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AMD still the way for budget systems?

krooton

krooton

krooton

Caporegime
Joined
9 May 2004
Posts
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Location
Leafy outskirts of London
So both the Phenom II X2 550 and Athlon II X3 440 can be had for sub-£70, with the cheapest i3 coming in just shy of £100.

Would I be correct in saying that the i3 does not perform 45% better than the AMD cpus and thus isn't worth the money if the budget is pretty strict?

Also, the tri-core would perform better for multi-threaded programs yes (the guy will be doing some music production).

I know the 440 could unlock to quad, can 550s unlock to tris?
 
Thanks, I've told him if he wants more oompf, he'll need to spend £50 more for an i3 + UD2H and overclock it to 3.6Ghz+, but I'm sure AMD will suit him fine.
 
Yes, basically AMD is still the way to go with budget builds, things really start getting wonky only once we reach the lower tier i5 and i7 chips.


- Ordokai
 
frozennova said:
Athlon X3 440 vs i3 530 - http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/119?vs=118

Phenom II 550 vs i3 530 - http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/97?vs=118

Athlon II X3s will unlock to quads and the Phenom II X2s will also unlock to quad, IIRC the 555BE has a higher success rate on unlocks

Athlon II x3 vs Phenom II X2 550 - http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/97?vs=119
Click to expand...

Good links, but saying that the cpus will unlock a core or two is very misleading as quite often the locked cores are faulty, which means that once forceably unlocked you destabilize your system. You may be lucky, but don't chose a dual or tri-core CPU expecting to get a Quad out of it.

I think overall AMD are better for budget systems these days, while Intel still lead performance wise. It just depends on your budget.
 
I went for a i3 overlocked as I had some single thread apps I wanted to speed up, and I read the i3 was good for that. Maybe I was wrong.
 
yes it seems that way. for £360 i built a quad core, 4gb DDR3 system which scored 7.3/7.4 on the Windows 7 benchmark which i gather is ok.
 
Big.Wayne said:
It's very hard to beat either AMD® Athlon™ II X3 435 or AMD® Athlon™ II X4 630 in terms of price-to-performance ratio!
Click to expand...

it is - my 630 clocks to 3.35ghz on stock cooling! might have to up the volts a touch more to see if it can go further once i figure out if my lack of HT knowledge is holding me back.:confused:
 
Would the X3 440 run with my Thermaltake 450 Watt PSU? I was also thinking of running the Sapphire HD 5770 Vapor-X.
Failing that I might just keep it as budget as possible with a 245 or 250?
 
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