Recommendations Please

Haydz

Haydz

Haydz

Associate
Joined
14 Jan 2009
Posts
679
Location
Manchester
Im currently saving up my pennies for a new system...

I have already snapped up two of the major parts in quite a good deal, ive got the Phenom II 955 and the M4A79-T Deluxe, for a brilliant 320 quid. I Also already have a PSU, Monitor, Keyboard, Mouse and Disk Drive. Just require everything else :D.

Im going with an AMD system purely because I dislike intel for reasons which i don't quite understand, Ideas so far consist of:

Antec 902 Ultimate Gaming Case - £100
Gigabyte ATI Radeon HD 4870 1024MB GDDR5 - £140

My original budget was around £550, with £200 in the bank if needed, however having spent 320 im down to about a £250 budget for the rest.. with the extra 200 quid if needed.. I do save around £20 a week which goes towards the PC Kitty, so just baring in mind i am willing to wait whatever amount of time required for the remaining components.

Any recommendations will be great :D
 
Last edited:
Going to overclock or not? If yes, I believe the 120 quid tricore is a better shout than the quad core. The three core one clocks to 3.8 or so, and I suspect the hotter quad core doesn't make it to such a high speed.

Antec 300 is fairly nasty to work in based on the one build I did in one. It is 50 quid cheaper though, which is excellent. Can't comment on motherboard, as I don't use phenom systems myself.

Western digital drives are appreciably slower than normal 7200 rpm drives, I wouldn't like one for my operating system drive. I use one as back up OS and data, and it's serviceable but not quick. Samsung F1, perhaps a smaller one?

Memory I'd suggest OCZ. This is because I killed a set of reaper (I think through overvolting), and they replaced it with no problems. At a later date my psu died, harmed nothing else, and was replaced by a far more swish pc power and cooling one. So I like OCZ.
 
Intel are an evil empire to be sure (Que star wars imperial march music) But the I7 processor blow the socks off everything else!
 
What happened to my suggestion of the tricore? You save 80 quid. More importantly, you only have 3/4 the heat output at a given voltage, so temps are lots lower. So it overclocks higher. I'd much prefer 3 cores at 3.8ghz to four cores at 3.2ghz. This would change if everything was brilliantly multi threaded, but it isn't.
So you get a processor that's going to be faster at almost everything, and costs 80 quid less. Bargain.
 
Yeah, 720 is definetly more bang for the buck, but unless you need it on a rush/on a tight budget, quad is much better for the future than tricore since more applications are more likely to be optimised for quads.
 
I've got my AMD Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition @ 3.6ghz at stock volts, could push it to 3.8ghz with more volts but no need.

As for a decent motherboard, I would get the one below mine - Gigabyte have UK RMA if anything goes wrong - quick turnaround.

It's on offer at the moment - £7 knocked off i.e. £112.99 inc VAT

Gigabyte GA-MA790XT-UD4P (Socket AM3) PCI-Express DDR3 Motherboard

Posted this in another thread, but this is what you can expect Crysis to run at when using a 24" tft @ 1920x1080 settings - 54.4 FPS :D

i7core/X58 core is overated for gaming, don't get suckered in. ;)

crysisbenchmarktest1.jpg
 
#Bump

I have snapped up two parts in what i would consider a rather good deal...

Amd Phenom 955 and M4A79-T Deluxe for £320.

Still need ideas for the other components.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom