Replies to post #3989 on Dream Machine

[Bruce A Thompson]

Hi Dude

Not having used or even seen either one being used, I can only go by the reviews, the specs and by the sockets.

For the Athlon 62 3200 AMD recommends any one of 38 motherboards from 13 different manufacturers. Lotta support. Lotta reviews. Lotta people using it for both trading and gaming. The Athlon can save you some bucks on RAM using unregistered RAM.

For the Opteron 246 only one ATX board from only one manufacturer and 11 ATX-E boards from 5 manufacturers. I get the feeling that those Opterons are primarily for servers and multiple CPU applications. They should work fine for both trading and gaming. The registered RAM it requires while slightly faster costs slightly more than double what the Athlon uses.

Pricewise, you are into the fairly high dollar range with the Opteron machine costing more than the Athlon due to the RAM being more expensive.

The speed difference between these two machines is not going to be that much. To your untrained eye, the Athlon will probably boot XP about 3 seconds faster but after that you are not going to see a noticable difference in the speeds.

From what you are saying, I gather you want a trading machine that is rock solid and plays Half Life after hours.

Are you doing multiple monitors? Multiple hard drives? If I may be so bold, what are you spending here?

BT