FS2K2 : i850 or i865 or i875 ?

[Guest Dominique]

The basic choice now, for those of us who are in the process of acquiring a new system and are Intel-oriented is threefold- a i850 hyperthreaded system, still the top choice last week with prices bound to fall :9- a Canterwood system faster and then tantalizing but a lot more expensive (a nice config looks like over 4000

[Noel]

Well, I needed an upgrade before the 875 was out, and went the Granite Bay route with the ASUS P4G8X Deluxe with 1GB of Crucial PC2700 DDR running at CAS 2 no problem. I chose the inexpensive 2.53MHz cpu without hyperthreading, and the system is ultra-stable at 3040MHz. The machine runs FS2002 very well indeed and stays locked at 25 FPS IN ALL CONDITIONS virtually: night, day, with Falcon 50, FSFMax, ActiveSky, FlightDeck Companion, and is super smooth. Memory bandwith is higher than the 850e's (when this system is overclocked as it is now at FSB 160). I use the ATI Radeon 9700 Pro with AGP 8x and fast-writes enabled with no troubles in any game. I run SOFII, FS2002, TW2003, and Unreal II The Awakening. All run flawlessly with no lockups ever. I am using Win2K so I cannot use hyperthreading anyway.I only mention this as I do believe Granite Bay based systems are still quite a decent choice, certainly I would choose this over i850. The ASUS board comes stock with gigabit LAN, SATA Raid, 6 channel audio which is just dandy, firewire, USB2, etc. This board is very overclocking friendly. I chose the Swiftech MCX4000 with Papst 80mm fan which is about 10 degrees C cooler than the stock intel HSF, and is actually quieter. This HSF is a best of class device. This system also makes perfect sense because the internal bandwidth of the P4 perfectly matches that of the FSB. My next CPU upgrade will be whatever intel maxes the 533 MHz fsb P4s to. I'm not sure if that will be 3.2GHz or more (which should overclock to close to 3.85GHz with any luck on this testbed).The ASUS P4G8X Deluxe now sells for $170. Noel