i3 or i5

timbo2410

timbo2410

timbo2410

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Joined
27 Dec 2009
Posts
764
I have an Antec P180 case with a new Corsair HX750 W psu and my old HDD's (two Western Digital caviar and one Western Digital Raptor) ... now I want a good system with onboard sound and enough punch to run games without a stutter and still be able to encode video as well. All for around £800 to £1000.
Suggestions anybody??
 
Gaming plus encoding...definitely pick the i5 (Quad) over the i3. The different between i3 vs i5 CPU+board+ram is just roughly £230~£240 vs £300. Builds are cheaper thesedays comparing to few months back, thanks to the fall in DDR3 memory prices. But for your budget, you can probably even build a i7 with a GTX470/HD6870, assuming you don't need Win7 and monitor included in that budget.
 
It is possible to offload most of the work (encoding video) to the graphics card by the way. So that results in less than 10% load on the CPU. Worth investigating if the software you prefer will allow you to do that.
 
So you've already got the case, PSU, HDDs - so all you need is mobo, RAM, CPU and GPU for £800 - £1000, and you think you might have to settle for an i3??!! You could have an i7 if you really wanted, I'm sure. Is this also to include a monitor and OS? Keyboard, mouse?
 
timbo2410 said:
I've got the monitor, keyboard, mouse already. I was more concerned that the old HDD's might not be up to the task. Hmmmm very nice .... :D
Click to expand...

hdd.jpg


:)
 
my caviars are 120 gig each and the raptor is 74 gig ... they're all about 5 years old now .... I didn't want to put them in a new system to have them die a little way down the track .... so I suppose replacing them now would be a better option. So the list would be something like:
Core i7 950
gigabyte x58 UD3
6 gig patriot viper ram
gtx 470
ocz vertex SSD
Samsung f3 1TB
H70 cpu cooler
Windows 7 pro 64 bit
how does the quality of the components compare? Are they good?
 
I have a pre built OCUK system and I was advised at the time to go for Win7 pro 64 bit OEM. This was becuase I have several xp programs that I have to run and need the xp mode .... are you saying that it would be a good idea to get new HDD's?
Also, what is the difference between the Gigabyte EX58UD5 and the UD3 that has been suggested? ....
 
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