Hi All,Thinking about upgrading my motherboard, not certain on what m/board & processor to upgrade to?Could anyone help with which is the better of the tow mentioned above? For

I'm very happy with my new system - it's got an Athlon 2500 overclocked to 3200, 1GB PC3200, and a Radeon 9800 Pro. I hardly ever drop below 20FPS in FS2004 at 1280X1024X32...As far as the cutting edge stuff goes right now, the Athlon 64 is definitely the way to go - it's expensive, but it does beat the Pentium 4 in most benchmarks...Ryan

Big Thumbs-Up from me too...I run an Athlon 2600XP(333mhz FSB) with 1.5gig of PC333 DDR Ram. Very good!! No complaints for now, lets just wait and see what else comes out that may mean I have to upgrade again... ;)As for FS2004, it's good on this system...it does drop frames at busy airports....what would you expect, but in flight, with pretty much all graphical goodies 'on', it runs very smooth at a steady 20fps (capped) I know I'm losing some performance here 'cause I really need to wipe the drive, re-install Windows (2000 Pro) and reload the game, but there's SO much in there, and I can't remember what half of it is, or where it all is......I'm really loath to do it!!Anyway, to get back to YOUR question...yep! that 2600 will do you just fine!! (Make sure that you specify the 333mhz Front Side Bus - better performance).

athalon 2400+xp asus a7v8x 1.25gb ram solid and stable for over a year now. only thing i'd change would be using faster ram than my 266 sticks. but this is fine with lots of

I got an Athalon 3000, and everything runs superb, sliders on full, good frates.--R-T-C--

The main difference that i can see is the price, the Athlon is very cheap in comparison, 64 excepted. i would not go for the amd 64 however as the intel 64 will be superior when it finally surfaces!in the mean time go for a P4 as they, in my opinion are more reliable, unlike the athlon they will not melt if say the cpu fan fails, for example. go for the hyper threading as well as in the future software should be written to take advantage of it....cheersJames

Go check out the benchmarks at Tom's Hardware guide and do some price checks. You will get objective info that way.

yep thats a good site, its where i saw the article on the temperature control difficulties of the athlon,James

>only thing i'd change would be using faster ram than my 266 sticks.http://www.hifisim.com/images/as2betateam.jpg

Stick with the Athlon. I've got an 1700 XP running fs2002 and it works much better than even a 2ghz P4.

Stay with AMD- I have three PCs in this house - mine with AMD 2000XP which runs FS9 very well- maintains frame rates at 25-30 most all the time. Also my wife's PC - AMD 1Ghz- never tried FS on it but over nearly 3 years been extremely reliable. Also have an old AMD 700mhz setup used by Grandkids for games - I have run FS9 on that machine with quite reasonable results.Cost is also a big factor for most of us and you certainly seem to get more for your money with AMDDave

Don't buy any 64-bit processors right now if you are playing games on your PC!!Around 2 days ago, I saw an article (on www.giga.de/gigagames - german, though) in which they offered performance-results of the Athlon 64 for several games (Quake 3, UT 2003, Halo,...) and to my astonishment the processor gave around 25% performance decrease (!).Just a warning,regards,Stefan

Astonishing how this German site that has a full page ad for the P4 displayed as their splash page found it slower. If you want the real skinny on the A64's performance, do the research through credible sites (anandtech, toms, etc.). You'll find that the A64 lays the smack down on just about everything concerning gaming.As far as the comment about an Intel 64 being "better" than an A64. That's nonsense and speculation. Intel was the company that said the world wouldn't be ready for a 64 bit desktop until late 2005-06. They've sure changed their tune when the sales numbers came in for AMD's 64 bit desktop solutions. Please show me a link that discusses this though... I'd like to see how they're going to get a Xeon to perform as well and inexpensively as an A64 solution.I feel for the guys that are trying to make a decision and read stuff like what I see in this thread.

Whatever you do... DONT GET AN ASUS P4S8X!Unfortunately I purchased this motherboard and if I try to use a Soundblaster card in it with WinXP, the damn thing won't even boot. I have even tried a SB Audigy and that did the same thing. If you use the onboard sound it fine, but who wants stupid on board sound?I think a sound card should be a sound card and a motherboard should be a motherboard not mix and match the two.Thats my 2 cents!

Hey Smokeintodd...I only wanted to mention what I've heard/read so far about the AMD64 and games - nothing else.The german website has a pentium4 ad, that's correct. But do YOU know the show (it's every day in the week 22-24h on NBCgiga)? I do and I have to tell you that the guys moderating and managing the show+webpage do an exellent job. They often recommend games and they often say that some games are not that good. They always have reasons for their statements.I don't know why they should write an article on the AMD64 with false data - their show is called gigaGAMES and they concentrate on games, not on processors (although it's, off course, one business). Another ad you see on the page is for Snickers...does that mean that all what they say about Mars, Lion etc. would be false?Regards,Stefan BergertBTW: Churchill said sth. like: "I only trust in statistics I have manipulated myself"