Hi chaps. Been a while since I have been on here but I wanted to bend your collective ears...
It's time for an upgrade. I have already ordered Windows 7 and want to look at a general upgrade. My current system is a Socket 939 Athlon X2 4200 with 2gb DDR. I figure I can work to a budget of around £300-£350 and for that I want a new small mATX case, CPU, mobo and at least 4gb of RAM.
I have 3 options as far as I can tell. I need multicore for video encoding, games needs are minimal (but an excuse to buy Arkham Asylum is not too much to ask!). My current ATI 1600XT is looking decidedly old... My biggest wish is for a rig that is both snappy, and does the little things extremely well - encoding a FLAC file to LAME MP3 for example, or converting an AVI to be compatible with my Sony Bravia LCD TV. My new iPod touch is in the post and the prospect of encoding movies for this is also quite attractive...
Option 1) Core i5 – I reckon I could squeeze an i5 750, Low end board (Gigabyte GA-P55M-UD2), 4gb Crucial 1333Mhz DDR3 and an Antec NSK 3480 out of £367. This is the absolute top end of my budget and would rely on my keeping my ATI X1600 XT graphics card.
Option 2) AMD Phenom II X3 720 - This I would consider to be the next step down. I am not too sure about going for a quad core mainly because the additional jump to an X4 955 is only £30 off a Core i5. If I went down the 785G mATX motherboard route (ASUS M4A785TD-M EVO), I could make use of the integrated graphics in the short term - this is making the assumption that integrated graphic on this board (with the 128mb Sideport memory) will be better than my 1600XT. In fact if that's the case - it adds to the argument of a Quad X4...
The X3 route gives an upgrade price of £306, to my mind upgrades the graphics and keeps me on the latest platform. That said....
Option 3) Athlon II X4 with the above configuration. This works out at £280. Now I can introduce an argument for adding a £50 graphics card, or wait for the ATI 5xxx generation cards that will work in Hybrid Crossfire. Alternatively, go for a non integrated mobo and save £10 to put into a dedicated card. Additionally, by speccing a quadcore I should have good performance for media encoding.
NOTES:
I have a 17" DVI monitor which I will be keeping, along with keyboard + mouse.
Energy efficiency is important. This would lead me to side with Intel, however if I ditched my graphics card, that would save around 40W of power draw at full load meaning they are more even. That's with the assumption that the 4200 chip on the 785G is better than the 1600XT.
I could flog my Chieftec Dragon and current Athlon X2/2GB DDR/250GB drive rig for £50 to make a dent in the above cost. I will keep my current 320GB drive...plus external USB.