AMD gaming build (I think)

[ianmc74]

Been a while since I've been here, ty all (again). Currently running an E8500 @ 4Ghz with a 533 fsb. Love it.
Started my next gaming build. Want to go AMD, unless instructed otherwise. Anyways in my haste I have already purchased my case, ps, and hdd. N82E16817371023, N82E16822148433, N82E16811119161 all NewEgg numbers sorry no links. PS is only 430W active PFC but got it for $15 after MIR and think it will be plenty. Anyways this rig will mostly be used for gaming, surfing the net, and burning dvd's, cd's. All software will be freeware (in my experimentation). My OS will be Linux, Ubuntu, with all the freeware you can imagine (lol), NO MS, or MAC hopefully. My budget on processor, MB, and graphics~ $500 TOPS. I would like to hear from the community about their thoughts?

Thank you,

Ian

 

[jryan388]

How do you plan to game decently using linux? Wine? Probably more trouble than its worth.

Anyways, here's my idea:
Any am3 atx motherboard around $100 on Newegg, probably the least important choice. It should probably have 2 PCIe16 slots for future crossfire/sli support.
Phenom II x4 955 for $140, grab a decent cooler for $30 and OC it past 4ghz.
GTX 460 1GB for $170 or a Radeon 6870 for ~$230

 

[CsG_kieran_2]

^haha i laugh at you. open source goes far, many games exist.

get a good AM3 board (not AM2+) with a 4 core processor. is your case mATX or ATX?

 

[wasupmike]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128445
that will give you also USB3, SATA3 + good overclocking (no crossfire.. but i don't think that's for you... especially with that PSU)

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819103886
athlon 2 triple cores have proven to be great budget gaming CPU's

like 'jryan388' said - get a good $30 cooler and overclock it (you don't even have to much)... now with the money you saved... you can get a single powerful GPU like the GTX 460 1GB or the R6850.. for less than $200... then you'll have a balanced system spending ~$400 instead of $500... with the extra $100 space... get more RAM

 

[ianmc74]

How do you plan to game decently using linux? Wine? Probably more trouble than its worth.

Anyways, here's my idea:
Any am3 atx motherboard around $100 on Newegg, probably the least important choice. It should probably have 2 PCIe16 slots for future crossfire/sli support.
Phenom II x4 955 for $140, grab a decent cooler for $30 and OC it past 4ghz.
GTX 460 1GB for $170 or a Radeon 6870 for ~$230

Yeah, dont laugh. Last time I tried to run Wine with WOW was a complete failure. That was over a year and a half or so. Hopefully it's different now. Like I said, I'm hopefully going to avoid MS, or MAC, we'll see. I was planning on the AM3 prolly the one you suggested but wasn't sure if I should go with the X6.

 

[keithlm]

To resolve your X4 versus X6 questions you can review the Phoronix benchmarks to see how the X4 compares to the X6 in a variety of benchmarks. The Phoronix test suite also includes a bunch of open source games. But you will find that performance on Linux for games is very dependent upon what video card driver you use. NVidia and ATI both have proprietary drivers, but there are also some open source drivers.

Just go to the Phoronix-test-suite website and search in the "phoronix global" for some X4 and X6 tests to compare.

The search mechanism is not very mature so you'll find it easier to open two browsers and search for each CPU in each window. Then you'll have to find results for the same benchmarks with the appropriate CPU you want to compare. (The website author has mentioned that a new improved search is coming some day. But for now if you are lucky you can find the results you want to see; because in addition to not having a great search, it also cuts off older sets of results as newer results are created. And some people log on and run the benchmarks so many times it "hides" older results. But if you type in specific search strings you can narrow down what you get back.)

 

[wasupmike]

not sure how many well threaded apps are around for Linux that will be able to utilize 6 cores effectively... the most important factor to consider for an AMD 6 core CPU is: if you're going to mainly be doing video editing, encoding, etc... on the system as its prime use... if not... you'll be way better of with a faster clocked tripe/quad core... way better off...



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