Some advice please

[will1e]

hi to all, looking for some advice please, i,m putting a pc together for my son and have managed to get a asus m3n78 rev 1.02g motherboard with a amd phenom quad 9950 cpu. and a m3a-h/hdmi motherboard with a amd athlon 64 x 2 dual core 5200+ 2.71ghz cpu. was wandering which one would be the best i thought the first option might be but think its the older of the two but not too sure . it would be running xp (mce) and 3gb ram any help would be grately apptrecieted thanks

 

[jaquith]

Welcome to Tom's Forum!

Clearly the 9950 is the better CPU:

ref - http://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html
AMD Phenom 9950 Quad-Core ; PassMark = 3,066

ref - http://www.cpubenchmark.net/mid_range_cpus.html
AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 5200+ ; PassMark = 1,424

 

[will1e]

thanks for a quick responce

 

[suteck]

Can you put the quad core in the m3a-h/hdmi motherboard? It's the same socket and that board supports the phenom. I like the m3a better because it has more pci slots and 1 more sata connector. Also, It looks like there are more internal headers for usb support. Not only that but the hdmi connection looks more secured than the m3n.

 

[jaquith]

^Yes you can use a Quad-core AMD, just work off this list and NOTE the minimum BIOS required (CPUID); see -> http://www.asus.com/Motherboards/AMD_AM2Plus/M3AHHDMI/#CPUS

 

[suteck]

So he would have to build it, start it up, check and update the bios in their not already 803. them switch the cpu? Well, sounds like a lot of trouble but it would be worth it to me.

 

[jaquith]

I've rebuilt (10) PC's in (1) night once it was determined the, in my case the GA-X58A-UD3R had a newly found issue with SSD + RAID. Pulling a couple CPU's, if that's the OP's 'plan', is no big deal. Use the time to clean the HSF and replace the thermal paste - maintenance.