Best Mobo/CPU combo for circa £120
Alright people. Friend of mine has asked me to massacre his ancient DELL and put him together a frankenstein system on a horribly tight budget, cough £150 cough, cough.
I know I should probably put some of it towards a PSU but at this sort of price range I think for now he'll have to make do with the incumbant dell one unitl he can scratch some more pennies together. Obviously he's got case, optical drive and a hard drive already so the main bits I'm going to focus on for now are the CPU/Mobo/Ram
I'm going to whack in 4GB if this stuff Crucial 1333mhz DDR3, cos its cheap £36 for 4GB!
That only leaves me with about £120 to play with for MOBO/RAM but I know there are aplethora of decent budget options out there, from Phenom X2s to the new Athlons to i3 etc. and I'm really not sure which way to go so am open to any and all suggestions...
Main use for the PC is producing music using Reason and obviously browsing word processing etc.
Any thoughts? Cheers in advance
Re: Best Mobo/CPU combo for circa £120
Athlon II X3 (£58.40) + 880G mobo (£55.99).
I believe most audio programs are reasonably multithreaded these days, so a fast triple core seems the way to go to me. That 880G mobo has 4 DIMM slots so the memory would be upgradable in the future. £114.39, job done :)
Re: Best Mobo/CPU combo for circa £120
Looks a good bet. Cheers for the heads up Scaryjim. Does that triple core have chance of being unlocked to 4?
Any competing opinions about this one?
Re: Best Mobo/CPU combo for circa £120
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Nobull
Does that triple core have chance of being unlocked to 4?
AFAIK, yes. IIRC nibbler got an Athlon II X3 that unlocked to a fully fledged Phenom II X4, with all 6MB of cache - but it wasn't 100% stable under stress testing unforunately (I'm sure he'll come and let us know if I've got that wrong though ;) ). Unlockable AMD CPUs are a bit of a lottery, really. For my money, however, it's by far the best bang for buck in the budget end due to the combination of multiple cores and high(ish) clock speed. Should be a good all-rounder.
Re: Best Mobo/CPU combo for circa £120
or save you self a few extra £ and get this
http://www.scan.co.uk/products/asus-...-micro-atx-vga
£45, free delivery
Re: Best Mobo/CPU combo for circa £120
This motherboard is worth considering:
http://www.ebuyer.com/product/205849...edium=products
It has USB3.0 and SATA3.0 but is ATX and lacks an IGP.
Re: Best Mobo/CPU combo for circa £120
Quote:
Originally Posted by
cigbunt
Like the idea of saving a few pennies on the motherboard, might even be enough to get me a budget PSU, like an Antec Basiq or similar, maybe even push him to spend a tenner more for the corsair £30 one...Seen some even cheaper DDr3 the other day so that's another fiver saved!
Cheers for advice guys
