When to buy, when to wait

regulus

regulus

regulus

Soldato
Joined
18 Aug 2006
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ChCh, NZ
LOLhai

As some of you may have read on here last week, I had a little incident with the girlfriend, water and my PC motherboard, rendering my current system effectively non functional. I tried each and every suggestion offered here but to no avail, I need a new PC.

Now, I'm not just dumping this on you folks to make my decisions for me, I've been doing some reading the past week on what to expect in the hardware world for the rest of 2010. I'm particularly interest on what AMD is doing with Llamo, but sadly that doesn't appear to be on course until 2011.

I have a strong urge going with AMD this time round because of their attractive pricing on the BE addition CPU's and the longevity of the AM3 socket, making future upgrades quite a bit cheaper. Throw in the fact that this is primarily a gaming machine there isn't an obvious and glaring reason to go for the more expensive i7 processors. I'm also not a major fan of overclocking and would most likely only jack any processor up by a maximum of 200-400 MHZ and never look at it again. It would be a crime dropping so much money on i7 and not make the most of its potential, so AMD with its lower clocking capabilities would most likely be a better fit to my needs.

While we all find (myself included) CPU's and GPU's to be far more sexy and interesting to research, I would have to ask advice on RAM, motherboards, PSU's and whatever else.

Basically I'm looking for an AMD gaming machine priced at around £800, screen and other peripherals excluded. So whenever you have time this following week, I would very much appreciate seeing what you could come up with. I won't be buying anything until Fermi is available for sale, but I expect to go with ATI anyway.

thanks.
 
Absolutely no point going amd or looking at future upgrade paths. Unless you are a serial upgrader by the time you come to replace cpu you'll want a mobo as well.

Just go i5.
 
I tend to keep a PC for a long time. You can tell by just looking at my sig and how ancient my old system was. I go for 'best bang for buck' at the time and lose all interest in any hardware for the next 18-24 months. If my old system didn't come to an unfortunate end, I wouldn't even dreamed of updating until 2011.
 
regulus said:
I tend to keep a PC for a long time. You can tell by just looking at my sig and how ancient my old system was. I go for 'best bang for buck' at the time and lose all interest in any hardware for the next 18-24 months. If my old system didn't come to an unfortunate end, I wouldn't even dreamed of updating until 2011.
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Yep exactly the reason you should not be looking at upgrade paths, I do exactly the same although more like 3 years. The i5 is still the way to go.

You need OS?
 
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this would do the job :) comes in at £805.58
 
wouldn't fit in your budget, the 5870 is faster but the 5850 can be overclocked to 5870 speeds (plus the 5870's £100 more)

depends on whether you're comfortable with overclocking your gpu or not tbh although the 5850 is more than capable in games at stock speeds
 
Completely fine with overclocking GPU's. My lowly 4870 used to eat any game alive so I'd expect the 5850 to follow suit. I can easily stretch for a 5870 but it would really have to be worth it over a 5850.
 
AMD's 965 is a very nice chip, I've just always found Intels slightly less fiddly when it comes to overclocking and they're more familiar to me. This is probably the same reason that a lot of other people suggest them. I know the new stepping revision Phenom 955/965 can hit 4GHz and they're probably slightly better value money when it comes to gaming.
 
That's what I've been reading as well. It's getting increasingly difficult trying to find honest reviews and recommendations with all the favouritism flying about.
 
The AMD chips are very competative if your on a budget as you get more "bang for your buck" for instance you can get a 965 black edition for a similar price as a i7 920 system or even less if you purchase at the right time.
 
EnderXi said:
The AMD chips are very competative if your on a budget as you get more "bang for your buck" for instance you can get a 965 black edition for a similar price as a i7 920 system or even less if you purchase at the right time.
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965 systems are generally considerably cheaper than 920 systems (unless you go for the cheapest 1366 boards available with only dual channel RAM).
 
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