Computer question-advice for mobo and pcu.

[zteknik]

Now for all the comuter geeks out there I have a question as to what AMD processor and motherboard combo to get.
My old rig finaly played its last game... [panic]
It was an older opteron 180 on a DFI Lanparty board.Its been so long since I speced anything out I don't know where to start.
I hear the Phenoms are good but which one to get and what board should I get? I liked the DFI board ,overclocks great and your able to fine tune it,but I think they stopped production of their gamer boards.
Personaly I would like to keep it AMD,not too big of a fan for Intel
Any input would be great[Beer]

[cstone]

Primary uses and price range would help.

First place I check if I'm in a hurry is the Microcenter: http://www.microcenter.com/search/search_results.aspx?N=4294966996+517+4294963348&cat=0001%3c%3e%3c%3eAMD-%3a-Hot-Ad-Deals-%3a-Motherboards-%3a-Computer-Parts-%3a-Micro-Center

[ZERO THEORY]

Personaly I would like to keep it AMD,not too big of a fan for Intel


Blasphemy. I read good things about the Bulldozer chip last winter. But the general consensus is that intel's micro-architecture is vastly superior. Kepler for Ivy Bridge, if I'm not mistaken.

[zteknik]

Ah,yes that would help[Bang] my bad.
Looking for mostly a gaming setup.As far as price,well I don't know where there at now for a decent processor and a motherboard.
I would guess a high performance cpu would start around $200? And a motherboard with good features and plug ins would run around $300?
But it's been years since I even looked at what they go for.
I know I'm going to have to get the proper memory and a video card as well but that will be later on,I have to take small steps as not to deplete my shooting budget :D(or piss the wife off[handbags] )

[zteknik]

Blasphemy. I read good things about the Bulldozer chip last winter. But the general consensus is that intel's micro-architecture is vastly superior. Kepler for Ivy Bridge, if I'm not mistaken.
I guess I'm stuck old school, and my experiences with the older Intels is that you realy couldn't get them to do too much without having them lock up.
I guess I could go Intel if they can be fine tuned.

[cstone]

I don't keep up with computers the way I used to, but I used to read this website pretty frequently to get ideas on what was available and read reviews:

http://www.tomshardware.com/

I still like Microcenter for basic systems. They often have mobo/CPU combo deals and they will install the CPU and run the burn-in for you for no extra charge.

$300 is about all I will spend on a desktop machine. You know 2 years after you buy it, the same system will cost $75.

[zteknik]

I don't keep up with computers the way I used to, but I used to read this website pretty frequently to get ideas on what was available and read reviews:

http://www.tomshardware.com/

I still like Microcenter for basic systems. They often have mobo/CPU combo deals and they will install the CPU and run the burn-in for you for no extra charge.

$300 is about all I will spend on a desktop machine. You know 2 years after you buy it, the same system will cost $75.

Cool,I have to check them out.
So true,I must have spent over $800 on mine when I built it minus the stuff I horse traded,and now it's scrap...But I did run it hard for over 6 years and it kept up pretty good.Just like cars they need maintenance.

[Rabid]

http://www.anandtech.com (http://www.anandtech.com/) is another good review site. If it is anything like it used to be you can get a pretty good computer from micro center and upgrade the video card for a budget gaming computer.

[USAFGopherMike]

With the power newer mobo/CPU/Graphics cards suck, make sure you have a PSU that will support what you build. Might as well start with a newer case and go from there. That's what I did.

[zteknik]

Yea the last PSU I had wouldn't support all my crap I had to get the Antech 1000 watter.I'll probably go the water cooling route this time. All the fans I ran sounded like I was on the flight line..
If I had the space I would love to go a SLI rout but my desk will only hold one monitor.And dual graphic cards would be a waste.
Now that has me thinking ATI Or Nvidia? Last ATI card I had was junk,software sucked and lagged too much..Plus the drivers for it sucked,any updates for it and it crashed unless you manualy uninstall all the old drivers then install the new one.

[Dingo]

My mobo has +1 fire damage, and his poke ball is covered in laser spikes! The powers of your ceepee-yew cannot withstand it!

