Windows 7 system on the cheap...

[kfitzenreiter]

I am toying around with building a new system to run windows 7. Now I should mention that I already have windows 7 installed on a AM2 sempron, a 775 pentium 4, and on an ancient Athlon XP socket A system, but I am thinking about retiring one of these and gutting the case with new parts.

My thing is this however. While none of my computers are lightning fast, they aren't too bad given their humble specs. Even my lowly socket A got a 3.0 windows index score. Not too bad for a machine from 2003.

So I'm thinking to myself, what about a less traditional build. I mean, I'd like to go out and buy a core i7 and pair it with a couple velociraptors and a couple $500.00 graphics cards and so on and so forth, but I just can't justify the expense. What if I got hold of say an extreme edition Pentium D and threw a decent graphics card in with one raptor? What sort of score would I get from windows index? How would my performance compare to a newer proc/mobo?

 

[WR2]

Pentium D Extreme Edition 840 3.2Ghz or maybe Pentium D 805 2.66Ghz and overclock it to 3.5Ghz?
How much would it cost to get your hands on one of those older chips?

 

[WR2]

It looks like the Pentium D 965 EE 3.73GHz gets around 1278 on the Passmark CPU benchmark.

That barely makes it into the 'high end' CPU chart. For comparison:
Athlon X2 5000+ 2.2Ghz 1299 $55
Celeron E3200 2.4Ghz 1394 $53
C2D E7500 2.93Ghz 1522 $120
Athlon X4 620 2.6Ghz 2933 $100

You can check out the Passmark CPU chart yourself for other benchmarking results.