Help please? :)

melkiah2003

melkiah2003

melkiah2003

Associate
Joined
22 Feb 2011
Posts
61
Location
In a bin. Wales
Hey all,

I'm in a bit of a pickle and could do with some help.

Basically, My studio PC has finally decided to give up the ghost, departed this mortal realm and left me unable to lay down my riffs! :mad:

I'm going to build another, nothing too fancy or pricey but I'm not quite sure if the board and CPU I have chosen are compatible. I'd be very grateful if someone could take a look and tell me what they think. :)

Gigabyte GA-970A-DS3 (Socket AM3+) DDR3 Motherboard

AMD Athlon II X2 Dual Core 250 3.00GHz (Socket AM3) - OEM

G.Skill RipJaw 4GB (2x2GB) DDR3 PC3-10666C8 1333MHz Dual Channel Kit

Western Digital Caviar Blue 500GB SATA 6Gb/s 16MB Cache - OEM (WD5000AAKX)

OCZ ZS Series 550W '80 Plus Bronze' Power Supply

ATI Radeon HD 5450 SILENT 512MB GDDR3 PCI-Express Graphics Card


I'll be running XP on this machine, pretty old skool I know but all my audio software/hardware is getting on a bit now and I'd rather spend a little on this than spend a lot of cash updating all that ;)

anyways, you're help would be very much appreciated :cool:
 
YOUR BASKET
1 x Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 500GB SATA 6Gb/s 16MB Cache - OEM (ST500DM002) £58.99
1 x Intel Pentium G840 2.80GHz (Sandybridge) Socket LGA1155 Processor - Retail £55.99
1 x OCZ ZS Series 550W '80 Plus Bronze' Power Supply £49.99
1 x Gigabyte H61MA-D3V Intel H61 (Socket 1155) DDR3 Motherboard £47.99
1 x Kingston HyperX Genesis Grey 4GB (2x2GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C9 1600MHz Dual Channel Kit (KHX1600C9D3X2K2/4GX) £23.99
1 x LG GH22NS90 24x DVD±RW SATA ReWriter (Black) - OEM £18.98
Total : £267.94 (includes shipping : £10.00).



http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/405?vs=121

As you can see that intel pentium 840 is a better choice than your athlon. Feel free to change the search criteria to find something you like for your budget. I just went like for like on price of CPU.

Mobo offers USB3 and you have an IGP so you might not need that cheap dedicated GPU. You could always add one later. That PSU is overkill for the spec but I left it in. You might want to buy a budget gaming GPU and 550W is ample to run any GPU sub £200.

RAM is better 1600mhz vs the 1333mhz you spec'd, cheaper too. Plus it doesn't have those aggressive heatspreaders that can often be a pain when fitting large heatsinks. HDD is cheaper and faster, I added a 24 speed DVD writer. I don;t know if you intend to reuse your old one......it does need to be sata not IDE.

While llano is a option it's a limited socket. The H61 i have spec'd would take the new Ivybridge CPUs if you wanted to upgrade the CPU in the future. So you have the choice of sandybridge Pentium G/i3/i5/i7 and as i said the ivybridge CPUs too. Not bad from a sub £50 mobo.

Hope this helps, any problems or further questions, feel free to ask :)
 
Last edited:
Thanks for the reply guys :)

The intel option does look good but the only problem is that I don't think it has a PCI slot for the audio interface card, sorry, I should have mentioned that before.

My old machine was running a P4 2.8Ghz CPU that I built almost 10 years back now, would the athlon be worse than that?

Sorry, I'm pretty clueless when it comes to CPU's and stuff :)
 
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