Athlon II vs Phenom II

[Sputnik]

Possible outcomes:

It works - yey - quad core
It doesn't work - boo - reset bios and use as bought

No chance of damaging anything.

That's how I'd look at it, It is exactly the route I took with mine.

I don't need the extra core but, It is a bonus that the chip unlocks.

[Sputnik]

I suppose I could get him to spend an extra fiver and get a Phenom II X4 955 BE.

But that would be like putting a V8 in a Reliant Robin as far as his usage is concerned.

Everywhere I looked it is £10 - £15 more

[Attila the Bun]

Everywhere I looked it is £10 - £15 more

My bad...I meant £5 over his £350 budget.

[dfour]

955 quad would be total overkill for his use. Just get the phenom x2 and see if it unlocks should he need the extra horsepower later.

[Attila the Bun]

Part of me agrees with sputnik and cptwhite_uk, part of me agrees with shaithis.

I think that I'm trying decide if it's better to save him some money now or give his system a longer lifetime.

[Sputnik]

or give his system a longer lifetime.

If your looking for some future proofing, Personally I'd spend a bit more and get an AM3+ motherboard over a more expensive CPU.

[Attila the Bun]

If your looking for some future proofing, Personally I'd spend a bit more and get an AM3+ motherboard over a more expensive CPU.

That was also a thought, but I know that once this rig is built it will sit quietly (well maybe humming audibly) in the background until it breaks X years down the line. I thought if I give him AM3 with a quad it will handle any of today's applications and games (with the addition of a reasonible GPU) with spare cores in the background for future core hungry applications.

[Attila the Bun]

An update:

He went with the X2 because he liked the idea of possibly getting another 2 cores for free and spent some of the saved money on some bluetooth peripheries.