well... it's a good solid product, but not future proof. i'll explain...
PCI express will have 4 times the peak bandwidth of agp8x, will not cause latency problems by hogging the PCI bus (sound snaps and pops, network drops etc) video cards will no longer need to go in that one specific place. you could put it on your bottom slot and maximize cooling. PCI express is already set up for the new nforce 3. plus the new radeon 9900 256MB is supposed to ship as a PCI express card, with an agp 8x adapter. the nforce 3 is out now, and the radeon 9900 should be out in two months.
the board you showed me is brand new. it uses the 200mhz x 4 pentium 4. this is effective 800 mhz FSB. for every clock cycle, the cpu can fetch data 800 times. the DDR400 that the board you linked to supports can only send data to the cpu 400 times. this equals a bottleneck. while the board you showed me is one of the fastest solutions available today... in three moths or so it won't nessasarily be obsolete, but it wont be compatable with the new technology. so if you build a new machine with that board, then if you want to upgrade to the fastest crap again in 6 or 9 months, none of your cards will work. they just plain wont fit, and even though there will be adapters... they're adapters... hate them...loathe them. so if you score that p4 with 800 mhz fsb and in 6 moths you want to put it in a new faster board, you can have DDRII-800mhz. this will synchronize the data transfer between your p4 and the ram at 800 mhz.
this is much more efficient.
an exiting year is ahead of us... hardware wise. I'm not saying it's foolish to upgrade, cause that's sacreligious, but it's foolish to spend top dollar on all the finest parts, cause 90% of them are gonna be dead end parts.
i bought a r9700 pro last year. at the time i had an xp2000+, now i upgraded to a 2800+ and my speed increase was exponential. i dont know if you read the anandtech article on cpu scaling with video cards, but in essence all video cards have a ceiling. when they hit it, the only way to go faster is to overclock the card. i am confusing myself here....
ok lets say i have a r9700 and a ti4600 on a 2ghz p4. in ut2k3 botmatch i
get 62 with the ti4600 and 78 with the radeon. so i upgrade to a 3 ghz p4,
then i get 72 with the ti4600 and 99 with the radeon, hence, the radeon outscales the ti4600.
so my r9700pro was a good investment cause even after going from 2000+ to 2800+ there is still more room to make the card scale higher.
that board you linked is excellent... and if you toss a 3ghz p4 in there it should carry you for a year and a half at least... but then you're gonna want to upgrade and none of your cards will fit.
now on to the statement "
PC Gamer lists them for around $10 and I can find some cheap ones online for about $12 but when I go to a store like CompUSA they have them for $25!" was this word play on the word "hammer"? or what cause it confused me.
anyway hammer is the new amd athlon64. the same technology that crapple licensed for their new g5. it smokes the crapple, it smokes the p4, the xeon, everything out there. it is a 754 pin socket cpu, almost twice the pins of the athlon, and runs an 800 mhz fsb and will range from 2.2ghz to 4.0 ghz. some are kicking around now, but nvidia just started releasing the
nforce 3 to manufacturers a couple of weeks ago.
this is highly significant because the amd architechture has been the most advanced for the longest. this is how a 2.13ghz amd with a 333 MHZ fsb can hang even with a 3.2 ghz p4 with a 533 mhz fsb. at a 900mhz disadvantage externally and a 200 mhz fsb disadvantage, it should be hopeless... but the athlon competes because the instruction set is so much more refined. it takes 24 steps for a p4 to do what an athlon does in 16.
so when the hammers are all over, and i have an athlon 64 clawhammer in my machine that is even with the clockspeed of a p4 (800 mhz fsb / 3.0 ghz) it will be so much faster than the p4 it's hard to predict and will be hard to measure.
i tend to ramble on these tech posts.... all the while ignoring my own tech site...
guess i just lubb that bf community.