninformed assumption it was socket 939 - nope - AM2. Ordered my mobo - guess what I ordered - socket 939.. :-(

So now I have to RMA back to NewEgg wait for that to process, then figure out if I want to go through the hassle of sticking with AMD.

From what I have read about AM2, it is basically not worth the money to invest in. At least with Intel, I knew what I was getting myself into, but with AMD, I feel like the hardware is a case of voodoo to get anything to work.

Must be the universe or something today.

Should I just keep with the AMD or should I jump ship to a 9XX series processor and mobo???

Oceansvisions:

Any chance of returning CPU for a socket 939 instead of the mobo? I noticed on the AMD site that the X2 cpu's have both the AM2 and 939 sockets available. I just built a socket 939/AMD system earlier this year, and I love it - I think it's worth it, and I've been an Intel fan for years.

As far as RAM goes, go to crucial.com - they have a memory configurator on the site - plug in your cpu and mobo and it returns several levels of compatible memory.

The GPU - maybe someone else can answer in more detail, but as you know, Vegas does not require very much as far as graphics cards go. Now if your into gaming, a graphics card is a different story. Check out Johnnyroy's site for more info. (www.johnrofrano.com)

good luck

Frenchy

That MSI card is a really good deal. Astonishing value for less than $50.

It's got DirectX 9.0 Shader Model 3.0 Support and OpenGL 2.0 support, those two are key for any other helper apps you may use with Vegas, and perhaps with Vegas 7 also if the Madison guys got their thumbs out in time.

Choosing RAM is easier for AMD than for Intel, the latter uses more different memory types.

Crucial, OCZ, Corsair, etc. are great brands, just buy what you need at newegg instead to save good money, and be careful with the CAS settings (some are 5,5,5 which can slow things down a bit).

Ok, I'm down to either the Gigabyte GA-M55SLI-S4 Socket AM2 NVIDIA nForce4 SLI ATX AMD Motherboard which supports up to 16GB RAM or the ASUS M2N-E wich supports 8GB RAM - they are similarly priced. Any opinions on the Gigabyte? Supporting that much RAM is killer and it supports 4 PATA drives but as I said - I only have experience with Intel MoBo's matched with their CPU's.

I appreciate all who have the patience to answer this AMD n00b's inquiries...

Cliff

Oceansvisions, hang in there! You saved on the AMD X2 and you'll find that you will save alot of $$ on the memory chips because retailers are always offering deals on Intel cap/ memory chips. Just replace the MB with a AM2 socket. When AMD announces new X2's AM2 chips big jumps in performance, you'll have all the hardware needed.

Go with the Gigabyte board, that is a really good value.

The Asus has only one IDE cable (vs. 2) and no firewire (vs. 2, front and rear).

Alright - Gigabyte board is ordered, called NewEgg and they said no worries - just refuse shipment on the 939 socket board and they'll credit...

Next on the list is a vid card and then lastly, RAM...

what's your total budget if I may ask? Are you recycling parts to save money?

Yeah - I am recycling mainly the hard drives since I purchased them within the last 6 months.

Budget??? LOL - my budget is basically what I can find at the lowest price. Work has been kinda slow so the budget is tight currently and recently my trusty P4 machine has started acting up - It usually stays on 24/7 and recently have had some wonky things going on with random reboots, drives that quit working and are unrecoverable - stuff like that. I keep my machine free of crap software and am religious about firewall and AV scans each night as well as scheduled defrags.

I just recently threw together an old P3 600 with a RAID1 setup with a couple of Seagate 300GB drives as a backup file server on my network and run a scheduled backup on sunday nights.

Have had this sinking feeling recently that my hardware is getting pretty long in the tooth and would lilke to move a little more forward on hardware specs in anticipation for shooting HD.

As much as I would love to just plop down the $$$ for a nice setup, I'm not that flush currently hence all the questions on best bang for the buck.

On the topic of RAM - I'm confused on what the difference is between standard ram and dual channel...

I have my motherboaard arriving from NewEgg on Monday or Tuesday and now am looking at the RAM purchase - The mobo I am getting supports up to 16GB of RAM and has dual channel slots. Question is - regular ram or specific dual channel? I'm probably going with 2GB RAM - I was looking at Corsair XMS 2x1GB sticks - or is standard RAM going to work?

A little confused since NewEgg lists the Corsair ram as "GAMING" ram.

TIA,

Cliff

Dual channel RAM is tested as a pair, otherwise they are presumably tested as an individual stick.

Running RAM as dual channel lowers the headroom available slightly... theoretically, it's possible for individual sticks to test ok but not test ok when running dual channel. Realistically, the RAM you get will have lots of headroom before they become unstable... that's why people can get away with overclocking them 20% or whatever they happen to achieve. So it's quite unlikely that you'll get a bad stick of RAM. If you do, you should be able to RMA the stick.

2- The higher quality RAM can be run with lower timings... sometimes this is called "low latency". In a way, it's more or less like overclocking... like how Intel+AMD sells CPUs of various clock speeds. They bin all their parts to find the fastest-performing ones, then they set the part to a specific speed. The parts typically have lots of headroom in performance/stability since this lowers the chance of RMAs.

3- In practice, low latencies makes extremely little difference in performance for video editing. In my Vegas tests, there was no measurable difference.
http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?s=&threadid=18841

In other applications (like encoding), there may be a few percent difference in performance. However, you'd have to balance that out against the price premium on low latency RAM.

But the short story is... the differences are splitting hairs. I would just get some normal RAM that's from a brand name (i.e. Kingston, Corsair value select, Crucial, Mushkin, etc.).

For best performance, get *pairs* of *identical* RAM; they do not have to be marketed/sold as dual channel, you can just get multiple individual sticks if that happens to be cheaper.

Thanks for putting this into laymans terms.. :-)

Dual channel mode increases the bandwidth (and througput) for memory access. Here is a whitepaper about it.

The theoretical difference is that you can double memory throughput, but of course theoretical doesn't necessarily mean reality. But the difference can still be quite significant. One person tested and got the following resutls and discussion:

P4 1.8 northwood 1GB DDR (2 X 512)..@ stock (same channel)
Read = 1970mbs Write = 857mbs

1Gb DDR (2 X 512)..@ stock (dual channel)
Read = 2535mbs Write = 1015mbs

Dual channel is sort of a moot point, since you can do it with any RAM. Just get pairs of identical stuff, and put them in the right slots.
i.e. you have 2 sticks and 4 slots... half of the combinations won't give you dual channel operation.

2- In my own tests, I did get similar results for memory bandwidth figures. Real performance is affected by a few-several performance between dual channel and not dual channel.

I have been using the specs from Boxx to formulate my hardware config.

I already have the 2GB of RAM and when I went back to NewEgg to look at pricing for another 2GB set - the price had jumped $40.00. Now considering that 32bit win xp pro doesn't see more than 3gb of ram, is there any reason not to get an extra 1GB of RAM? I'm going to hold out for awhile after Vista gets released to at least Vista SP1.

I am trying to anticipate being able to upgrade more easily this time around hence the question - or should I make the jump for another 2GB of ram?

Boxx configs up to 4GB on their current NLE machines.

TIA,

Cliff

Before buying a 1GB set of RAM to put on top of your 2GB RAM, I would consult the mobo manual to make sure this combination works with their hardware. If it does, you should be fine with that.

I think those Boxx configs with 4GB RAM would (or should) have XP x64 installed. This operating system, with compatible hardware and drivers, is extremely stable and works great. Memory management is vastly improved over 32 bit windows. I wouldn't expect Vista to achieve the same level of stability for quite a long time.