Best bang for buck CPU, $100

[geepondy]

Jim, I apologize from my previous post before doing research. That actually is a pretty good deal. $73.44 plus 23.44 shipping for a total of $97.63 is considerably cheaper then the Newegg price of 119.95 plus 19.59 shipping. Thanks for the suggestion.

Originally posted by: jjmIII
Check your shipping price here for the case. Could be a good deal.

 

[Zap]

Wishy-washy-ness aside, this has been a great thread so far, minus the "must overclock" and "must Core 2 Duo" zealots. 😛

Originally posted by: geepondy
But those X2 64's offer very good value for the low dollar. I was looking at Tom's Hardware CPU charts and a hundred dollar X2 4800 beats the E4300 in all the benchmarks I looked at.

Yes, when not overclocking, may as well save money and get a cheaper AMD chip with a cheaper AMD platform motherboard.

If absolutely lowest cost, still AMD stuff.

If absolutely overclocking, then Intel stuff.

Originally posted by: geepondy
Do you think even with an unclocked E4300, I would think wow, this is really much faster then my P4 2.23? I would so obviously see the difference in booting up and running tasks?

Any of the new chips would be faster than your old P4 in all tasks where a faster CPU makes a difference. Booting up isn't one of them, AFAIK. 😕

Heck, you can even get a Celeron 420 or whatever the lowest speed "Conroe-L" chip is for $40, and it will still be faster.

Originally posted by: Viditor
IMHO, you should focus more on the rest of the system...

1. Do you want to re-use your old HDDs? Make sure there are enough IDE connectors...
...

This is a really good idea. Too many people think the CPU makes or breaks the deal, and it doesn't. These days all CPUs are "fast enough" to do everything, just that some are faster than others. Think about it... if we were talking about automobiles, would it make sense that whenever someone posts "I have $15000, which econobox should I get" we get many answers saying stuff like "econoboxes suck, you should get at minimum a sports car for $10000 more."

First thing is that you need to have a budget, and then stick to it. Choose the rest of your system, and then figure out what you can get based on remaining budget.

Originally posted by: geepondy
A few years ago I put together a pc for my sister and the onboard audio was obviously crappy with whining and buzzing in that I had to go out and put a Soundblaster Live in for her.

Latest onboard audio should not have whining and buzzing. IIRC that's a requirement of HD audio, which every board based on recent chipsets now has.

Originally posted by: geepondy
Jim, I apologize from my previous post before doing research.

Wow, the civility is so shocking here that I may never venture back to Off Topic. :laugh:

 

[geepondy]

Zap, I certainly have learned a lot. In reading reviews of CPUs, it's funny how the terminology changes rather quickly. Reviews are referring to the especially lower end, AMD X2 chips as being good for "budget systems" or "second systems". Less then two years ago, they were referring to these IC's belonging in "enthusiasm's" systems. I'm sure the Intel E6xx series will follow that path as well.

I know hard drives can make a big difference in system performance, especially bootup. Is it safe to assume the high recommended Seagate ST3320620AS (recommended to me twice in this thread) will perform noticeably faster then my current Western Digital WD1200JB Caviar Special Edition 120GB which is probably five years old now although not cheap at the time. I wonder if there's an HD benchmark chart that would include my older drive versus a newer drive.

 

[Zap]

Yes, just about any new HDD will outperform a five year old drive. What you may want to look for are the newest models - sometimes tough to spot. Seagate's upcoming model 7200.11 drives are supposedly really fast. They're only "officially" 500GB and up, but there's an "unofficial" 250GB model.

 

[magreen]

Originally posted by: bryanW1995

Originally posted by: magreen

Originally posted by: bryanW1995
seriously, please don't use the D word around here.

Right, because around here we advise people to buy what we want them to buy, not what would be good for them acc. to their needs. 😕

this is the cpu/overclocking forum. if he had absolutely no desire to oc, he wouldn't be here. why would anybody buy a dell when he could get literally 2x the cpu clock speed out of a simple oc on a pentium e? if you a dell person then by all means please sell me on their virtues. I'm afraid that you need to go to the section for women and children if you are hoping to find a big audience, however.

Yes, it was for the sake of civility that I didn't respond to this particular piece of bait.

 

[Zap]

Originally posted by: magreen

Originally posted by: bryanW1995

Originally posted by: magreen

Originally posted by: bryanW1995
seriously, please don't use the D word around here.

Right, because around here we advise people to buy what we want them to buy, not what would be good for them acc. to their needs. 😕

this is the cpu/overclocking forum. if he had absolutely no desire to oc, he wouldn't be here. why would anybody buy a dell when he could get literally 2x the cpu clock speed out of a simple oc on a pentium e? if you a dell person then by all means please sell me on their virtues. I'm afraid that you need to go to the section for women and children if you are hoping to find a big audience, however.

