Upgrading from intel to AMD, any suggestions?

Question

Im somewhat new to computers, and i got my Dell a little more than a year ago, not realizing what a huge mistake I made. Recently I have been getting into online gaming, like StarCraft and Rainbow Six 3, and have realized how much my Pentium 4 sucks compared to my best friends Athlon 3400. After little play time, my computer sounds like its about to explode and gets ultra laggy to where I cant do anything, so I have to shut it down and let it rest. After some research I decided that im going to build my own computer probably with the Athlon 3800 dual processor but I dont have a lot of money and am trying for under a $400 budget. Some people say the 3800 dual is going to have a huge price drop soon from $150 at newegg.com within the next 2-3 months, but i have no idea. Anyone know about this? I would like to be able to play recent games, and was wondering if anyone has any suggestions for decent processors. I want something that wont get outdated for atleast 4 years. Thanks

Answer 1

Same questions again and again. I can't help you but have a look at this question I asked for more info:

Are AMD Processors really worthy?

And I will look at yours for more answers!

Don`t make a wrong move.

Answer 2

Alrighty, first off yeah, buy some RAM. Windows XP's performance is more dependant on RAM than processor anyway.
Something else you might want to consider about the hard drive... If you want speed in that department, you are gonna need cash. There's no way around it. Consider a model made by Western Digital called the Raptor. It's an industrial grade drive with a serial ATA interface. Very fast, but also expensive, and only 150GB in the largest model. I think it's worth it though.

Your system memory and access/transfer speed of your hard drive are IMO crucial to a computer's performance. Processor and video card only come into play when you're gaming, video editing, or something extremely CPU intensive of that nature.

StarCraft does not support dual core or 64-bit.

Answer 3

4 years? That's a tall order! Most stuff that you build with now is obsolete in about a year! I just built a Dual-Core 3800+, Socket 939 Asus A8V mobo,2 Gig RAM, 250GB SATA II HDD, 120GB IDE HDD, EVGA 256MB AGP video card, Cooler Master "Centurion 5" case, and a Zalman CPU fan last year. And now a socket AM2 is out there! If you can wait till the end of this year, start saving your pennies, AMD is supposed to be coming out with a "Quad-Core" processor late this year. That would put you close to that 4 year mark, but who knows? Things change fast in the computer hardware end of things. As far as cost that has already occurred. The 3800+ x2 is $100 less than what I gave for it a year ago.

http://secure.newegg.com/NewVersion/Shopping/shoppingcart.asp?submit=view

Answer 4

There isn't anything that won't be outdated in four years. Ever hear of Moore's Law? It states that computing power doubles every 18 months, which means that the state of the art machine three years from now will be roughly four times as powerful as today's state of the art. Sorry, but that's reality.

Answer 5

How much ram do you have in your Dell? games require lots of ram.. if you don't have it, get it.. believe it or not, processors are basically the same.