HELP PLEASE!!... Newbee.... budget build!

[Biscuit]

what CTF and i were discussing was the trade off between having 4 x ram slots on the A55 model chipset for the socket FM1 or having high speed interfaces (SATA 6Gb is for solid state drives or hard drives and USB3 is for external devices such as webcams or external hard drives) on the A75 chipset.
Basically the problem with buying a single 4GB stick of ram is that you dont benefit from the full capability of the fusion platform as having 2 x sticks of ram allows both sticks to be accessed simultaneously (dual channel) thus giving you greater speeds (bandwidths). If you got 2 x 2GB sticks you would have the full speed benefit however if you were using a motherboard that only had 2 ram slots, you would have to replace the existing sticks rather than adding more when you decide to upgrade.
Another thing that CTF pointed out was one of the major companies involved in supplying chips for RAM resellers might be going bust, this would push ram prices up which might make it more expensive to upgrade at a later date. For that reason, and considering 8GB is only £35 at the moment, it seems wise to just get the whole lot now so that you wont need to worry about your RAM for the foreseeable future.
Whether or not you decide you would like to have the extra capability for more ram than that is up to you, although it seems pretty pointless to me, i have 8GB at the moment and windows doesnt use anywhere near all of it.

Does that make sense?

[Pob255]

However at the same time

Web surfing, ITunes, Kids homework (MS Office)etc. Also stream movies via Servio to my PS3 and Xbox.

4gb of ram should be more than enough and should remain so for a long time to come.
Doubly if you have a valid 32bit OS, if the price of ram doubles it'll still be nothing to the added cost of having to buy a new OS

Back to youre first post the Coolermaster Elite 330 Case With Coolermaster eXtreme Power for £50 is a good deal, yes it's not the best or most powerful PSU but it would be fine for an FM1 system using the onchip graphics, the issues would come on adding a graphics card (esp a higher end one for gaming) for a budget basic use build it's fine.

On SATA3 and USB3 . . . SATA3 is good if you consider getting an SSD at some point, USB3 however isn't actually that great, simply because very little needs or can use the added bandwidth. 1080p webcams and portable hard drives are about the only thing that makes use of usb3

ON gaming, it does depend on what you mean by "minor" if you mean web based flash games and popcap games (eg peggle and plants vs zombies) then the onchip graphics of the A6-3500 will cope very well, if you're talking the latest big budget titles with all the graphics sliders turned up then no it'll not cope well (which is where you want to ether add in a separate graphics card or turn the sliders down)

[benno1976a]

Thanks Biscuit, makes sense!... I think....

So would it make sense to get a chip set with 4 RAM slots and buy 2 lots of 2GB RAM (to use now) and 1 stick of 4GB RAM (while its cheap) so I can upgrade later....

Can I get a chipset with 4 slots and SATA 6 / USB 3, or will that send the budget sky high?

[steelfury]

Save yourself some time and hassle and get a pre-built one, has a PCI-e for adding a graphics card later.

http://www.ebuyer.com/344622-zoostor...p-pc-7873-1057