- Aug 23, 2003
- 25,375
- 142
- 116
$79 Pentium D 805 & ECS P4M800PRO-M V2
Notes:
Bare CPU does not include a heatsink/fan (pick up a cheap Arctic Cooling unit online).
Overclocking with this ECS motherboard works best if you use a single stick of memory and a PATA hard drive. Even then, you are better off with low-FSB/high-multiplier CPUs because this motherboard doesn't have too much headroom.
Yes, I know I've only been running Stress Prime for 30 minutes when I took the screenshot; I'll update it later after 12 hours, but I've overclocked a few of these combos and they all do this speed without a problem.
A Core 2 Duo will be faster and use less power; the cheapest Core 2 Duo combo at Fry's is almost 100% more money. This is more than enough power for a majority of the PC users out there.
An AMD X2 3800+ combo would also be faster, but again it costs about 90% more money.
Add a cheap/quiet $15 Arctic Cooling heatsink/fan, a $40 Antec Sonata II/PSU (also from Fry's), a $20 250GB WD PATA hard drive (from Staples), and a $20 Samsung 16X DL DVD+/-RW from Microcenter, and a stick of $40 512MB PC3200 (damn high RAM prices)...and you have yourself a mighty-fine dual core system for roughly $215 (the motherboard has an AGP slot, but the built-in audio/video/LAN work fine for office use).
Notes:
Bare CPU does not include a heatsink/fan (pick up a cheap Arctic Cooling unit online).
Overclocking with this ECS motherboard works best if you use a single stick of memory and a PATA hard drive. Even then, you are better off with low-FSB/high-multiplier CPUs because this motherboard doesn't have too much headroom.
Yes, I know I've only been running Stress Prime for 30 minutes when I took the screenshot; I'll update it later after 12 hours, but I've overclocked a few of these combos and they all do this speed without a problem.
A Core 2 Duo will be faster and use less power; the cheapest Core 2 Duo combo at Fry's is almost 100% more money. This is more than enough power for a majority of the PC users out there.
An AMD X2 3800+ combo would also be faster, but again it costs about 90% more money.
Add a cheap/quiet $15 Arctic Cooling heatsink/fan, a $40 Antec Sonata II/PSU (also from Fry's), a $20 250GB WD PATA hard drive (from Staples), and a $20 Samsung 16X DL DVD+/-RW from Microcenter, and a stick of $40 512MB PC3200 (damn high RAM prices)...and you have yourself a mighty-fine dual core system for roughly $215 (the motherboard has an AGP slot, but the built-in audio/video/LAN work fine for office use).
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