cheap system for surfing...

MAXIBOY · 10 Mar 2010 at 21:19

i have the choice of either building a socket A athlon 1.4ghz or a pentium P4 2.0 ghz system for a young newphew of mine...

which would you choose and considering the cpu's are cheap would you up grade either...secondhand...

thanks..

Strawberry · 10 Mar 2010 at 21:43

I had no problems whatsoever surfing on a 1000 MHz Athlon with 1024MB of ram, so unless he wants HD flash content to play properly you don't really need a high-end system for that.

Heck I can surf fine on my old 300 MHz.

You can surf fine on a $20 PC, sending and receiving text was never something awfully high-end.

PermaBanned · 10 Mar 2010 at 22:03

What's your total budget? You could probably build a whole decent system that would blow either one of those away for £250.

E3200 - £35
GA-G41M-ES2L (or similar) - £35
2GB Giel Black Dragon - £30
Coolermaster Elite 330* - £25
Seagate 7200.12 320GB - £35
Samsung SH-S223 - £15
Coolermaster TX3 - £15
Antec 380W EarthWatts Green - £35

Total: £225

*alternatively something like the xClio Propeller

MAXIBOY · 10 Mar 2010 at 23:37

yeah budgets as cheap as possible

reason i was asking is i have both sat here doing nothing...in bits....

just wondered which would be better and if for 20 odd quid it was worth upgrading the cpu's further...

Redmint · 10 Mar 2010 at 23:39

Depends which mobo you have for the P4, if it's a 775 you could get a 3GHz with HT for about £10 probably.

CAT-THE-FIFTH · 10 Mar 2010 at 23:40

I would use the Pentium 4 2GHZ setup. However the amount of RAM the system has,the speed of the hard disk it contains and what OS it will be running are also important factors.

stulid · 10 Mar 2010 at 23:42

Pentium4 sucked!

MAXIBOY · 10 Mar 2010 at 23:43

its a 478 with 2gb ram running xp pro not sure on the hard discs without looking but older ide drives

CAT-THE-FIFTH · 10 Mar 2010 at 23:50

MAXIBOY said:
its a 478 with 2gb ram running xp pro not sure on the hard discs without looking but older ide drives

You could probably get a higher clocked P4 for a few quid off a famous auction site.

2GB is plenty of RAM for general purpose use!

Redmint · 10 Mar 2010 at 23:56

What the CAT said (I keep thinking of the Red Dwarf Cat...).

CAT-THE-FIFTH · 11 Mar 2010 at 00:17

Redmint said:
What the CAT said (I keep thinking of the Red Dwarf Cat...).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcezLXUifvk

Redmint · 11 Mar 2010 at 00:30

"Hello, how can I help you?"
"Fish!"

CAT-THE-FIFTH · 11 Mar 2010 at 00:34

Redmint said:
"Hello, how can I help you?"
"Fish!"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5p9b5uAHzpc&feature=related

d|b · 11 Mar 2010 at 01:03

Maybe thing about getting something on the based based around the Intel ION platform with an Atom CPU. They are super small (i.e. about the size of an external HDD) and they play back HD content without a problem.

ac1d1ty · 11 Mar 2010 at 01:32

stulid said:
Pentium4 sucked!

No it didn't. It just became outdated.

Confused · 11 Mar 2010 at 12:23

Use the P4, but add a new hard drive.