Thread: Advice Sought on Memory, Drives, Heatsinks, Audio, OS

October is upon us, that golden time of the year when tech goes on sale to make way for the new Oldsmobiles stuff.

The main thrust of my question is thus: I haven't been able to find any benchmarks that can definitively prove DDR3 superior in performance to low-latency DDR2 modules, not even the vastly over-matched 1600/1800 stuff. I am an AMD man, and so I thought to pick up one of those new 125W TDP 9950BE Phenom X4's along with 4GB of DDR2 1066 and an Asus M3A79-T mobo. Can anyone provide a reputable benchmark that shows otherwise to those I have found? Should I really wait until ~March for AMD's DDR3 platform? Keep in mind that my current system is a single-core A64 3500+ w/ 2GB of DDR400, and I know Sod's Law well enough not to try to go chasing after the bleeding edge; anything would be an improvement at this point, and I'm more concerned with having a system that can age gracefully instead of being future-proof.

Additionally, would you recommend stepping up to SATA optical drives, or should I stick with IDE? What are the pitfalls and gotchas of going with SATA (esp. regards things like access to them if I need to work outside of Windows (ie, on a bootdisk or similar; will I need a controller driver, etc.)?

I have not looked terribly hard, but can anyone recommend a good AM2 heatsink? The less flashy the better, as I abhor cases with windows. Something with an intelligent thermal design (ie, no dissimilar metal contacts or stupid 'coatings') that doesn't extend too far off the board or weigh too terribly much (the design spec on the socket is 450g, heatsink companies; I've seen coolers that weigh 1300g, and are 6 inches tall! Someone needs a remedial course on torque moments). I'm not expecting to overclock this processor much beyond say 3GHz, so I'm not looking to cool the Sun, but surely someone makes something decent.

Regards future-proofing (just a teeny bit), go with an Asus Xonar sound card, or back to Creative for an X-Fi? I know BD is recommending the Asus, but Creative is (unfortunately) the top-drawer stuff when it comes to audio, although I suppose this choice ties into the next one. Still, comments are appreciated.

Finally, the age old question: stick with XP, or go Vista? I don't have any games that could take advantage of Vista (and I pretty much just game and lurk the TTP forums), and Windows 7 is supposedly around the corner, so how long does Vista really have left? Are there any features really worth it? For that matter, stick with 32-bit or go for an x64 copy?

Draco

I've been relatively unwhelmed by DDR3 at this point. Intel is coming out with a new board in about 1 month that will offer quad channel DDR3. If you have any interest in Intel, I'd wait for some benchmarks on this.

Not an AMD person so I don't have any recommendations there.

I've heard good things about the PCI express version of the x-fi's and the newer drivers for it. I would pass on the older versions of the x-fi like the one I have due to driver issues and what not with Vista.