about 6 months ago based on recomends on here. £500 got her an AMD 3200+, Asus mobo S939 , 512meg MSI 6600PCI-E, 1 gig of ram and 2x120gig IDE HDDs and a reasonable PSU with 3 year warrenty, all in her old case, keyboard, speakers and monitor. But things move on, and it is my turn, and things have changed. So, I've set a budget of about £600 and that has to include hopefully the YY cube that is on ebay ATM (I'm bored with a full beige tower with the side off that runs too hot witha simple duron system). I will spray the YY casing satin "hotrod" black, and the bezel in chrome paint before I build up. Iff I don't win the auction, then it is case hunt time too. Already have a tagan PSU. Question is, 1) A) AM2, lower X2 speed processor, higher cost, maybe an upgrade path. B) S939, higher speed X2 processor, cheaper costs, lack of upgrade path. C) intel coreDuo and unknown hardware (haven't used intel since my SMP PPro200 and my BP6 celeron466.) 2) Which graphics, high midend? A)ATI B)Nvidia (have only used Nvidia and Matrox for the last 10 years so don't have a clue which is better for current hardware) 3)If I stick with what I know and Nvidia A)6800GT B)7800 Plan is to stick with all the basic (keyboard, monitor, Tagan PSU) will need 2 gig of memory to suit whichever board I use. but I will re-use the DVDRom, DVDRW, and 4 HDDs (plan is to add the current external USB fitted one inside if I win the YY cube). Drives are all IDE133, not SATA, while I have a PCI expansion card, I'm going to need 4 IDE mainboard channels and the card to get everything in. Any thoughts on AMD old V AMD new V Intel CoreDuo? ATI V intel Slower GT card versus faster Basic card? DDR2 V DDR (speed versus cost really). I want to be able to keep the system in play without major changes for at least 2 years, like I have with the outgoing Duron 1.3. it seems so slow now, but does most of what I need, just like to do it faster (building DVDs, video encoding, and some 3d gaming). Cheers all.
Sweet spots are- 7600GT, 7900GT, 1800XT 256mb. Go for the AsROCK board, it has 939 and AM2, so get that board and a 3800X2 939 at your laughing.
Hmm, more choices. So what is the budget intel board that is the flavour of the month, and what CPU should I be looking at? I loved the old DX2/66 type designations. They were easy to understand. Now for someone who has been building PCs for 10 years, suddenly because I haven't built anything new for a year, I understand nothing.
Oh, and in the UK, who is prefered to order from, Price versus reliability versus real stock levels? I used to use Aria, Scan, and occasionally OCuk, but I've heard that OCuk can be ropey, Aria has gone off the boil, and Scan only seems competive if you use "TodayOnly", and Ebuyer has lost it's edge, becoming unreliable on big orders (missing things), and being generally crap and awkward wit returns.
something to be aware of is that most of the new motherboards (read AM2 and core 2 duo) only have one Pata channel and as such can only support two devices, however they do have an absolute abundance of sata connectors and so with the addition of a few adaptors to make the Pata drives Sata, you'll be laughing, but will obviously need to build the extra cost into the price of a newer setup. Looking at the prices of the new intel cpu's i'd be inclined to go for one of them, the motherboards do cost slightly more than the amd boards though. The other question i have is how long with socket 775 be around for? It's seen a couple of years service already, and is still going strong, but for how long? Will it be changed when DDR3 comes to the fore? who knows. Sorry to give you only more questions rather than answers but i'm not fully up on the whole situation at the moment.
the core 2 duo chips are so sweet right not... I have a Asus P5N32 SLI Premium WiFi NF590 SLI mobo with the E6600 conroe chip and it runs unbelievably cool, fast and efficient... id did cost a far bit tho, so it may blast your £600 out the window! however, i would imagine that the entry level core 2 dup chips are just as sweet... i oc'ed my e6600 past 3.2 ghz the other day... watercooled, but it is silly fast... the 7600 GT is a sweet card ATM... lot of reviewers in mags and online places say that it is one of the, if not the, best mid/range card! I picked up a coolermaster stacker case and the cooling in that was sweet standard... i have a 7900GTX gpu and it takes up alot of space, so the 7600 being a single slot card has its advantages in the case that you might be getting! good luck tho matey! I was such an AMD fanboy for years, i hated the p4 chips and architecture... built them for people whilst spitting on them!!! the amd 64 architecture and memory shizzle was sweet, but now the core 2 duo blows evey amd outta the water in my opinion!
