Upgrading/Re-building PC - Dual core, triple core, or quad core?

[Zhaoman]

I don't think new hard drives or cases or dvd-rw are necessary. For 360bhp to get the most performance for £300: a p31 mobo (£40), e7200 (£80), 2gb ddr2 (£30), and hd4850 (£125); (total: £275) would ensure that he'll be able to play most of today and tomorrow's games at highest settings and at high resolutions.

The 400w PSU is fine for the above setup, and in future he could upgrade for better stability and peace of mind.

[360bhp]

Not sure about the mobo but I approve

That's a nice build. There again though if you are willing to overclock Intel are the better choice and also leave the option for a Q6600 later

I don't think the phenoms will come to much for some time and the good one's will not work on that motherboard or the 780G for that matter.

Quite like this build as CAT-THE-FIFTH suggested.

Gigabyte GA-MA69VM-S2 690V Socket AM2 Onboard VGA 8 channel audio mATX Motherboard 132272 £36.12
AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+ 2.5GHz Energy Efficient Socket AM2 L2 1MB (2x512KB) Cache Retail Boxed Processor 134571 £39.25
Corsair 4GB Kit (2x2GB) DDR2 800MHz/PC2-6400 XMS2 Memory Non-ECC Unbuffered CL5(5-5-5-18) Heat Spreader Lifetime Warranty 130429 £55.15
OCZ Stealth Xtream 500W PSU - 1x PCI-E 6/8pin, 2x SATA 12cm Fan 135159 £34.77
Western Digital WD2500AAKS Caviar SE 250GB 7200RPM SATAII/300 16MB Cache - OEM 124733 £33.19
8800GT on Ebuyer(made by Zotac)

£288.47

EDIT: The mobo is currently not available from ebuyer for some reason!

Think I may go for this. Would my current 400w psu be ok for this new build for now, or will the 500w be needed?

Staffmike.. Why would something like the AMD Phenom X4 9850 http://www.ebuyer.com/product/143263 not work with this mobo?

[staffsMike]

It's just what scan say on most of their 780G webpages and the 690V certainly don't look any better.

The vast majority of the 780G boards have a three-phase or four-phase PWM circuitry design. These designs are completely acceptable for the 45W, 65W, 89W, and 95W TDP rated processors; however, drop in a 125W TDP processor such as the Phenom 9850e or 6400+ X2 and you are asking for trouble

Do some research into your motherboard if you want it to work with a phenom like that.

There are two new phenoms to be released which are 1.8 and 2.0GHz which are said to be 65W, that will be fine . Just the high end one like the above, or the new high end one which is 140W thus even worse, may cause problems.

[DanceswithUnix]

Which should be read as "dropping in a 125W TDP processor with a ****e powersupply and overclock the balls of it is asking for trouble", the warning only effects the 'high-end' X4's, when AMD drop to a 45nm wafer process it'll be irrelevant. And the point of the HD3470 is Hybrid X-Fire, the OP did say he wanted to do a spot of gaming, didn't he? Maybe he'd manage without for extra savings *shrug*

Nah, Anandtech did a review and found some motherboards (uATX ones I think) simply fried their PWMs if you plugged in a 9850. Was a basic incompatibility which they went nuts at the mobo makers for (quite rightly imho) as it wasn't made obvious in any literature. Some will work if you get enough air over the PWM area, but that still doesn't seem clever.

[staffsMike]

And the point of the HD3470 is Hybrid X-Fire, the OP did say he wanted to do a spot of gaming, didn't he? Maybe he'd manage without for extra savings *shrug*

I thought that Hybrid crossfire only worked with the HD3450 as they are one in the same but even still I'm pretty sure that still isn't working yet.

[Noxvayl]

Quite like this build as CAT-THE-FIFTH suggested.

Gigabyte GA-MA69VM-S2 690V Socket AM2 Onboard VGA 8 channel audio mATX Motherboard 132272 £36.12
AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+ 2.5GHz Energy Efficient Socket AM2 L2 1MB (2x512KB) Cache Retail Boxed Processor 134571 £39.25
Corsair 4GB Kit (2x2GB) DDR2 800MHz/PC2-6400 XMS2 Memory Non-ECC Unbuffered CL5(5-5-5-18) Heat Spreader Lifetime Warranty 130429 £55.15
OCZ Stealth Xtream 500W PSU - 1x PCI-E 6/8pin, 2x SATA 12cm Fan 135159 £34.77
Western Digital WD2500AAKS Caviar SE 250GB 7200RPM SATAII/300 16MB Cache - OEM 124733 £33.19
8800GT on Ebuyer(made by Zotac)

£288.47

EDIT: The mobo is currently not available from ebuyer for some reason!