Yes, it was for the sake of civility that I didn't respond to this particular piece of bait.

Why not respond to it?

Get a Dell and overclock that puppy!!! 😀

 

[magreen]

Originally posted by: Zap
Why not respond to it?

Get a Dell and overclock that puppy!!! 😀

Not bad, not bad at all. You get the best of both worlds that way.

 

[geepondy]

Used ton of Dells at work, no complaints. When I had to put the add on pcbs (Ieee, canbus PCI cards) on our engineering machines, the case was a snap to open and get at. Also recommend Dells for family members because if you build them something, you will support them, regardless of what software goofs they made or what viruses they downloaded.

 

[geepondy]

Ok, I will post what I bought tonight. I thought more about my wants. I wanted a system that was going to be significantly faster then what I have now (p4 2.26ghz). Mainly I didn't need blazing speed, I just didn't want things to run so slow like winrar and quickpar taking forever plus a day. I wanted (with a better video card by tax return time or sooner) to be able to play Half Life 2 at 1024x768 with at least some of the bells and whistles enabled. I wanted to hopefully multitask so that if a virus scan was running in the background, I could watch a DVD or listen to music without the system hiccuping. I want stability and low power. This is equally important to what is posted above. I leave my computer on 24/7 except when going away for the weekend or vacay and about all I do is that if I go to work and am not downloading or using the pc, I'll put it in standby. Check your system with a kilowatt meter and add up the costs at the end of the month and it makes a difference in the electric bill. So at least for this system (sorry) I decided not to overclock. If I decided to overclock I would want to do it right rather then gamble and take a chance and that would mean getting a good overclocking mb (which would mean no onboard video), real fast ram and an other then stock cpu cooler.

So from Newegg I bought the following:

CPU AMD|A64 X2 4800+ 2.5G AM2 65N R - Retail (Qty=1, Price=$109.00)
MEM 1Gx2|COR 240P TWIN2X2048-6400C4 - Retail (Qty=1, Price=$100.00)
MB GIGABYTE GA-MA69GM-S2H 690G RTL - Retail (Qty=1, Price=$79.99)
DVD BURN SAMSUNG|SH-S203B % - OEM (Qty=1, Price=$31.99)
HD 320G|ST 7K 16M SATA2 ST3320620AS - OEM (Qty=1, Price=$79.99)
DISCOUNT FOR COMBO #57660 (Qty=1, Price=$-15.00)

I bought the processor and memory combo for $15 off and also there is a $40 rebate on the memory. Can anybody comment on this memory? I have liked Corsair in the past. The DVD burner received an excellent review at www.cdfreaks.com and the hard drive was recommended here. The Newegg picture of the mb shows it comes with two SATA cables and I hope that is correct as I'll need one for both the cd drive and hard drive. Excellent shipping rates at Newegg. The total for three day was only $8.11. I actually decided it would be worth it to me to pay $22.14 for two day because that means it will arrive Thursday, I won't be here to pick it up and so will instruct them to send to the UPS office which is close to work and will pick up on Friday.l

From www.provantage I bought the Antec NSK6580 case for $97.64 including shipping. The web site says there is a $25 rebate on the case but they don't offer a downloadable rebate form nor do I see it at Antec's site. Anybody know what is up with that? Also I'm a little nervous. The shipping is ground and they say 3-5 days and quite possibly less as they ship from many locations but I ordered the case on Sunday and today did not receive a shipping confirmation. If anybody has experience with provantage or knows more details about the rebate I would appreciate the input.
It truly would suck to receive everything else by Friday and not receive the case. If by tomorrow afternoon I do not receive email shipping conformation, I will call them.

So the total cost is about $500 but I hope I'm getting good componentry for my money. To put it in perspective, I believe I paid more than that for my P4, 2.26, Asus P4PE mb and 512mb ram. I'll take the $40 memory rebate and hopefully $25 case rebate and put it towards a video card.

Thanks everybody for the great advice. Feel free to comment about my selection although I know the overclocker's will be disappointed.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Originally posted by: dflynchimp
mhmm, there was a time when one could say "I OC'd my cpu to "X" GHz, and people would be like...what's OC???"
then came the time when one could say "I OC'd my cpu to "X" GHz, and people would be like...WOW!!!"
and now..."I OC'd my cpu to "X" GHz, and people would be like...oh, okay"

QFT.

OC'ers don't seem to be the minority as much as they used to be. Darn Intel and their insanely-underspecced CPUs... 😛