AMD or Intel ? Help me to choose

[shivakumar]

Hi buddies, I planned to upgrade my old (5yrs old) desktop. Recently I have upgraded my hard drives and CD writer. Now planned to upgrade my mainboard. I planned to buy a laptop by next month. So my budget for my desktop is below $200.

I am confused by the reviews and benchmarks found on net. Which one should I go for? Sempron or Celeron or Athlon 64 or P4. I prefer 64bit.

And also which video card and DDR is give better performance with the CPU.

I mostly use this desktop for software development. some times multimedia apps such as blender and some graphics.

Kindly provide your suggestions.

Thanks

 

[apache_lives]

$200? that aint gona get u much, anyhow at the moment AMDs has faster models then Intel, but intel offers cheaper (and slower) dual core cpus, and to get a fater system you will need to upgrade almost everything - cpu, mobo, ram, video psu and so on - id wait and save up more and maybe wait for AM2 and conroe

AMD Semperon and Intel Celeron are the budget chips
AMD Athlon and Intel Pentium are the... main performance chips
AMD Athlon FX and Intel Pentium EE are the High end (most of the time not worth it)

Ram depends on the boards for Intels and cpu for amd but both use either DDR or DDR2 (intel only ATM), and video card - they use the new PCIe now so your old agp care is useless, and video cards with DDR faster? doesnt matter the system doesnt use video ram the video card does.

What is your current system specs?

 

[CompGeek]

200$ is a bit tight but you can go for
ASRock 939SLI32-eSATA2: ULi based Dual x16 SLI Performance
and a Athlon 3000 venice core or
Though i would earn more money to get a X2 or pentium D,both of them dual core.

BTW You might as well upgrade your memory since 5 years ago DDR was much weaker than now.

 

[apache_lives]

and then you would need a new video card and psu, and i somehow doubt you even have ddr ram so ram too

id wait and save up

 

[barlag]

Hmm, I could give you lots of advice but alas $200 is too little to upgrade with options. Basically you will maybe be able to put together something meaningful with a low end celeron or an old athlon xp or something like that.
Of course you should upgrade your 5 year old HD to something that will be 10x bigger and and many-many times faster. HD is after all the slowest component of a PC.
The memory you will also have to buy as you will have trouble finding anything that works with old SDR modules or even old DDR.

If you had more $, then I would really recommend to buy the cheapest dual core cpu you can find. Compilers in general take good advantage of dual cores and basically its almost 2x faster. Another option is not to get a desktop but to spend that extra 200 and get a better laptop and sell your current desktop spend that also on the laptop. Since however you seem to keep you desktops for a really long time, I dont recommend relying on laptops fully because they age much faster than desktops.

PS If you have the bucks the new Athlon X2 is by far the best option at the moment (in my opinion). They are cool and fast, albeit not yet cheap.

Cheers,
Gabor :roll:

 

[apache_lives]

hey barlag you have -1 posts - wtf? LOL

Yeah intel pentium d (dual core P4's) are cheaper at the moment at the cost of less performance (not bad, but not the best) and power/heat levels.

For the upgrade you would have to buy the 5 majors - CPU, MOBO, RAM, VIDEO, PSU - 200 devided by five gives you ~$40 per item - even $200 is barly enough for a mid range cpu sorry.

 

[barlag]

Hi,

yeah I found a bug in this message board earlier. 8O If you add a survey you get a error when you post a new thread. But it doesnt increase the posts. I went and deleted my 4 duplicated threads and voala I have negative posts. At least I think thats how it must have happend.

Gabor