Think I may go for this. Would my current 400w psu be ok for this new build for now, or will the 500w be needed?

Staffmike.. Why would something like the AMD Phenom X4 9850 http://www.ebuyer.com/product/143263 not work with this mobo?

That's a good system and I'd get the new PSU to be safe. You don't know how much longer your current one will last(could be a few years or even a few weeks with the new GFX). I think its the safest option to get a new PSU.

If you want to support newer Phenoms and ones to come out in the future then I'd switch the motherboard for this one> MSI K9A2 CF Its only £20 more and will provide support for all the newer AMD chips to come as well as better overclocking

Just curious... why do you not want to look at the HD4850?

[360bhp]

Thanks very much ExHail! Will go with a new psu. New mobo looks good too

Going for the 8800gt just to save on money really, and plus saw a few videos of the 8800gt playing crysis, and it seems to be pretty good considereing the games I play are not as intensive as that. Maybe except for company of heroes which I once in a blue moon play.


How much speed difference will I notice from this system with the new system? Hopefully I'll be blown away lol

[DanceswithUnix]

The 8800GT will blow you away, the rest will help.

I also would want an AM2+ motherboard. When quad core CPUs hit 50 quid you might want to swap one in. I also like my motherboards to have gigabit ethernet for when I need to do backups, video editing etc.

How about the Asus M3N78-EMH, £15 more?

[aidanjt]

Nah, Anandtech did a review and found some motherboards (uATX ones I think) simply fried their PWMs if you plugged in a 9850. Was a basic incompatibility which they went nuts at the mobo makers for (quite rightly imho) as it wasn't made obvious in any literature. Some will work if you get enough air over the PWM area, but that still doesn't seem clever.

True, communicating that there would be an incompatiblity in *some* cases would have been a good idea, but frankly, why jam a 125W CPU into a small system in the first place, that by itself is asking for trouble.. Anyway, as I said, once AMD start rolling out 45nm CPUs, that problem with go away.

[aidanjt]

I thought that Hybrid crossfire only worked with the HD4850 as they are one in the same but even still I'm pretty sure that still isn't working yet.

Erm, no, Hybrid crossfire works with the HD3470 board fine, it's the same chip, just with beefed up clock frequencies.

Enabled hybrid graphics cards models so far include ATI HD2400XT, HD2400Pro, HD3470 and HD3450 based VGA cards....

The drivers already work for the above, it just isn't supported in XP yet, whether that is due to the OS sucking or begrudged porting of the code to the XP driver-base remains to be seen.

[staffsMike]

Whoops I meant the HD 3450.. guess I've been Typing HD4850 too much

That's cool though, It's still not a great gaming solution though.

[aidanjt]

That's cool though, It's still not a great gaming solution though.

Not really, but decent enough for humble resolutions.

[staffsMike]

Very true, at 1024 x 768 most cards are

[DanceswithUnix]

True, communicating that there would be an incompatiblity in *some* cases would have been a good idea, but frankly, why jam a 125W CPU into a small system in the first place, that by itself is asking for trouble.. Anyway, as I said, once AMD start rolling out 45nm CPUs, that problem with go away.

Shuttles are small.

uATX boxes are large.

ATX boxes should have rudders put on them and be used to move goods around the waterways of the world.

I only want one GPU, so for me a small(ish) box with a big CPU seems a reasonable mix. Admittedly I personally wouldn't go as far as 125W for fan noise reasons, but I don't see why someone wouldn't.

As for 45nm, do you not think AMD are going to crank up the volts and MHz on any improvement 45nm brings to close their gap with Intel? I suspect things will go faster, but no cooler (at the high end at least).

[aidanjt]

Actually they'll need to drop the voltages, but they will crank up the MegaHurtz, however the amount of current consumed will still drop as a product of Ohms law, and AMD's focus on energy efficiency, I'd say they'll have X4's with TDP's between 65W and 95W when they reach that point.

[Noxvayl]

I think when AMD go to 45nm they will do both

Some of the CPU's launched will be focused on power saving and the others will be focused on performance enhancements. Bringing down power consumption would provide them with a good server platform that can hopefully battle Intel on running costs since the current AMD Opteron uses similar power to the Intel Xeon.

Then for the desktop they'll send the clock frequencies up to try and get some sort of competition against the Intel quad cores. They need to do it soon though because Intel's nehalem will wipe the flaw if there is absolutely nothing there to oppose it.