On the Fence again between AMD and intel

xred

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Jul 2, 2010
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Hi All
I am a newbie member but not new to the site.
I am looking for a second opinion

I am looking to build my 50 yr old Bro his second computer..
He currently has a second hand 3.0ghz P4
does the trick eventually even he is finding it slow now....I found it slow when he got it ..lol

He wants to keep it to 600 tax in out the door.
I want to build the best bang for his buck so he wont need another puter till 55 at least.

He has a nvidea 220 pcie vid card now so dont need another vid card.
He isnt a big gamer online, just poker and stuff like that but no first person shooters or anything like that.

But he wants to get a lcd tv and put his computer on it as well be able to play tunes while he plays poker.
He burns odd CD now as well and basically cant do anything untill done.

So I have been checking out the E6500 with a decent mobo and mem so I can give a mild overclock. for a bout 550 out the door.
Then i realized for about 50 bux more I could set him up with a G6950 rig.

Well now my local computer store has a
Athlon X4 635
Gigabyte GA-880GM-UD2H AM3 Motherboard
OCZ Gold DDR3 1600MHz 4GB
OCZ Solid 2 30GB SSD
bundle for 350, with a Case p/s and windows 7 I can have him a Quad core and a solid state drive.
Prolly run circles around my $1600 i5 well not for gamin.
He has a second hard drive in his other machine with music and stuff on that we planned to move over any way,
so as long as 30gb is big enough for win7 which i have been reading it is, I am having a hard time passing up
the AMD.
My last machine b4 my i5 was a 4400+ and now it is my server I have had no issues with so going AMD doesnt bother me.
Again biggest bang for the buk!

This bundle is only on until july4

so wat I want to know is wat you think
I think the processor is lots for him I just have no SSD experience.
Does anyone have win7 on an OCZ Solid 2 30GB SSD and can give me some real life performance examples
like boot time app launches stuff like that.

Another question is the mobo Ive always been an ASUS or EVGA guy but I have read good things Gigabyte.
But I find alot of negative stuff about that mobo on net.
I do take alot with a grain of salt as alot of people dont do their home work when assembling pc's so they don't work all the time the first time
and some people well should be buying HP's or Dells
Does any one have this mobo in use?
Are you able to OC all I want to do is run the mem at 1600mhz which should give me around a 3.4 oc i believe.

After looking at Benchmarks it appears the X4 635 performs as well as the i3 and for somethings as well as some i5's
so hard not to consider this bundle.
Any advise or thoughts are welcome
I think it would be cool to give him a machine that boots in seconds instead of minutes like his current one.
And he can be my SDD test bed.

Thanks



 

C00lIT

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Oct 29, 2009
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It is pointless to buy intel under a 600$ tax in budget.

The bundle sounds pretty good, the Athlon X4 is a very good chip for an impressive price tag.

Personally I would simply get regular 500Gig Harddrive with 4gigs of ram DDR3-1333 and if the Geeforce 220 does not have HDMI out, I would get a Radeon4670. In the end your brother's pc will cost less then 600 tax in

AM3 Motherboard has more future then the LGA775 wich is already dead.


LGA775 is only good for resellers who deal directly with intel for motherboards and cpu's and have 24hour RMA services.
 

alhanelem

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Apr 20, 2010
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HOLY COW THAT IS ONE LONG POST!
anyway, i have no exp on SSD or amd cpu's but my sister has a gigabyte mobo and i oc'd her e1200 to 2.2 GHz with an fsb of 1100 (275*4)
i heard the amd cpu's overclock really well and can easily be upgraded with backward compatibility.
also for win7 you need a min of 16 GB which leaves 14 GB extra, which isnt much. can you put his old hard drive into the new computer for more space? unless he could buy an extra SSD later.
 

xred

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Jul 2, 2010
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The bundle is 75 bucks off so its almost like getting a free SSD.
If I put all the pices together speerately with a 500gb HD it is more
money.
14 GB is a little shy but only other thing i could see on there is
adobe reader.
He has a second HD so space shouldnt be an issue.

I think this is it
 

alhanelem

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then go for it, a 50 yr old wont need the latest hardware to be happy.
my dad uses a crappy pc with a e1200, 9400 gt and he thinks its fast (for him anyway)
 

xred

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Jul 2, 2010
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well got the bundle for him it was great deal
be hard pressed to get a puter like this for 600 tax in total
damage was 615 tax in
ga880gm-ud2h
oczgold 4gb 1600mhz
x4 635
ocz solid v3 30gb
.....all above bundle for $357

then nxzt gamma case
thermaltake 430w ps
win7 home prem 64 bit

Now if i can just find conclusive info on the sdd
I installed in ide mode as a how to i saw on ocz site
said achi mode interfered with comm between controller and hd
I later see achi can be used.

I asked thier support they said either way will work and
TRIM runs both ways as it is in the f/w.

So i guess i will keep it this way for now
else
have ocz and run ide or achi
are there any other reasons to switch to achi
I just want this thing to stay like this and not get slow because
of hd needing maintence.

according to ocz none is so guess we will see.

zippy lil thing.
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