Immortal

Hey Alec, If you want the fastest and greatest, then the Athlon-FX 51 is the way to go, but will set you back a hellova lot and you must ONLY use ECC RAM with it, which slows it down. If you want the best P4 rig possible, then go and get a Pentium 4 Extreme Edition. It runs @ 3.2Ghz and has 2MB of L3 cache along with the normal 512K od L2 cache. It has been proven to be the fastest P4 in ANY game, that extra L3 cache helps it along well. one more thing, you wont be able to get to 4Ghz without watercooling AT LEAST, and even then its unlikley. After 3.8Ghz your aproching the chip limit really and the people that do go over this speed usually have tested so many different chips to find the best silicon! I agree with Mr Guvernment on the Radeon 9800XT. It is by far better than the FX5950 and is the best DX9 card out there. The Asus variants also come with a good HSF that will provide you with overclocking potential. I beleive Doom II uses OpenGL 1.4 or 2.0 im not sure, but the Radeons do excel in everything. True nVidia has DoomIII optomizations, but that usually means a few more FPS and sometimes, less image quality. Personally i dont mind sacrificing a few FPS in doom III for better quality card and a better card for other games. On the RAM issue, PC4200 RAM with operates @ 533Mhz is good for overclocking when in Dual Channel mode, as you can get very high frequencies. You would do fine with PC3200 which operates @ 400Mhz, but that would mean no OC'ing. With PC4200 it gives you 66Mhz (133 DDR) of FSB overclocking room, which is worth it. To sum it all up, get a Pentium 4 Extreme Edition, Asus Radeon 9800XT 256MB and PC4200 RAM (but stay away from OCZ, issues arise with the Max3). Hope this helps.

Sorry, it double posted...

yes but the new Asus is the XT version, 3Mhz extra core speed over default 9800XT and 10Mhz extra on the RAM, so not much! Default 9800 pro speeds are 378 Core and 338 RAM, ATI rounds it to 380Core and 340 RAM, but thats is what it really is.

yeah thats about right....

Core: 380Mhz, Mem: I think its 680!

Call of Duty, new game ROCKS badly. Halo is also very good, but does get boring....

I just ran PCMark 2002 with my setup and only got a HHD score of 1720, is this normal? http://service.futuremark.com/compare?pcm=1621683

I reccomend getting a 2.4C and overclocking that, you can acheive MUCH higher FSB's and remember FSB means faster RAM access which means faster system performance. If your going for the Max3 mobo, as i did, make sure you do NOT get OCZ PC4000 or PC4200 RAM. They have very bad issues with this board. Also the board has issues with VDIMM over 2.8v (currentley being investigated). The VTT, which should ALWAYS be half the VDIMM drops to around 1.3 when going over 2.8v, thats why OCZ ram has problems, it likes higher volts. Thats why im using Geil Ultra Platinum Series PC4200 Dual Channel, it is very fast RAM. Stock FSB of 266Mhz, 533DDR, which means that your RAM probably wont be your bottleneck. Note with this RAM, you cant get very high GAT settings, saying this, if you want high overclocks you wouldnt really enable GAT anyways. Your system looks very good, im baffled as to why you arent getting 2 raptors and putting them into RAID 0 and watching them take off! My 2 seagates in RAID 0 absolutley fly! My current rig, see sig, absolutley flies, even at stock i can beat many overclocked systems, both athlons and P4's in 3DMark 2003. For example it beats Sapiens74's overclocked setup by around 700 3DMarks in 3DMark 2003 and mines still @ stock (Ok i do have a 9800 Pro)! The max3 is definatley the best mobo for the P4 money can buy!

Only overclockers need higher frequency RAM. Currneltey i have the highest possible, with DDR533, PC4200. Timings dont matter with i875P and i865PE chipsets, studies show a 3Mhz increase in FSB can overcome the difference between CL2.5 and CL2.

Norton Personall Firewall 2003 is awesome. Have never looked back, Couple it with NAV Corp 8 and you have an unbeatable combo!

Nav Corp 8 here too, i have found it to be much faster and better than NAV 2004, its now on all my machines.

Some may be archived in some form of compression. I know the plextor Premium CD-RW can bun 1Gig onto 700MB CD's by using a special GigaRec technology...

The best thing you could do is take the HSF apart and re-apply some thermal compound... are you using thermal compound or the thermal interface pad?

Check the fan RPM using some Windows utility (MBM 5 is a good 1), MBM will also tell u the default voltage of the chip and so on...

If its stable theres not much to worry about. Also are you running it stock voltage or giving it extra voltage...

could u tell us what cooling you are using and what motherboard....

when i get my rig in my sig, (any day now), il take the thermal pad off, and apply some thermal grease, as it is MUCH better conductor of heat.

if its using cheap cooling or stock cooling then those temps are bang on perfect for those type of cooling, especailly if its a Palomino core...

This is because usually the majority of USB modems use the CPU cycles to do their workloads, which means even if ur not doing anything the modem may be doing something and hence usin CPU cycles.

Radeon 9800XT or radeon 9800 Pro Best on the planet, currentley available in 256MB versions (all XT's are 256 and some Pro's) and 128MB versions. ALL have dual heads, 1 VGA 1 DVI, with a VGA-DVI converter too!

ive heard that a low level format may be able to fix the bad sectors, however i am not sure....

The entire Radeon series of cards support T&L as do the Geforce 256 range of cards. However, the Geforce 256 cards's T&L is too slow/old for Halo, so its not supported. Also make sure you have latest drivers, as performance will be much better.

I seem to have heard, that when, on some I875P boards, u put in 4GB of RAM, pnly 3.6GB of it would be useable, this is a known issue with some 875P boards, as the other 400MB is reserved space for PCI, Audio or something?? ;( Xeons already have Hyperthreading enabled so that cancels out. And your only left with PAT and the 800FSB. 800FSB does affect perforamce a lot, (up to 20% between a P4 2.4 533 and an 800FSB variant) and PAT decreases memmory latency! Doom III and Half Life 2 have hyperthreading optomisations.. so both will be ok. Photoshop and stuff, wont really metter as Hyperthreading would still enable the P4 to be SMP. In the end u got P4 HT which will be 2 CPU's to Windows and Xeons HT which will be 4 CPU's to windows. This means that ul need a OS capable of 4 CPU's if u wantr to use the Xeons to their FULL advantage, and only Windows 2000/2003 Server can do that or Linux. If the Xeons have large caches, 1MB+ then the Xeons it MUST be, if they have 512k, then its really ur choice. P.S The new Intel P4 Extreme Edition is just an upped Xeon

if the FPS are constanly over 100 then it doesnt matter. The human eye cant sense over 60-70FPS, so u wont notice a difference in gaming...

What you have to do is just copy the game files over, not to install it. Just copy the game files over and it will work, i have tried it!