What CPU?

[sastusbulbas]

Hi all,

I recently took a gamble and bought an Asrock 4CoreDual-SATA2 Rev2 motherboard.

I had planned to use this with an Intel E7400 which I took a chance and bought expecting bios edition P2.10 silly me. Its bios is P2.00.

So, I am hoping to return the unopened E7400 CPU, and buy another. What do you guys recommend?

Intel E2220?
Intel E5200?
Intel Q6600?

Would an E5200 be any sort of bottleneck for the HIS IceQ 3850 AGP? I want to run C&C 3 as high as possible at 1650.

This is a big change for me, and a bit of a stepping stone, coming from an AMD Sempron 3300 2.2Ghz single core CPU with a 400Mhz front bus speed

I also bought a Scythe Kama Angle CPU cooler, this looks good, but it may be too tall for my current case silly me again... Oh well, an excuse for a better case later...

Rest of the parts,
Gigabyte case,
Hyper 540w modular PSU
Corsair XMS Pro DDR400 (PC-3500) 2x1Gb
Samsung Spinpoint 640Gb Sata II HD
HIS IceQ 3850 512mb AGP graphics card
DVD writer n stuff (IDE).
Samsung 2032 monitor.

Future plans are heading toward a better system, so a possible upgrade path between now and August,

BeQuiet 650w PSU (is this overkill for a single 4870?)
Suitable better memory
Better case
Probably a ATI Radeon HD 4870 1024MB graphics card.
New motherboard and memory.
Better CPU? (would I be better off with a cheap CPU now and getting an E8500 or similar?, or using a Q6600 now and in august?)
More hard drives

Cheers all,
Steve

 

[EnglishLion]

I don't think you'd bottleneck your gpu with any core2 cpu, especially overclocked. The E5200 will do well for you with your current setup, the Q6600 shouldd be great in almostt any setup. I've gott an E2160 overclocked to 3.3ghz and it matches up nicely with my ati 4850 1gb gpu.

 

[sastusbulbas]

Yes common sense prevails, an E5200 it is, the saved cash can go toward a new PSU or case.

Cheers

 

[RJC]

Yep, good decision

 

[jawor121]

Agreed with RJC, you can always get some better cpu.Especially when i7 will get more popular, s775 cpus should get cheaper then.

 

[sastusbulbas]

So I put this stuff together today, and loaded up Windows 7.

Not so happy with W7's inability to play my favorite game, Tiberium Wars, but fingers crossed some patch comes out or something.

Getting 5.5 with Windows Experience Index, due to the memory, gave the set up its first light OC, 12.5 x 220 on the CPU for 2750ghz, which automatically incresed the memory from 200mhz (DDR 400mhz) to 220mhz.

At 240 x I think the memory may have let the side down as the system black screened, I think it can be seperated from the CPU OC, but not sure I want to play too much with the standard cooler and DDR 400.

The motherboard can take DDR II 667mhz, but I am wondering if it could utilise DDR II 800mhz?


Gigabyte case
Hyper 540w modular PSU
Asrock 4CoreDual-SATA2 Rev2 motherboard
Intel E5200
Corsair XMS Pro DDR400 (PC-3500) 2x1Gb
Samsung Spinpoint 640Gb Sata II HD
HIS IceQ 3850 512mb AGP graphics card
DVD writer n stuff (IDE).
Samsung 2032 monitor.

 

[jak731]

have you considered looking for a very cheap 2nd hand single core celeron, so you can flash the bios to 2.10, then selling the celeron on or keeping it as a spare cpu?

 

[sastusbulbas]

Now that I have an E5200 in it I see no point getting a cheaper chip, and even with a Bios flash the most the motherboard will handle is an E7500, but I am not sure the board will OC that?

I think the biggest benefit from a bios flash would be with the unofficial version which increases the ability of the mobo to take 2x2Gb of memory.

Going through Dos with a floppy sounds too complicated though.

 

[jak731]

whoops, didnt look at the time of your OP

 

[Phatjayunoi]

The motherboard can take DDR II 667mhz, but I am wondering if it could utilise DDR II 800mhz?

DDR2 800 or even 1066 RAM will work perfectly fine, just as long as the voltages are within range i.e. 1.8-1.9.

I've been using 2x1GB OCZ DDR2 800Mhz on mine for a year and it works fine.

I think the biggest benefit from a bios flash would be with the unofficial version which increases the ability of the mobo to take 2x2Gb of memory.

Even with with 4GB, it will still only read is as 3.25GB or whatever even on 64-bit operating systems due the the VIA chipset limitation. But it is still an improvement over 2GB though.