I3 or i5

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jemmusic

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Nov 19, 2011
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looking for something prebuilt in eiether i3 or i5 . something all i have to do is through a graph card and a hard drive in . no o/s no dvd drive
my budger is not great about 500 ..found a few on e bay but dont know what route to go ..
i game amd do music and video editing so need something with balls ..quad core with around 8 gigs ddr3 1600
 
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luciferano

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An i5 has a substantial multi-threaded advantage over the i3s in that it has twice as many cores. The i3's Hyper-threading is less effective than adding a third core would have been, let alone a fourth like the i5s have on the LGA 1155 socket.
 
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tsnor

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You said "my budget is not great about 500 ":

Draft $500 budget
video card = $200 (say HD7850)
hard drive = 100
That leaves $200 for the processor and MB. That puts you in i3 range.

If you want to use a <$150 card (say HD7770) then you are have enough left for the i5, but it will not game as well (should edit video faster unless video edit software uses GPU acceleration).

Or go for a used system.
 
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luciferano

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A good 500GB Western Digital Caviar Blue hard drive could be had for about $60. You could get an i5 instead of an i3 with the savings if you get a Radeon 7850 such as one of the two excellent Asus DCII models that goes for less than $200, although probably not a multiplier-unlocked i5.
 
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luciferano

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I doubt that you'll get that ebay computer for the price that you're looking at. It has over 40 people watching it, so there's probably going to be a helluva bidding war over it and it might double or even triple in price before it sells. If you could get it for $500, then it would be a steal, but that's probably not going to happen.

Honestly, I don't know where you'd get a prebuilt like what you're asking for , let alone at the price that you want. Buying one without an optical disk drive, let alone without an OS, isn't easy unless you buy an old, used computer and at that point, you might as well just do a build it your self computer.

EDIT: Also, that Ebay computer already has a GTX 670. That's like four or five times faster than a GTX 550 Ti, so in the unlikely situation where you win it, there's no reason to get a GTX 550 Ti.
 
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luciferano

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I'd just buy the CPU, graphics card, and hard drive myself. I can get one of the best 7850s, an Asus DC2 7850, with an i5 and a Western Digital Caviar Blue 500GB hard drive (7.2K RPM, SATA 6Gb/s meaning good burst performance of the 16MiB cache). Of course, that'd be ignoring other necessary components such as a PSU, case, and motherboard, so I'd drop down to a Phenom II x4 as my CPU so that I could afford to buy and put together a full computer (ignoring the OS and optical disk drive, of course) for under $500.

This is what I'd buy:
http://pcpartpicker.com/p/iF9S
It's a DIY computer, but it's excellent for the price. This Radeon 7850 is faster than two GTX 550 Tis and is almost as fast as two reference-clocked Radeon 7770s.

A prebuilt can't be bought at this price point that can come close. Heck, a prebuilt for around $750 probably couldn't come close. Bringing up the budget to say $550 wouldn't change much, but going to maybe $600 would mean that you could fit in an i5, but again, not in an already built that isn't used and possibly faulty as a result of that use.
 
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jemmusic

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but i i ad a card upgrade would it be any better ? it should handle modern games then .
 
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luciferano

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It would, but you'd have to bring your budget up to around $600 just to get a Radeon 7770 for it. Do you want to do that?
 
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jemmusic

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yeah i can go up in price to get good graph card.... found this with 8 cores
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Ultra-Fast-Eight-Core-Computer-System-4-0GHz-CPU-8-Core-Desktop-PC-HDMI-NEW-/261075028490?_trksid=p5197.m1992&_trkparms=aid%3D111000%26algo%3DREC.CURRENT%26ao%3D1%26asc%3D14%26meid%3D2342977835210365675%26pid%3D100015%26prg%3D1006%26rk%3D1%26sd%3D261075028490%26

i could upgrade the card and add ram
 
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jemmusic

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ok i got you ... someone told me more cores the better smh ...thats why i like to ask before i buy thank you
 
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jemmusic

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are amd computers good ? i always had intel so i stuck with that . i did build an amd system one time years back cost me 800 to build it but i didnt know anything about over clocking and i just sold it on bay for 1100 .. so now dont know intel or amd
 
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luciferano

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Some computers with AMD CPUs are good, some are bad. Some with Intel CPUs are good, some are bad. Asking if AMD computers are good is like asking if AMD graphics cards are good. I'm not sure of how to define good in this context and since the computer isn't actually branded nor built by AMD, it simply has an AMD CPU, it's technically not an AMD computer. It's an Acer computer that uses an AMD CPU.

I'd recommend getting the computer that we've now both linked if that's at a price that you're willing to pay, but it's not better or worse than any other specifically because it has an AMD CPU. The AMD CPU that it has performs properly for the price of the computer and the rest of the hardware such as the memory is more adequate for the price than any other computer that I saw on Newegg, so I recommended it. If a computer with a better price and/or better performance at about the same price had an Intel CPU, then I'd recommend it because it had better performance and/or lower pricing, but that it had Intel instead of AMD as the designer of the CPU would not be a factor in that recommendation.
 
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jemmusic

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just found the same amd from newegg on ebay for 344.00 buy it now ..... if i bout it i can still buy a good graph card and up the ram ... what you think ? and thank you for all your help
 
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luciferano

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That sounds good. You're welcome.
 
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luciferano

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It's the same computer, but that one is listed as manufacturer refurbished. That's probably an Ebay listing to sell returned units. Manufacturer refurbished means that they should have fixed any issues that might have warranted the return, so it should be fine to buy, but just be aware that it was probably faulty at one time and maybe there will be issues again. Granted, there's no guarantee that a new unit couldn't have issues either, but you might want to consider this in your purchasing decision. If there are issues, then you have the warranty any they should be fixed, but it could mean down-time while they fix any issues if you can't fix them either yourself or through help of forums such as Tom's. Again, the same is true for new units too, but still.
 
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jemmusic

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wow i didnt see that ... for a few bucks more i should just get it new
 
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