About a week ago I would of come into this thread touting the AMD set up for it is all I have ever used, aside of one PIII 500 my wife is still using today.
But 4 days ago I talked myself into buying a
E4300 for $115 shipped
A Asrock 4coredual-Vsta open box for $38 shipped
And a 1gig stick of Kingston DDR2 667 ram for $19.99 shipped
from Newegg, all thanks to a kick ass garage sale I had that weekend.
At stock the E4300 was slightly faster then my AMD A64 939 4000+ running a X1900GT overclocked @ 600/720, by a few hundred points in 3dmark 2001, 2003, and 2005.
Last night and today I been playing around with the system trying to find a stable FSB that is happy all around and did so far @ 280 FSB up from 200, running the chip at 2.5.
At 280 FSB I went from a overclocked graphics score on a 4000+ stock of 24520, to 30K+
And at a 310FSB stable only in 2001 for some reason, 2003 & 2005 have artifact this high, I got a score of over 33K in 2001.
And I havent even begun to try to overclock my X1900Gt on this board yet
So I say, if you can find a better performing AMD set up for $215, the Asrock 4coredual-vsta is no longer up for open box, just retail at $60, so its $215 for the same set up as I have now, that can take DDR2 and DDR, AGP, and PCI-E, and give you results as high as I have gotten, by all means do so.
I used to be a fan of my money going to AMD for they gave me best bang to buck ratio, not anymore. Intel is going to be getting my money for a little bit now it looks like with results like these
My 4000+ would go no higher then 2.6 from 2.4, and even at that couldnt come close to the performance I am getting with this cpu. Now I havent been able to try a dual core AMD chip yet, so I would like to see someone pop in here with there over clocking results and show me why I should go back to giving my money to AMD right now. I am super impressed with this chip, with the performance factor, to the heat sink that came with it. The HSF doesnt look all generic, and has a very cool attachment clip set up on it. OH and talk about running cool, it never broke 50c at 315fsb and at 280 stays at 45c under a load, and Im using the thermal paste that was attached to the hsf when I got it, should be even colder when I take that off and run some good stuff on there
Anyway, with that kind of perfomance gain, Im off to go see what I can get my card to do, and see what all it will do with real games later
Best sub $200 I have spent so far.