[zteknik]

My mobo has +1 fire damage, and his poke ball is covered in laser spikes! The powers of your ceepee-yew cannot withstand it!
You sank my battleship!!![gohome]

[ZERO THEORY]

Yea the last PSU I had wouldn't support all my crap I had to get the Antech 1000 watter.I'll probably go the water cooling route this time. All the fans I ran sounded like I was on the flight line..
If I had the space I would love to go a SLI rout but my desk will only hold one monitor.And dual graphic cards would be a waste.
Now that has me thinking ATI Or Nvidia? Last ATI card I had was junk,software sucked and lagged too much..Plus the drivers for it sucked,any updates for it and it crashed unless you manualy uninstall all the old drivers then install the new one.

Nvidia, hands-down. You already touched on the driver follies of Raedeon cards. And for the time being, Nvidia GPUs are simply making brighter, crisper, smoother displays.

[streetglideok]

Dont forget newegg.com. Intel is best, but AMD is the cheaper route. Dont forget, you'll likely need to upgrade your PSU. Any of the PSUs made more than a few years ago don't supply most of their power on the 12v rail, which is where most motherboards need it now. Corsair makes some really good units now as well as a few others. Alot of people running 16gb-32gb ram now.

[Byte Stryke]

Intel vs AMD
Ford vs Chevy
Glock vs..


AMD is every bit as good as Intel

eeexcept that you are going to pay for all of Intel's dumbass commercials trying to convince all of the sheep that their product is superior.
If you build a good product, it advertises itself.
I don't listen to any review that touts one product over another(Previous model comparisons aside)... chances are, they are selling you something.

[RblDiver]

I put together my PC for ~$1000 about a year ago, and it still can run most things on high (perhaps not ultra, but at least high) pretty well. Don't know what it'd run me today, but if you're interested I can dig up a list of my parts when I get off work.

[Caithford]

Intel vs AMD
Ford vs Chevy
Glock vs..


AMD is every bit as good as Intel

eeexcept that you are going to pay for all of Intel's dumbass commercials trying to convince all of the sheep that their product is superior.
If you build a good product, it advertises itself.
I don't listen to any review that touts one product over another(Previous model comparisons aside)... chances are, they are selling you something.

Actually, you aren't correct. AMD's architecture is different from Intel. They go with shorter execution strings to cheat "faster" clock times. AMD is less expensive for a reason. Intel i5 is the way the go. Plan on about $300 for a good i5-3570K (http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/processor-comparison/processor-specifications.html?proc=65520) is the way to go for top end chip. You can get a good motherboard for about $200. I wouldn't bump the m/b up to $300 and would instead spend that on the better cpu, or better video card.

[streetglideok]

You can usually find good mobo's in the $150 range. Dont go cheap on memory. I prefer Gskill myself. I would look hard at 16gb, but no less than 8gb. Get the best video card you can get. I'm running an nvidia 560ti, the 6-series is out now, I would look at the 650 or higher cards. And as I said before, make sure you are running a modern psu.

[Gman]

AMD is the company that brought you 64-bit x86 processing. Intel wanted to shove everyone into IA64 architecture. Look how well Itanium has done over its lifetime.

AMD is the company that brought you HyperTransport to get away from the Front Side Bus that Intel had been pushing forever. Now Intel has QuickPath, which you could say is a rip-off of HyperTransport.

AMD makes damn fine hardware. You can also get a lot more bang for your buck.

I also prefer AMD graphics solutions. You get more bang for your buck and you don't have the issues that Nvidia had with their chips that had ball grid array interfaces.

[zteknik]

Guystyhanks for all the input.
Now I can do some searching and research and pick the best bang for the buck.
I'm in no real rush so I can piece it together. I just hope when I get the pieces it's not outdated by then!![facepalm]

[Gman]

If you're buying it, it's outdated. There's always something better coming. Don't get into analysis paralysis. Based on the age of your old system, you're in for a pleasant surprise.[Coffee]

You can usually find the 'sweet spot' on price/performance at sites like newegg.com. You'll see that big price jump for just a little more speeed. If you want to buy at the extreme top of performance threshold, you will pay a high premium for it. That level of performance is rarely needed. Most games these days use hardware acceleration built into the graphics chipset. You rarely need the latest and greatest CPU.

