Sorry about the rather long title but I could not think of anything else, anyway onwards to the problem...
My brother-in-law is after an upgrade from his current machine which is a old AMD Athlon X2 5600. Now he has decided that he has had it with AMD and wants an Intel chip which is all fine and dandy I am just not sure which one because of his budget. For this upgrade he requires the following items;
Case/Chassis.
Motherboard.
CPU.
RAM.
The above is all that is needed since everything else will transplant over (optical drive, HDD etc). His budget is about £250 give or take perhaps £20 and this is where the problem starts, I am not sure what to get between an i3 Sandy Bridge or a regular i5. He does not game on it at all now he mostly uses it for things like ConvertXtoDVD and similar things. He doesn't do video encoding (DVD ripping etc) either so I am thinking that the i5 would just be overkill for what he wants since nothing he uses would really use all 4 cores properly. He won't be overclocking it either (I won't let him because for the most part he is useless when it comes to hardware).
The price difference between a regular i3 and a SB i3 is next to nothing so hence thinking that the SB option is his best option, the RAM I have picked out will work regardless of which option I choose (Corsair XMS DDR 4GB Dual Channel 1333MHz). So put simply it boils down to this... is it worth getting the i5 for an extra £60 or so or just stick with the SB i3?
Thanks for any advice.
Stoner81.
PS - At the moment I am thinking that Sandy Bridge is the way to go based on what he wants the system for.
PPS - Once I get it ordered and everything I will be doing my first build log here
My brother-in-law is after an upgrade from his current machine which is a old AMD Athlon X2 5600. Now he has decided that he has had it with AMD and wants an Intel chip which is all fine and dandy I am just not sure which one because of his budget. For this upgrade he requires the following items;
Case/Chassis.
Motherboard.
CPU.
RAM.
The above is all that is needed since everything else will transplant over (optical drive, HDD etc). His budget is about £250 give or take perhaps £20 and this is where the problem starts, I am not sure what to get between an i3 Sandy Bridge or a regular i5. He does not game on it at all now he mostly uses it for things like ConvertXtoDVD and similar things. He doesn't do video encoding (DVD ripping etc) either so I am thinking that the i5 would just be overkill for what he wants since nothing he uses would really use all 4 cores properly. He won't be overclocking it either (I won't let him because for the most part he is useless when it comes to hardware).
The price difference between a regular i3 and a SB i3 is next to nothing so hence thinking that the SB option is his best option, the RAM I have picked out will work regardless of which option I choose (Corsair XMS DDR 4GB Dual Channel 1333MHz). So put simply it boils down to this... is it worth getting the i5 for an extra £60 or so or just stick with the SB i3?
Thanks for any advice.
Stoner81.
PS - At the moment I am thinking that Sandy Bridge is the way to go based on what he wants the system for.
PPS - Once I get it ordered and everything I will be doing my first build log here
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