My Athlon 64 3000+ (original gen skt 754 NewCastle) is finally due for retirement. The stresses and strains of modern gaming, high def media encoding and it's complete lack of dual anything (it's single core and single channel) are taking their toll.
Additionally, it's serving double duty as my primary computer since my laptop died, and my media PC. And I can say that typing this on my TV is not particularly easy.
In short, I need to build two PCs eventually. A media PC and a new desktop. The question is, do I build them both now, or do I hold off on the desktop. Yes, I know that I would invariable get more performance for less if I hold off on the desktop, but building them both now, would mean I could spend less on the media PC. I will explain:
If I build them both, I can drop a lot of money into the desktop (like a high end Phenom II or i7 920) and just build a basic media PC (like a dual core Athlon or Core 2).
But. if I just build the media PC, it needs to have a good meaty processor in it (like, say a Phenom II 720 or something) to handle media encoding, and in six months I'll still drop a fair chunk of change into the desktop (because I would never build a new computer that's *slower* than my old one).
What would you do if you were in my shoes? Would you make a larger up front investment that ends up costing less? Or would you spend more money in the long run, but end up with two slightly faster (and more power hungry) computers?
Oh, and any recommendations for the final processor choices are welcome to. Given two systems of approximately equal cost and performance, I'll choose the AMD system, but if the Intel system is a) cheaper or b) more powerful, I'll probably go Intel. My primary interest is bang-for-the-buck.
edit:
The budget is kinda what I'm trying to figure out here. I'm guessing that the combined system costs will be somewhere in the $1500 to $2000 range if I built both of them now, and the $2000 to $2500 range if I built them separately.
What I'm more interested in is finding a nice balance between cost and performance, I don't mind paying more if the cost increase is justified by a similar performance increase. I'm not going to buy the fastest computer possible no matter the cost, but I'm not going to price myself into a corner where I end up getting something that's too slow. for what I'm asking it to do.
Thanks.
Additionally, it's serving double duty as my primary computer since my laptop died, and my media PC. And I can say that typing this on my TV is not particularly easy.
In short, I need to build two PCs eventually. A media PC and a new desktop. The question is, do I build them both now, or do I hold off on the desktop. Yes, I know that I would invariable get more performance for less if I hold off on the desktop, but building them both now, would mean I could spend less on the media PC. I will explain:
If I build them both, I can drop a lot of money into the desktop (like a high end Phenom II or i7 920) and just build a basic media PC (like a dual core Athlon or Core 2).
But. if I just build the media PC, it needs to have a good meaty processor in it (like, say a Phenom II 720 or something) to handle media encoding, and in six months I'll still drop a fair chunk of change into the desktop (because I would never build a new computer that's *slower* than my old one).
What would you do if you were in my shoes? Would you make a larger up front investment that ends up costing less? Or would you spend more money in the long run, but end up with two slightly faster (and more power hungry) computers?
Oh, and any recommendations for the final processor choices are welcome to. Given two systems of approximately equal cost and performance, I'll choose the AMD system, but if the Intel system is a) cheaper or b) more powerful, I'll probably go Intel. My primary interest is bang-for-the-buck.
edit:
The budget is kinda what I'm trying to figure out here. I'm guessing that the combined system costs will be somewhere in the $1500 to $2000 range if I built both of them now, and the $2000 to $2500 range if I built them separately.
What I'm more interested in is finding a nice balance between cost and performance, I don't mind paying more if the cost increase is justified by a similar performance increase. I'm not going to buy the fastest computer possible no matter the cost, but I'm not going to price myself into a corner where I end up getting something that's too slow. for what I'm asking it to do.
Thanks.
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