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Originally Posted by matm347
Well, the AM2 socket has not shown any improvement at all as the DDR2 speeds are not what they need to be. Intel has finally gotten better, but still needed to be overclocked to over 4Ghz (which it does pretty easily)
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A 4GHz P4 will not beat a mid-range Athlon 64 in most gaming applications. I don't know what benchmarks you'be been looking at, but you've been misinformed. It would be comparable to a 2.0GHz to 2.5GHz Athlon 64, depending on the game. Intel's new processors, on the other hand, appear to be ready to topple AMD's advantage at stock speeds. Granted, AM2 is coming out sooner and there will be some more clock boosts and no one knows for sure what performance change the new socket will bring, but Intel's next generation does not need to be overclocked (nor clocked that high at all) to beat AMD gaming performance by a considerable margin. That's assuming Intel didn't do something funky to the AMD system they tested on at IDF.
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Originally Posted by matm347
the slower DDR2 has quite a bit to do with this. And if Intel sticks with their track record, they will need probably 2 or 3 different chipsets for the new line.
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DDR2 isn't really slower anymore (the speeds have gotten to the point where it can make up for the latencies and the high DDR overclocks), and it has absolutely nothing to do with the performance difference. If you can remember back to when LGA775 came out, DDR and DDR2 performance tests were run on just about every site and they showed less than 5% difference in 95% of applications, and not all of them were in DDR1's favor.
Regardless, I suppose I can understand why you don't want to wait. You might be sorry when you next upgrade and your RAM, processor, and motherboard are all obsolete, but I can certainly understand why you wouldn't want to wait. That said, I suggested that because you would only be waiting about one month before the socket was available (game comes out March 20th, AMD2 comes out late April last time I checked).
As for your actual choices, there's no major problem with DFI SLI board, although the new Crossfire boards have some very interesting advantages that make it a tough choice in some ways. However, Crossfire itself is not one of those advantages. Unless you use a widescreen monitor or regular LCD (Crossfire is debilitating on a regular 4:3 CRT due to its refresh rate limitation) and want unusable performance at a ridiculous price, Crossfire doesn't make sense. If you did need that kind of performance, then using an LCD wouldn't make sense anyway because you would be capped at 60FPS. SLI is a much more feasible technology, but honestly neither are even remotely reasonable. Niether are useful on the mid-range and low-end, and on the high-end they're just overpriced. A single 7800GTX+ or X1800+ is all you're going to need for quite a while. The next generation of cards (along with the spiritual DX10 and Vista) should be out before the performance of SLI/Crossfire is worth paying for.
Basically I would say don't try to match up the brands of the video cards with the brands of the motherboard chipset. You are really unlikely to use SLI or Crossfire. It has consistently been much more economical to buy a new high-end card than to go with a mid-range SLI card or last-gen SLI upgrade, and I don't expect that to change. Although the 6800GS comes really close, with the added power requirements and the cost of an SLI board it basically tied its high-end counterparts (mainly the 512MB 7800GTX) for performance and price. I wouldn't expect more of that, though. If you're thinking of Crossfire as upgrade option I'd also recommend against that not just because it's probably not going to be economically feasible (cheaper to sell the old card and buy a new one than to buy another of the old), but because the next generation will feature hardware support for WGF2.0 (a.k.a DirectX 10). Unlike the last gen (last two from nVidia) supporting DX9.0C, which was an improvement, but now huge, WGF2 hardware support will basically be the next big must-have as it will be required for a lot of thing in Vista and WGF2-based games right away (as opposed to PS3 in DX9.0c, which is only used in a few games and recieved late adoption by developers).