Need opinion on build.

[Boreas]

Lots of valuable advice, thanks guys!

When I opted for the AC F 7, I already considered getting a 50mm fan for the northbridge chip as well as case fans to take care of cooling for the whole case. I think I forgot to mention that 50mm fan. Is the AC F 7 really that noisy?

 

[htne]

Originally posted by: Boreas
Lots of valuable advice, thanks guys!

When I opted for the AC F 7, I already considered getting a 50mm fan for the northbridge chip as well as case fans to take care of cooling for the whole case. I think I forgot to mention that 50mm fan. Is the AC F 7 really that noisy?

No. I have an E6300 overclocked to 3.2 ghz on a Gigabyte DS3 motherboard, with the Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro. I have the fan control turned off in the CMOS setup, so the fan runs at full 12 volts all of the time, and the fan does not bother me, even with the case open.

 

[eplebnista]

Originally posted by: MustangSVT
any other good boards that's maybe closer to $50?

That's an excellent question.

 

[SimMike2]

Originally posted by: yuppiejr
You can get an Athlon 64 X2 3600+ retail and a Biostar Tforce 550 board for around $150 shipped at eWiz and overclock into the 2.4 - 2.8 ghz neighborhood. Or you could go with the C2D e4300 and one of the two cheapie boards above for $170-180 and hit 2.4 - 3 ghz which will still kick the snot out of the overclocked AM2 which is 20% slower on a clock for clock basis. I have nothing personal against AMD but their current offerings are simply outclassed by everything in the Intel C2D lineup.

Here are some quick comparisons of my old Opteron dual running at 2.5GHz on a 939 board with 2GB of dual channel DDR, and my new Core2Duo 4300 running at 2.88GHz with 2GB of DDR2800.

I processed the exact same DVD with DVDShrink, using the exact same quality settings. The C2D did it in 25 minutes. The AMD did it in 45 minutes.

For SuperPI, the 1M test took 19 seconds on the C2D, 35 seconds on the Opteron.

Since I do a lot of video encoding and editing, this was a solid upgrade for me. Over the last few years, I've rarely got an upgrade that boosted benchmarks this much.

 

[Tboy012]

Originally posted by: SimMike2

Originally posted by: yuppiejr
You can get an Athlon 64 X2 3600+ retail and a Biostar Tforce 550 board for around $150 shipped at eWiz and overclock into the 2.4 - 2.8 ghz neighborhood. Or you could go with the C2D e4300 and one of the two cheapie boards above for $170-180 and hit 2.4 - 3 ghz which will still kick the snot out of the overclocked AM2 which is 20% slower on a clock for clock basis. I have nothing personal against AMD but their current offerings are simply outclassed by everything in the Intel C2D lineup.

Here are some quick comparisons of my old Opteron dual running at 2.5GHz on a 939 board with 2GB of dual channel DDR, and my new Core2Duo 4300 running at 2.88GHz with 2GB of DDR2800.

I processed the exact same DVD with DVDShrink, using the exact same quality settings. The C2D did it in 25 minutes. The AMD did it in 45 minutes.

For SuperPI, the 1M test took 19 seconds on the C2D, 35 seconds on the Opteron.

Since I do a lot of video encoding and editing, this was a solid upgrade for me. Over the last few years, I've rarely got an upgrade that boosted benchmarks this much.

your c2d 4300 @ 2.88GHz makes my opty look bad...
my opty 185 is @ 3.055GHz and SuperPI 1m test took me 28sec

 

[21stHermit]

Originally posted by: SimMike2
Here are some quick comparisons of my old Opteron dual running at 2.5GHz on a 939 board with 2GB of dual channel DDR, and my new Core2Duo 4300 running at 2.88GHz with 2GB of DDR2800.

I processed the exact same DVD with DVDShrink, using the exact same quality settings. The C2D did it in 25 minutes. The AMD did it in 45 minutes.

For SuperPI, the 1M test took 19 seconds on the C2D, 35 seconds on the Opteron.

Since I do a lot of video encoding and editing, this was a solid upgrade for me. Over the last few years, I've rarely got an upgrade that boosted benchmarks this much.

Thanks for posting these numbers.

Clearly a case of "A test is worth 1000 Expert Opinions"

Hermit