Hi all,
Am going to be doing some upgrading soon, finally moving up to 64-bit.
I've been well happy with my system as its been and the games I have been playing these days have not been especially challenging. But as a new-ish Dad, I am starting to do more with digital photos and videos and am def wishing things happened faster on my rig!
After much deliberation, I came up with the following spec options.
I chose the mobo cos of the (many) excellent features and chose the memory as this board is "ready" for this actual Corsair memory and should be pretty quick. I am buying a brand new boxed Radeon X850XT Platinum from a friend for £50 - which I know is a bit below spec but to be honest, I reckon its more than fast enough for any of the games I play (HL2, AoE3, MoH, CoD) and I think the rest of the system will be beefy enough to cope with video editing etc.
But then I have just this sec priced up a comparative AM2 setup and it comes in at about £40 cheaper albeit for a 4600 chip rather than the 4800 above. Question: is AM2 worth it right now? Is the performance jump worthwhile? Am looking at a total spend of around £550 (or less!) so comments and suggestions would be much appreciated.
Cheers,
Cel.
Am going to be doing some upgrading soon, finally moving up to 64-bit.
I've been well happy with my system as its been and the games I have been playing these days have not been especially challenging. But as a new-ish Dad, I am starting to do more with digital photos and videos and am def wishing things happened faster on my rig!
After much deliberation, I came up with the following spec options.
- CPU: AMD64 4800 X2
- MOBO: ASUS A8N32-SLI Deluxe nForce 4
- MEMORY: Cordsair 2Gb DDR XMS3500LL Pro TwinX
- COOLER: Zalman CNPS9500-AM2 AeroFlower
I chose the mobo cos of the (many) excellent features and chose the memory as this board is "ready" for this actual Corsair memory and should be pretty quick. I am buying a brand new boxed Radeon X850XT Platinum from a friend for £50 - which I know is a bit below spec but to be honest, I reckon its more than fast enough for any of the games I play (HL2, AoE3, MoH, CoD) and I think the rest of the system will be beefy enough to cope with video editing etc.
But then I have just this sec priced up a comparative AM2 setup and it comes in at about £40 cheaper albeit for a 4600 chip rather than the 4800 above. Question: is AM2 worth it right now? Is the performance jump worthwhile? Am looking at a total spend of around £550 (or less!) so comments and suggestions would be much appreciated.

Cheers,
Cel.