- last post: 01.01.0001 12:00 AM PDT
Just a few more things to note:
The Athlon FX processors are currently not the 'best' gaming processors, they only support ECC Registered memory, which is more expensive and not as fast as Unregistered memory (but less error prone, the chip core and motherboard was designed for the Opteron, a server chip)
The absolute 'best' at the moment is the Pentium 4 Extreme Edition 3.4GHz.
When the Athlon FX is shifted to the Socket 939 package, and the memory controller and motherboards start supporting unregistered memory, then you'll start to see a bigger speed gain. Improvements may come when you can get a 64bit operating system and drivers as well, but that won't be until the end of the year at least.
(All that said, the differences are fairly minute for most games, of the order of 5%)
Also, on graphics cards, Radeons have, for the past couple of generations, been the ones to go for, as their 24bit colour precision and their almost lossless Anisotropic Filtering and low-loss Antialiasing ensure that they perform better at high resolutions than nVidia cards. (although Gearbox reccommend not using AA/AF on Halo)
The latest model of GeForce does have more future-proof functionality, with the full 32bit colour precision and support for Shader Model 3.0, but currently ATI hold the performance crown.