Building Gaming Computer...Amd 3200+ good option???

[badninja3]

for about hte same price, u could get an opteron 144 from monarchcomputers.com. its about $114 but doesnt come with a heatsink or fan. so that might bump the price up, but u would probably want an aftermarket cooler anyway. plus opterons overclock like none other. ask the amish kid. he has a thread about his.

 

[PerfectSK]

Yeah, it looks good. It should game alrite as long as you got a good graphics card.

 

[alvino]

I ended up with the E4 version of the 3200+.. eh oh well. Still works great.

Alvino is right, my dad's workstation happens to have two 1gb sticks. One is a corsair 3200 and 2.5 cas, the other is a mushkin 3200 at 2.5 cas, and it runs in dual channel.

I don't know why my dad got 2 gigs of memory for that computer... it's not even used heavily.. just a 2.66ghz p4 with a geforcefx 5500.. no gaming.. nothing intensive.. just browsing the web and such..

As for not bottlenecking.. your not too far off, but not completely accurate.

Running half-life2 at 1600x1200 with 4xaa and everything else maxed (cept hdr, doesn't work with aa on nvidia cards..) the game runs smoothe, really nice. However, lowering the resolution and the aa does not improve performance much at all. It is the same with UT2004. It's most likely a CPU bottle neck.

Since your resolution is that high, just ditch AA and use HDR. At that resolution, you'll hardly notice the jaggies. That's a old trick I learned a while ago. A great way to get rid of jaggies without using AA is to jack up the resolution. In Day of Defeat: Source, I don't have my AA on at all, but since the resolution is at 1680x1050, I hardly notice any jaggies.