My main pc decided to leave this world today, so I need a new one I had an Asus A8N-SLI, GF8800GTS320MB and AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200 with 939 socket. The motherboard has been failing for a while now, and today my GPU decided to kick the dust, so no use replacing anything. I have been out of the technology loop for about two years, and I have no idea what would be a good setup to buy... What I have understood, it would be an Intel/nVidia, but thats about it. I will mainly use it for gaming and 1080p HD bluray movies, and I got two monitors with 1920x1200 and 1280x1024 resolutions connected. As I still have working HDDs, I hope, and I like the case, I dont need those. tl;dr: motherboard, processor +cooler, gpu, ram and probably PSU too for gaming and HD movies, for under 800eur... And as I live in Finland, that would be about 800$ too, as everything is so damn expensive here... Thanks in advance :3
www.xe.com informs me thats about £700? Should get a decent rig for that Although if its about $800 as you say, thats more like £500. If you could have a look at the prices of components we recommend to give us some idea of whether its nearer £700 or £500 that would be great. Since your out the loop I'll give some general pointers -AMD don't have much going for them in the cpu department at the moment -Intel i7 is amazing but expensive -For your budget I'd go for Core 2 Duo, probably something like an E8400. The difference between that and your X2 4200 will be unbelievable. -1920x1200 is a tough resolution to run things at, you need a Radeon 4870X2 or GeForce GTX 295 to run everything with full sauce. The GTX is way out of budget. 4870X2 is about £250, which is still a large portion of your budget, so maybe try a GeForce 275 which is about £200. Either one will handle 1920x1200 much better than your GTS 320mb (ah, i remember when I got one the day they came out ) -Motherboard-wise, a good one is the Asus P5Q pro (£90), though some guys on these ere forums prefer Gigabyte. Hope that makes a start
actually that is fairly incorrect the phenom II is a par with any of the C2d / C2Q that being said i would reccomend you pick up cpu - q6600 gigabyte mobo - GA-EP43-DS3 memory - OCZ Gold Edition 4GB (2x2GB) GPU - geforce 260 core 216 more than capable at 1920x1200 dvd - any dvd writer psu - dont skimp here corsair tx 650 i reckon this would probably set you back ~euro400 so feel free to upgrade where necessary but you will notice a huge improvement over your old machine
I know what your saying yakyb, they're not awful like the old Phenoms. Maybe I'm just a bit jaded by the whole Phenom fiasco the X4s are about 10% than the Q6600 and about the same price, it's just the Q6600 is two generations behind Intels offerings.
yakyb said exactly what i wanted to say. +1 As for the CPU, pick the one you prefer, they are both very close close in performance (the latest phenom X4 and Core 2Quad Q6600) I would say to wait until December for the Core i5 (well it will be released few month earlier, but you need to wait for price drop and competitive motherboards and chipset to come out) But because you apparently can't wait: - 4GB of RAM is needed today, like you have no choice if you want to play games at high settings. - Gigabyte motherboard or MSI for the Win! From what I personally saw Gigabyte motherboard are a breeze to use. They just work at first run. No tweaks or anything needed like some ASUS motherboards (ie: Can't put all RAM all at once at first run, you have to add them one by one). - Geforce 260 216 is quiet a powerful card. Look for brands that has life time warranty. In north America (US + Canada) BFG offer life time warranty on the product as well as 24/7 tech support via e-mail and phone. But that is here, not in Finland, but I am sure you can find a similar brand. - Corsair PSU all the way, yes it's expensive, but 5 year warranty is hard to beat, and they are very quiet and efficient. - 64-bit OS (Vista 64-bit or newer). You'll need that to use your system properly as XP doesn't like new technology... and by new I mean 2006... so yea your old system. Also, Vista/Win7 will allow you to play Bluray movies with no sweat, and you need 64-bit OS to use your full 4GB of RAM. Many posts on this forum talks more on why going on Vista 64-bit (same for Win7), so you can check that out if you need more info why you need such an OS and not XP. Win7 comes out in October for OEM, and year end for consumers (so soon after, is my guess). you can download and use Win7 Release Candidate 1 from Microsoft website, and use it for 1 year (June 1, 2010). I suggest to get Win7 instead of Vista 64-bit (if you don't have it already) as it's silly to buy a Windows where a new one comes out few months later.
I agree with GoodBytes comments on 4gig ram, maybe waiting for i5, and 64bit OS. Regarding the ram problem with asus I haven't heard of it but it sounds plausible, I used a Gigabyte GA-P31-DS3L for a long time and that couldnt take certain combos of ram, so it looks like all companies have their quirks
Thanks a lot for the answers Ill took a look at the prices and availability in verkkokauppa.com, and the q6600 is about 200e, Corsair TX650W 95e and OCZ 2x2GB1066MHz platinum kit for 67e. The GA-EP43-DS3L ('Lite' seems to lack firewire and PCI-E 4x atleast) is 75e and P5Q Pro is 125e. So that would leave me about 315-360e for the graphics card. The GF260 is between 180-230e, GF275 230-270e, GF285 310-400e and GF295 460-500e. verkkokauppa.com doesn't have the OCZ gold edition, but it does have the platinum one. Is there a huge difference between them ? I'm gonna stick with XP until win7 is released, I have used the beta as a secondary OS and so far I have liked it. Any ideas for the cooler for q6600 ? I don't think my old Zalman CNPS9500 has intel mounts, and if 4200 is idling at 40C, Q6600 would probably get fried anyway. And no, I don't need the bluray drive, already got one from a friend.
Platinum is slightly better than gold, it has lower timings (for a C2D system you can slacken the timings and get a bigge frequency overclock) so worth getting platinum all things considered. Cooler wise the Titan Fenrir is the beast if you can afford it, otherwise check out the Arctic Cooler Freezer 7 Pro, which is both very cheap and very powerful.
