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Ultimate Bang for the buck rig AMD X2 OR CORE 2 DUO

A

Aeridyne

Senior member
Nerds elite awaken from your basement slumber that you may shed geeky luminescence upon the question... amd or intel (and what cpu/board etc i should go with naturally)

I must say that I am already sort of leaning toward intel, but not entirely, the idea here for me is that I am an extreme penny pincher, all scrooge style, so I am looking at the whole deal this way;

Performance is relative to the cost, if one part is 20% faster but costs 30% more, then it is not better.

My setup if mainly for; retarded amounts of firefox tabs, as serious as possible gaming on a tight budget, and dvd encodes, with a bit of p2p in the background (which really seems to slow my current system down), running usually atleast one virtual machine, and some internet security program, probably kaspersky, but i have mcafee, norton and panda - which one is the best with the least resource hogging btw?

My current baby is sittin with,

Thermaltake Xaser V Full Tower
Ultra X-Finity 500W
AMD 939 3500+
Biostar SLI board
EVGA 6800GS
4 GB 3200 DDR
2 DVD burners on Secondary IDE
2 Hard drives on Primary IDE
2 hard drives on pci HD controller

I want my system to be able to encode a dvd and be able to play a game at the same time, that would be sweet. I also run a lot of Virtualization but normally only one at a time.

As i said before I am all about value, If i can get a lower cost part and unlock it sweet, stuff like that, I like to keep processors and boards under 100 and really as far under as possible, but i dont usually get away with it. I don't overclock, atleast i havent yet, but if i get a core 2 duo they are just begging for it, so i might do a mild overclock of around 20-30% on the stock cooler.

I plan on keeping everything except for the board, cpu, and ram.

I already got me a set of Crucial Ballistix DDR2 800 (2GB) so i hope I'm set on that
I need to get a board and cpu for sure, the single core 3500 is great, but it gets maxxed out too much, i hate it when my rig crawls

So into the board/cpu combo realm, of course with the tight money i'm workin with im lookin at pretty much a low end X2 or a E4300
I have seen some benches here on anand and it seems like the x2 3800 and E4300 are pretty evenly matched and the X2 is a bit cheaper, but how overclockable is the X2?
It cant be as overclockable as the E4300, but again, its a bit cheaper, normally i would just take the E4300, but now that I am considering overclocking either one, the boards for the X2 are really freaking dirt cheap, but which ones are cheap AND good overclockers? Any of them? Or should i just bite it and get the E4300 with the BFG 650i when it comes back in at newegg? There are boards for teh X2 around 60 bux plus teh 80 dollar chip = about 140 --- while the E4300 is 114 and a good board is around 100 = 214 /// is the E4300 worth that much more? (btw if i go with an intel setup, i probably want a board that will take a quad core proc. in the future, which is another factor swaying me to the more costly setup, however i normally upgrade boards about once every 1 or 2 years anyway so upgradability really isnt that important, I wait until there are bitchin new parts for around 100 each, such as what I am doing right now)

Also, the final factor that i need to incorporate is storage with speed. I have a bunch of 160 and 200 gb IDE drives, i also have a bunch of 18.2 10K scsi drives and an old pci card, and i already have the IDE raid pci card too. I have been doing a lot of research on raid, but i still have a lot of questions. 1st off I need to say that i am only concerned with raid 0. But I need to find out more about it, I have made raid 5 arrays before, but didn't have a chance to monkey with them a whole lot, but what I did do i take 2 compaq proliant servers each with 10 scsi drives and create an identical container on both using raid 5. I then setup windows 2003 on one, then used acronis to make an image and dropped it on to the other one no problem. I will use a similar method to create backups if I do choose to use raid 0 on my main drives I hope. What I don't know though, is if I use acronis or something to create an image of a raid 0 and say my board takes a crap, will I be able to restore that to a board with a different controller with different drives? Some people have told me that if you try to move data that was created using one type of controller to a set that was created with a different controller that it wont work... wtf are they talking about?
Aside from that, some say that raid 0 is bad because they corrupt easily, how much more often will data become corrupt on a raid 0 than say 1 regular ide drive?
And what would be the best way to implement raid 0? Where can you run in to bottlenecks? will a regular ide controller pci card bottleneck? will a scsi pci card bottleneck? Would it be better to just run with the onboard controller that comes with my new board?


