Am3 ath/phem ii x 3/4 pawn 775 and quads?

[ExoMale]

I picked up couple computers yesterday for a tenner, one I was more interested was a non name micro atx tower and inside it is a crappy 255w psu, but has a Foxconn N15235 fitted with a pentium dual core e6300 @ 2.8 and ram maxed at its 4gb cap(though bios and system reading 2gb only??) and originally I was going to swap my am3 foxconn board in to it to take advantage of atx power supplies and clear my desk, but now thinking if I should or not...


I know AM3 is better than 775 and the board supports 8gb of 1333 ddr3, from a quick google, the Athlon ii x 2 250 is roughly on par with the the e6300 which got me thinking of whether that would be the same for the triple and quads?

Can get a q6600 for less than £15, but cheapest Athlon ii x 3 is £15 - 20 for one of the lower versions, but for a x4 even in the phenom I'm looking at triple the q6600 costs

Found a hd 5870 1gb for £15 if still for sale leaving me with needing a beefy psu, i need my computer for general, but I mainly want to play Anno 2205 of a recent title game which the Radeon is the minimum listed for it.


I sold my ps4 due to lack of use and to fund a bit of upgrading of, but wondering which route I should take for budget build

 

[pandem0nium]

some of the x2 and x3 phenom IIs unlock to quads. Might save you a bit.

960Ts may unlock to a hex. Mine did.

I did have the same athlon II 250. Would do 3.60 without a voltage increase and 2250 on the NB.

 

[Borealis]

I would say that the 775 quads were better than AM3. The Core2 Quads were some of the best CPUs of their era and outperformed the equivalent AMD CPUs. The Phenom X6s were a different ball game though, as they were true 6-core CPUs and performed very well. For general use, either route would be fine as it doesn't take much to run office apps/email software! Of course, 775, AM2+, AM3 are obsolete platforms now.

padem0nium is quite correct, some of the x2 and x3s can be unlocked to triples/quads. Some Phenoms even unlocked to hexes. I believe you needed the right board/BIOS to do that though I may be wrong. I never had a chip capable of it, so I never got into trying it out.

I used to have an AM3 Athlon X4 640 running quite happily in an AM2+ board with 4GB DDR2 800MHz until the GPU died, so I upgraded to Haswell. I remember running Crysis 2, Cities XXL and a whole bunch of other stuff on it and it didn't perform too badly! I've still got it all, boxed up at my parents' gathering dust and likely to go into the nearest skip. Trust me if you're interested.

 

[Terrorfirmer]

I would say 775 quads are superior to most of the AM3 CPU's apart from the good CPUs like the 955, 965, etc - but all the X4 630, 640's etc are not great.

Now it does depend on if you can overclock too, the Q6600 was a beast overclocker. With a bios update your board might support the Q9x series Core2Quads?

Really though when you could pick up a 2nd hand i3-3220 class full machine for about £60 off Ebay that's gonna be infinitely faster in most things and more upgradable, I wouldn't bother considering you're saying either the ram/board isn't working right, it all just sounds like a bit of hassle.

 

[cheesyboy]

I've still got an Athlon X2 270 running in my home PC. A mild overclock to 3.4Ghz and passively cooled: it does the job well enough that I've not bothered to switch it for the Phenom X4 965 I picked up off the MM a couple of years ago.

Talking of which, I only paid about £20-£25 for that Phenom. Would imagine you could get one cheaper now, if it came up on the MM - might be worth putting out a Wanted thread.

 

[ExoMale]

Thanks for the replies.

I only paid £12.50 for the am3 board, cpu, ram combo and a 500gb hard drive as I was after something for my case I keep holding on to lol, without a dedicated graphics card I cant test the Athlon outside of general and I think ram issue was buying a used one that was either ecc or bogus, was from shop lol so took the gamble, however after reseating the ram in the 775 system I now have 4gb though 3.25 available on 64bit which isn't activated yet or has all updates so maybe will have more useable later on.

I'm not worried about obsolete, I sold my haswell due to no time to use or needed the money, but with an Xbox one and another 360 I won't pc game much now that I do have the time, I just want to play anno 2205 the best I can on possibly a 1280x1024 or a ???? X 900 I think, be less than 1080 that's for sure for the cheapest possible budget(£5 for the intel setup or £12.50 so far) one day I'll have a proper gaming computer, but I want another ps4 and the VR by end of the year so that's my focus.


On another note maybe keeping the tower with 775 as will be better, windows 7 ISO install from USB stick ran really slow on the am3 enough to restart thinking it crashed lol where as the intel with just 2gb ram ran the installation much faster and found updates quicker, hell just using windows as normal is faster than the amd? Maybe I should get a proper psu and a gpu before getting a quad ha