Athlon64 (939) nvidia and ATI

[mrmax]

I’m building a game sys for my son, I am considering the following:
Athlon 64 3000 (939)
MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum (NVIDIA nForce3 Ultra)
1gig Mushkin PC3500 Level 1DDR2 memory

The video card is a hard decision. I want to keep the price under $200.
My initial idea was to match the MB nvidia chipset, with a Nvidia Geforce card.
I am thinking there is a performance/reliability bonus that is little discussed when you match the MB chipset and the Nvidia video card.
However to the best of my knowledge, the only seriously fast Nvidia card in my price range is the Geforce FX5900XT 128m for about $175 (overclocked, it is suppose to be almost as fast as the Ultra).
Unfortunately the 5900 is year old technology, and the next new games will not run that great on it.

Nvidia has released the new 6600 PCI-E which is suppose to be an incredible fast video card beating all ATI’s in the $150-$180 price range. The problem I don’t want to switch to P4 3.2 to get a PCI-E MB.
*The 6600 are already out and you can find 2 examples at Pricewatch.com. There won’t be a AMD MB with PCI-E for 2 or 3 months.

Here are my questions:
1. Has anyone seen a review with ATI cards in my price range with a MB NVIDIA nForce3 Ultra chipset?
2. What ATI card would you recommend in my price range $150-$199? Faster than the 5900XT
3. Is anyone aware of a benefit in matching the Nvidia chipset with a Nvidia video card?
4. Is it worth switching to a P4 3.2 with PCI-E MB to gain PCI-E and the Nvidia 6600 card?
(mainly switching to gain PCI-E, to have a very upgrade-able MB for future upgrades)


Thanks

[zybch]

I'm about to get exactly the same motherboard and a 3500+ CPU. I believe that the socket 939 compatible CPUs start at 3400 or 3500, not 3000, so you might need to pay a bit more for an appropriate CPU (I could be wrong though).
The biggest drawback with the NEO2 PE is the lack of PCI Express slots so you can't use many of the more recent cards.
You should be able to pick up a good 9800pro or even an XT.
nVidia or ATI depends on the games you are planning to run. nVidia cards do better with open GL and the Doom3 engine iin particular, AIT cards are better at Direct 3D and Half-Life 2 in particular.
I'd probably stick with ATI as the majority of games use Direct 3D now, not open GL, especially since microsoft announced a unified graphics library thingy to enable easy porting of PC and Xbox games to either platform.

[JediOfDarkness]

First off, AMD has started making the 3000 and 3200 in socket 939. Why I'm not too sure, but they have. As for a good card, I would go with the R9800 Pro or XT. It won't be able to compete with the 6800's and X800's, but that's the best you can do for under $200 without getting a 6600/6600GT. If you could dish out a little more you could go with the 6800 standard. As for if matching an nVidia nForce chipset with a nVidia GeForce card gives you any preformance boost, the answer is no pretty much. As of the latest benchmarks the new VIA K8T800 Pro chipset is actually faster than the nForce3 250GB anyway, so you might actually consider getting an Asus A8V Deluxe or MSI K8T Neo2-FIR mobo, as they come with the K8T800 Pro chipset.
Also, ditch that PC3500 memory and get PC3200 instead. You will get no preformance boost from getting PC3500 over PC3200 unless you plan to OC your CPU. Go for some good DDR400 with low memory timings, like 2.5-3-3 and you can't go wrong.

Edit:
Also, don't stray from that AMD64, it will be much better than going with a P4. BUT, be SURE that you have two chips of memory (ie two 512mb chips to = 1gb), that way it will run in dual channel mode. Otherwise you will not get near as good of preformance in games.

[Yoshi]

http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=14-145-096&depa=1

If you can add $60 to your price you can get this, it is better then any other card you listed, and will work in AGP

[zybch]

I wasn't aware that a 3000 and 3200 were being made in 939 packages. Beats me why they bothered.

The Aathlon CPUs don't benefit anywhere near as much from dual channel as the Intel CPUs do. I'm expecting a 2-3% boost but nothing more.
With an Intel system you'll get a bigger change but this is generally because the Intel chips and their hideously long pipelines need every little bit of help they can get :)

At the moment, PCI Express has NO benefits over AGP (a couple of percent that just isn't noticeable), but a lot of the new cards are PCIx only which is quite annoying.

[ShadeZeRO]

If you want low timing ram dont forget to checkout GEIL or Crucial/Mushkin

GEIL GD Series PC3500 is CAS 2.0 3-3-6 timings...

[porsch1909]

Originally posted by zybch
I wasn't aware that a 3000 and 3200 were being made in 939 packages. Beats me why they bothered.

The Aathlon CPUs don't benefit anywhere near as much from dual channel as the Intel CPUs do. I'm expecting a 2-3% boost but nothing more.
With an Intel system you'll get a bigger change but this is generally because the Intel chips and their hideously long pipelines need every little bit of help they can get :)

At the moment, PCI Express has NO benefits over AGP (a couple of percent that just isn't noticeable), but a lot of the new cards are PCIx only which is quite annoying.

i have heard that agp is faster than pci express in some cases. only marginally not noticable to anybody.

[JediOfDarkness]

APG 8X is currently faster than PCI-E 16X. Todays games and graphics cards do not require the extra lanes of bandwith, so they're just being wasted as of now. But getting an SLI capable PCI-E card would be a good choice. I'm not sure if the 6600's will be SLI capable, but if so, wait a little while until the nForce4 boards roll out to get an AMD64 with PCI-E and get one. Then later on (if you get a nForce4 SLI board) throw another 6600 in there and SLI 'em. Be as good or better as getting a next generation card of that time.

[Yoshi]

The 6600GT is SLI capable

[causticVapor]

Good news is that a 6600GT is faster than a 9800 pro in many instances - with half as wide a memory bus. A testament to the architecture.

As more and more cards become PCIe only, the move to it will make sense. AGP is on its way out. And the scalability is a nice thing too.

3000+ and 3200+ for s939 are all 90nm AFAIK.

[lazerbeam]

I just finished building a nearly an AMD64 3000+ system for my daughter with a 754 socket. I selected an Giga-byte GA-K8NS Pro board. I've used MSI boards in the past and its been a mixed bag as to quality & performance and included features. (I'm this will raise the hackles on some MSI board users, but this is truly my personal experience with 3 of their mother boards.) This is the 4th machine I've built with using the Nvida chipset. In three I've used ATI-based (9600 chip set) graphics cards with absolutely no problem. The forth was an Nvida based board. All worked well. The ATIs included an OEM board, a Sapphire tech and a Color Plus brand. The Color Plus seems to actually be all ATI (board, cooling fan, chips, etc), but much better priced. You can find this brand at zipzoomfly.com although I'm sure there are other vendors have it as well. But to answer the main part of you question, there seems to be no advantage or disadvantage in using either type of graphics chip-set with Nvidia based controller chips. Since the AGP controller chipset must comply with the AGP standard(s) the real difference is in how the graphics processing on the video card is implemented. Nvida and ATI use different graphics processing approaches. One might do a little better than another is different types of rendering, but all-in-all they are fairly comperable in overall performance.