OT: Bugger, main PC dead.

So I guess it is forced upgrade time. Might be memory, might be motherboard, might be gfx card, but at the age of them all, can't be arsed investigating. Specs are MSI motherboard, 1.3 duron, 1/2gig ram and a Hercules GF2MX graphics card.

PSU is a decent one, a Tagen 400watter. That replaced the old 350watt Enermax one that ran solidly for 6 years but eventually broke.

Biggest thing is, I don't want to have to scrap my old IDE HDDs, OK I might need to buy one big SATA to boot from, but I have nearly 1TB in internal HDDs that I have various stuff on, over 4 drives including one in a caddy.

I do have one PCI IDE card in there that I can run 4 hdds off, if I scrapped my IDE boot drive for a Sata, and run the DVD-Rom and DVD-RW off the normal legacy onboard IDE.

Question is AMD quadcore Phenom V Intel Quadcore, and NVidia V ATI?

Price is as much a thing as speed, somthing that will last a while but not at ubergamer prices. I don't care if Wendal had his picture on the box.

Probably going to be 3gig ram and 32bit XP for now for compatability. Onboard Network and sound will be sufficient.

Come panel, you know you love your opinions. It will be going into a full tower case, but if a small server cube came up I might be tempted.

Reply to
Elder
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What will you be doing with it?

Reply to
Abo

Light online 3d gaming, downloading, messing with video/photo editing. I'm building something that will keep up speed wise for a couple of years, because I know now if I compromise on speed now, everything will be obsolete in a couple of years anyway, so there won't be any upgrade path available.

I used to do the every few months upgrade thing but I ended up with a spare bedroom full of junk and an obsolete system in 3 years anyway.

So now when I build I always do best bang for buck now, and suffer the slowdown as requirements get higher, then scrap and rebuild.

This time I haven't a clue what has gone, and Socket A, DDR1 ram, and AGP graphics are pretty much stoneage and not worth replacing.

For a month or two it will be a rocket ship, until something heavy knocks it for 6.

Probably going to be sticking with 32bit XP for now, don't fancy vista. Maybe Ubuntu 64bit with 32bit XP in VMware for anything that I can't get to work under linux/wine.

The old PC has been crawling for a while, but I had the laptop for when I wanted to play the odd game even if I had to reduce the graphic detail.

Reply to
Elder

I've always built my own PCs, since my first 486 without a co-processor :)

This one I have now is a Dell, it was "much" cheaper than buying the bits myself, even a family member who works as a system-build bloke at a well known computer/parts place couldn't get it down to within 20% of the Dell price.

It's the best/most stable PC I've owned, once I'd flattened it and re-installed vanilla Vista. Cheap too, around £500 for Quad-core, 2Gb, Vista, 500Gb HD (2x250Gb striped) with a GF8600GTS, but this was 6 months or more ago.

Check out the ukhotdeals site, I've just ordered a PC for me Mum, it's a basic Dell tower with Intel Dual-Core, Vista Home Premium, 1Gb, 250GB SATA HD etc. etc. for £160 delivered.

Reply to
Tony (UncleFista)

What is Vista like on a decent spec PC? I'm only used it on some small Optiplex machines I was setting up for a=20 school?

Pretty quick with 2gig ram, but bare apart from Office pro. Plus I need somewhere to stick the old hdds.

I'm not fussed on the intel V AMD debate, I've always favoured AMD on=20 price/performance but the dual core Intels broke that, but for me now=20 with an old 1.3 anything is going to be a huge performance increase.

It is just a case of which will give a biggest leap for the longest=20 time.

Was thinking about

  1. MSI K9A2 Platinum 790FX Socket AM2+ 8 channel audio ATX Motherboard
  2. AMD Phenom 9850 Black Edition Socket AM2+ 2.5GHz 4MB L2 Cache
  3. Gecube HD 3870 XT Overclocked Edition 512MB GDDR4 256bit Dual DVI=20 PCI-E
  4. Seagate ST3500320AS 500GB Hard Drive SATA II 7200rpm *32MB Cache*
  5. Crucial 4GB Kit (2x2GB) DDR2 667MHz/PC2-5300 Memory Non-ECC=20 Unbuffered
6 Xion Stacker Black Full Tower Case With Alu Front Door - No PSU

All from Ebuyer Total: =A3507.29

Should keep me going for a little while and if 64bit Windows OSs=20 actually become fully supported driver wise I have room to use the rest=20 of the memory.

--=20 Carl Robson Audio stream:

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Reply to
Elder

Throw away the kid's toys and get a nice Mac. Job sorted.

Reply to
Steve Firth

A =A3500 spend won't get me a decent Mac Pro or decent spec Macbook=20 though, even in the shiny store website refurb section.

--=20 Carl Robson Audio stream:

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Reply to
Elder

Dump them for regular use and just use the big SATA. Then put the IDE drives into a USB caddy, maybe one at a time to get the data out. Then get another external SATA for backups.

cheers, clive

Reply to
Clive George

Are you using software that can take advantage of the quad cores? If not you'll get similar performance and save £80 with an AMD X2 6000 3.0GHz.

It's only £4 more for 800MHz which will help if overclocking and future upgrades. Phenoms can support upto 1066 memory if you want to get the best from it.

Reply to
Homer

Neither do I. Vista still has problems with some apps and drivers etc, so probably better to stick with XP, until the next flavour of windows is released, which might be more compatible with older apps. Mike.

Reply to
Mike G

a mac is a kids toy and for technophobes

Reply to
Vamp

OTOH a £1500 spend will give you a computer that just works and doesn't need "upgrading" every five minutes.

My grandson insisted on having some wizzy gamespec computer at the same time that I bought this MBP. It cost him £500, he said. In fact that was untrue because by the time he'd added monitor, keyboard mouse, OS and other stuff it cost him more like £1000. Within a week he was adding more RAM (£200 or so) and then increasing the HDD size (another £200 or so) and then within six months another processor (£400 or so) and then a new motherboard, graphics card, more RAM. And so on.

He's spent the price of a MacPro 8-core and got a dual Core system.

Reply to
Steve Firth

Sorry I don't take the opinion of amateurs on technical matters. Especially ones that can only get the hang of Microsoft KidsOS 2007.

Reply to
Steve Firth

Now I quite like Macs, just not some of the types that are drawn to the whole Mac thing - which is a real shame. I also nearly bought one too.

Reply to
DervMan

Which types are those? I work with/for a big very techy company with an associated research institute. They have a 100% Mac policy and everyone I meet there is young(ish) very switched on, alert and productive.

There are some bumptious media types that have them, but they can be ignored.

Worth doing, especially if you install MacPorts/Developer Tools and then have access to most of the nice command line tools stuff.

Reply to
Steve Firth

Best bang for buck in CPUs is the Q6600 but it's not cheap, avoid the Athlon range they are dog slow for the price, some half decent DDR2 and a good MB and you can get a good OC out of it, I'm not fully up on mid range graphics cards but you are probably best looking to the 8600 or 9600 range.

Reply to
Depresion

Nice, I find 64bit Vista on my system faster and more reliable than 64bit XP but 64bit XP dose suck.

Reply to
Depresion

£5000 won't get you a decent Mac, there is no such thing. ;)
Reply to
Depresion

Get a B5 Passat and fit an eePC. Then you'll surely have the fastest and best handling computer on the market!

Reply to
Douglas Payne

Been looking at B3 Phenoms, the xx50 numbered ones. The black edition looks better at higher res than the q6600.

Reply to
Elder

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