If you actually take the time to read and respond to every aspect of every question in this post, you are the master of all that is cool, or if you help me with anything you are still cool, just not the master of cool... either way, much appreciation to any answers! seriously.
 
You need to upgrade your video card And you need to switch to sata drives not many new boards have many ide slots if any at all. Core 2 faster and can overclock better then AMD X2 and there not much of a price difference for most. and you can get a good board for overclocking cheap with core 2 for around 60 to 90 bucks, unless your wanting a nforce board.

But your EVGA 6800GS won't push most of the newer games of today.
 
Is this thread from last october? Core 2 Duo is better bang for the buck unless you have less than $600 to spend.

"I want my system to be able to encode a dvd and be able to play a game at the same time, that would be sweet."
Good luck with that. Other than saturating the RAM and FSB, that'd make your system slow to a crawl, even with two fast cores.

Aim for:
E4300
Gigabyte DS3

You will need a PCI IDE (PATA) card if you want to keep using all your old drives; 99% of new motherboards for Core 2 Duo only have 1 PATA Channel.

PS: You can get a 50% overclock out of it really easy. Mine was absolutely simple to overclock and I got another 1.4GHz out of it. That's another 73%.

Originally posted by: Aeridyne
some say that raid 0 is bad because they corrupt easily, how much more often will data become corrupt on a raid 0 than say 1 regular ide drive?
Click to expand...

Mean time to failure of a two-drive RAID-0 is half the time of that of one drive.

You'll need a PCI-Express graphics card, by the way. A 7900GS would do on a budget.
 
Ok, it would seem that i must be a bit more concise. I tried to lay everything on the table so that everyone knew exactly what i had and what i was shooting for.

1. I am basically looking at 2 CPUs the AMD socket AM2 Brisbane core 3800 and the Intel E4300
both are cheap, both are overclockable... obviously, the intel OCs better... but how well does the 3800 OC? Is it comparable? (I will want to run on the stock cooler)

2. Whichever I pick, what are the cheapest possible board for each, that can achieve atleast a 50% OC and run DDR2 800 ram?

3. When it comes to raid, where can you run in to bottlenecks on a system?

4. Based on question 3, is the onboard raid on whichever board i choose going to be a good performer for IDE drives? Would i get better performance out of the onboard raid, my existing pci controller card, or my pci scsi card? OR do they all suck and i should go with a cheap pci-e raid card?
 
If you want to go as cheap as possible, why not just snag a skt 939 X2 & overclock using the setup you already have, then upgrade your video card to an X1950XT or 320mb 8800GTS?
 
I suppose that I might, but i really wanted to get something new, even if it is a little more... as for vid, I'm straight on video right now, I'm waiting for a 8800 part to drop, it will be a while still.
 
Ok what you have to understand is that your ability to overclock to near where you want to go (50%) is going to depend on a few things.

You'll need quality RAM that is overclock friendly. You'll need a good Power Supply that won't limit you. And the CPU and motherboard have to be OC friendly. Even with components that overclock well there is a certain amount of luck involved.

The E4300 overclocks better then the 3800+ more then enough to make up for the difference. If you're looking to do around a 50%+ OC then I would seriously consider the 3600+ if you're on a really tight budget.

Just my OP but I would just get one of the 650i boards for under $100 (EVGA 650i Ultra comes to mind) an E4300 and some Wintec Ampo's for less then $80 for 2GB and call it a day. More then likely you'll get the OC you want and be happy.
 
If gaming performance doesn't matter much, the the E4300 or E6320 is the way to go ... it'll still cost quite a bit more because you'll have to buy a CPU, RAM & a new motherboard but the performance increase will be large, even if you don't get a 50% overclock out of it.
 
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