I know we have a few pc techs here. I'm well overdue an upgrade on my machine and have always self built but since the little one joined the family I've never had any spare cash. I now have £200 in my pocket and have decided to go for it. My current specs are: AMD Athlon 64 x2 4200+ M68M-S2P motherboard 2 x 2GB Kingston DDR2 PC2-5300 GeForce GTS 450 I've been out of the game for a while and dust realise that there are now 8 core CPU's. I'd like to stick with AMD and looking at reviews the new FX 8 cores without over clocking are no faster than stock 6 cores. Do I go for an FX series or go Phenom 2 as my current board will take them. Ideally I would like an FX series with nice new 16GB DDR3 ram which would require a new board but i don't think I can get all that for £200. Any help or advice will be gratefully received.
Being a mostly Mac guy now apart from the work Dell, I'm a bit out of current PC builds, but do you need 8 cores? Will you be running any software that can take advantage of it? Also, presumably you've included the cost of the 64-bit version of the OS to use the large RAM amount, unless you're on a Linux distro, of course?
To be honest what you've got would be good for most of the things any normal person would need a pc for. The 8 core jobbies are more for real high end graphics programs and to make that pixel look smoother while playing forza. Most business servers aren't even that spec yet!
That's what I want. Video editing, music production, gaming, home theatre. What I have is too slow and struggles.
I've got 2 x 1TB hard drives, may have to double them soon too. Running RAID. A new motherboard will cost me about £50 The ram will be about £70, so that leaves £80 for a CPU. Or I can go for the biggest CPU my motherboard can handle and upgrade the rest at a later date.
Looking at your setup, as you have Win7 64 bit, I suspect most of the things you are doing need more RAM as much as a faster processor. 200 pounds wont buy much of an upgrade - decent processor chips cost that much alone. Adding an £100 SSD if you cant fit more ram and then using it for Windows loading and wearing the SSD out fast using it for swapfile makes a big difference. I have a PC at work I sneaked an SSD onto before IT got wind of my evil unofficial upgrade and it goes a lot better, but after a year it sometimes crashes randomly. When you have the money for the whole setup .. the 4 core Intel i7's can beat quite a few of the 6 or 8 core AMD efforts. A colleague at work was going on about the 8-core AMD machine he was going to build for ray-tracing. I ran the benchmark on my 4 core i720QM 1.6-2.8GHz laptop and it ran the benchmark about the same as the 3GHz AMD 8 core he was drooling over . The Intel offerings go faster now and leave AMD behind...
I can get the phenom x6 for about £150. To raise my ram to 8gb will cost me almost that, I currently use a 64gb USB as a boost drive - how well that works is a different story. Really need USB 3.0 for that to make a massive difference. If I went intel (which I have never had) it would be a complete build in the range of 500-600 notes. I won't have that sort of money for a fair time yet.
Used to build Video Editing workstations about a decade ago but haven't been up to date since then. Not sure if Intel still do a Skulltrail board but that used to fly back in the day!
would you choose: 1 x AMD Bulldozer FX-8 Eight Core 8120@8150 Black Edition 3.60Ghz (Socket AM3+) Processor - **£20 Cashback** £134.99 1 x Corsair CMZ8GX3M2A1600C9 8GB 1600MHz CL9 DDR3 Vengeance Memory Two Module Kit £38.65 1 x ASUS AM3+ SABERTOOTH 990FX S/L £121.97 TOTAL £295.61 OR 1 x Intel Core i5-3570K 3.40GHz (Ivybridge) Socket LGA1155 Processor (77W) - Retail £179.99 1 x Gigabyte Z77-D3H Intel Z77 (Socket 1155) DDR3 Motherboard £84.98 1 x OcUK Value 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C9 1600MHz Dual Channel Kit £26.99 Total : £303.36
I'd go for the AMD setup myself. 8 cores goes a log way if your apps can use multi-threading etc. I assume the Core i5 is quad core only so you're getting 4 additional cores - discount hyperthreading as it doesn't add much to the CPU throughput. Hope that helps?
From the info that is trickling through from another site the AMD is slower than the Intel and works harder to perform the same. Therefore producing more heat. From what I gather AMD used to be better but is now just a budget CPU