Thanks all, been hearing a lot of good things about coreDuo, hence why I asked. Very temped by them. Did think of adding liquid cooling for the CPU and GPU maybe to keep down noise, but knowing my luck it would leak. Just have to decide where to buy from. I guess ultimatley, whatever I do though, it is going to blow my old machine out of the water anyway, so I'm probably being far to fussy. A 1.3 duron on an MSI KT3Ultra2-ARU with a GF2MX might be rock solid stable, but it hardly sets the world alight.
Sweet shizzle sticks lol If I was going to upgrade now, I'd get a Core2Duo and an Abit or Asus board that's compatible, together with 2GB (2 x 1GB) of DDR2 (DDR2 latencies/speed have balanced out so they now match if not exceed DDR speeds). The 7600GT is a good card, enough to play most games at fairly high detail but not overly expensive so you can have a reserve for when the DX10 cards hit the shelves. If you're keeping the pata drives, I'd suggest a Highpoint Rocketraid - they're cheap, but work well. You can get those that offer 2xpata ports/4 devices. Just to throw a spanner in, I'd also recommend a Hitachi or Samsung sata2 hdd for your main system disk. With higher burst speeds, you'll notice an extra bit of responsiveness from your new system. EVGA 7600GT £141 Hitachi 250GB sata2 £52 Corsair 1GB DDR2-6400 x 2 £190 Core2 Duo E6400 £185 ABit SG-80DC £36 On ebuyer, that all ads up to (including delivery) £605.31 Or ultimately, you could save on not buying the sata2 drive, maybe downgrading the gfx card to a 7600GS and spend a heap more on getting a hihger-rated motherboard, the ABit or Asus ones that go for around £140-£150 look pretty darn good. hth
My pata drives are all Samsung (cheap slow brown box OEM/system builder ones for bulk storage not speed), don't suppose those Abit or Asus coreDuo boards support native booting off SATA2, rather than needing F6 and driver discs, or streamlined Drivers in the XP install? I've already got one 4 drive IDE card in (2 ports on the card + 2 main interfaces on the system board in use (SIS I think, cheapy from maplin)). I know the slow old PATA drives would slow the system, but with 820gig of storage including the external USB drive I keep my MP3 collection on, I don't fancy throwing them away just yet.
Aah, I meant keep the old drives, but bung in a new drive for Windows and programs as you'd see a significant improvement over using a slightly older pata drive. Most chipsets support native sata ports, i.e. they don't require F6'ing.
Core2Duo would be the ideal choice at the moment, but if you want to keep to your budget it might be worth going with a socket 939 X2 build as you could pick up the parts quite cheaply but still have reasonably quick machine. What do you plan on using it for?
Ok, mobo: P965 based: 6 sata native, usually expensive because it's an expensive chipset, single PCIe x16 only. Usually better overclocker, made for Conroe. 975X based: only 4 SATA on ICH7R, usually a bit cheaper than 965, Crossfire support. Only some 975Xs support Conroe. P945 based: budget, some support, 4 SATA from ICH7. ATI RD600 for Conroe: not for a while, meant to be a beast with Crossfire support. NF570 SLI: bunch of **** in comparison tbh, avoid. Based on NF4 tech and only uses 667 mem tops. Early looks are that it causes mobos more problems than they are worth if you're an enthusiast and forget overclocking. NF590 SLI: Should be a lot better than the 570, not out yet though, higher end that P965 with SLI support and 6 SATA and other stuff ++. All things considered, I'd aim for 975 or 965, but what board, uh, I honestly cant say Ive found one that really suits all my needs. I'd say Asus but they insist on using the SoundMAX codecs which I hate, and I havent used the Gigabyte board yet as well as the abit's and DFI's arriving at some point.
Thanks again for the chipset and Sata stuff guys. FIBRE+: planned useage would be some light photoshopping, converting videos and building DVD images of movies with full motion menus (takes lot of juice when doing other stuff while that processes in the background) Currently takes overnight to convert a 2 hour AVI to DVD or KDVD. Like to do some 3d gaming too, mainly need4speed driving games, and the UT games+quake. Haven't had anything that would run the latest doom/quake varients for a while though.
