Tong Family

AnandTech says there news on a couple of fronts that are going to change recommendations quite a bit for this month, so if you haven’t bought wait a small tick
AMD is announcing Winchester 90nm socket-939 low-end Athlon 64s! That is pretty amazing. According to the “board”:http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.aspx?catid=40&threadid=1400299&enterthread=y newegg.com has them for $170 for the 3000+ (running at 1.8GHz, 9x multiplier) and $220 respectively (2.0GHz, 10x multiplier). That’s not expensive at all compared with the older 754. Main issue is that according to “AMDZone”:http://www.amdzone.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=Sections&file=index&req=viewarticle&artid=63&page=1 the new Winchester 3000+ at 1.8GHz is about the same speed as the older Newcastle 2800+ also running at 1.8GHz. So what a conumdrum, which one to go with. The pricings are now essentially identical. The main problem is the the Winchester 3000+ overclocks to 2.0 GHz while the Newcastle 2800+ overclocks to 2.2GHz so will be faster and is cheaper for right now.
Second news is that “enquirer”:http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=18800 reports that the new nForce4 motherboards will ship October 19. If you can’t wait then its the MSI Neo2 Platinum for socket 939 and DFI LANParty UT Nf3 250 (if you can get it) for socket 754.
That being said, the other recommendations remain pretty much the same except for the power supply:
* _Power Supply_. Also, in their overclocking tests, they found that going from a 460 watt to a monster 520 watt power supply made a big difference, so more power is in order. Why? Well, it means more stability in the actual voltage as you move up. They had a good experience with OCZ 520. I’ll have to see how loud these things are. I have a True Power 540 for our server and it is pretty quiet but not ultra.
* _Memory_. They found the OCZ 3200 Platinum Rev. 2 was fastest at both DDR400 and it also achieved the highest 1T speed that we found in our tests. This also means the highest performance possible.
* _Optical_. Finally, they did a review of the BenQ DW-1620 and liked it as long as it had the latest firmware build.
* What shouldn’t change, well the case and the hard disk looks about the same recommending the Coolcases Chenbro 610 and the Western Digital WD740GD drive for speed or the Samsung Spinpoint 1612N for quiet and big.