If you really want to speed things up, you might consider an SSD for your OS and games. You can use a conventional HDD for cheap storage capacity.

[zteknik]

If you're buying it, it's outdated. There's always something better coming. Don't get into analysis paralysis. Based on the age of your old system, you're in for a pleasant surprise.[Coffee]

You can usually find the 'sweet spot' on price/performance at sites like newegg.com. You'll see that big price jump for just a little more speeed. If you want to buy at the extreme top of performance threshold, you will pay a high premium for it. That level of performance is rarely needed. Most games these days use hardware acceleration built into the graphics chipset. You rarely need the latest and greatest CPU.

If you really want to speed things up, you might consider an SSD for your OS and games. You can use a conventional HDD for cheap storage capacity.
This is true.Trying to keep up with latest and greatest is foolish and quite costly.
I would be quite happy to build another machine that would last and keep up for 6 years again.Technology has vastly improved since then and came down in price-remember when a 500GB IDE drive was $150?Now their dirt cheap.
Definitly looks like the way to go would be to get a top notch graphics card and memory.
SSD? Please fill me in,I'm quite interested,I have no knowledge about them[Tooth] All I knew about were scussi and sata drives.

Is Pricewatch.com still around?They were a good source for hardware.

[streetglideok]

IDE drives are all but no longer supported. AMD may, but intel does not. They are up to SATAIII now. Conventional SATA(pick your speed of bus) offer low cost, large volume drives for the buck. Though they are quicker compared to years past, they don't hold a candle to SSD's. When my wife's western digital finally died(bought used off ebay, was 8 years old), I replaced it with an intel 120gb ssd for win7, and a 500gb wd. Both are sataIII. The speed is phenominal. I press the on button, and less than 20 seconds later its done booting, completely. There are some articles online about solid state drives, and how some makers inflate their benchmark scores to appear faster. There is also a couple of different controllers used on them, and again read up on them. Cheap ssd's have reliability issues from what I heard. Other than that, the only down side is cost.

[zteknik]

Excuse the noobish question,but could I do a RAID setup with the SSD's?
I would guess so if their a hard drive and you have a RAID controller and the array properly set up.

[gos]

Actually, you aren't correct. AMD's architecture is different from Intel. They go with shorter execution strings to cheat "faster" clock times. AMD is less expensive for a reason. Intel i5 is the way the go. Plan on about $300 for a good i5-3570K (http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/processor-comparison/processor-specifications.html?proc=65520) is the way to go for top end chip. You can get a good motherboard for about $200. I wouldn't bump the m/b up to $300 and would instead spend that on the better cpu, or better video card.

this is good advice

You can build very good systems for about $1000. Once you've spent $1000, the only worthwhile upgrade is the video card, in terms of gaming frames-per-second.

[gos]

Excuse the noobish question,but could I do a RAID setup with the SSD's?
I would guess so if their a hard drive and you have a RAID controller and the array properly set up.

You can, but SSDs are so much faster than hard drives that striping data across them or mirroring between them results in lousy performance due to the mismatch in speeds.

Most people install windows on the SSD along with a few of their most used applications, then put data like pictures and movies on a rotating hard drive to save money.

These days I wouldn't buy an SSD smaller than 256GB, since it will only cost about $250 for a top-of-the-line model, and it'll last you for several computers.

[gos]

this is good advice

You can build very good systems for about $1000. Once you've spent $1000, the only worthwhile upgrade is the video card, in terms of gaming frames-per-second.

Oh, and don't forget an SSD if you have the money.

Personally I'd stick with either the Intel SSD 520 or the Samsung 840 PRO, for best performance and quality. Both will cost roughly $1 per GB.

[zteknik]

Ah so it's probably not necessary to set up a raid then.

[buckshotbarlow]

this is an elcheapo setup that just works:
28461

I like asus or msi, i've been having some issues with the gigabyte board. I have 3 of em, 2 run vmware with the 8 cores, and the 3rd is my lowend gaming system with the six core. 1 runs the asus board, no problems. 1 runs the msi boards, zero problems and the third (gaming system) runs the gigabyte board...issues are fail to boot, bios hangs. If i had to do it all over again, i would of got the asus instead of the gigabyte board...

the gaming system has a nvidia 660 TI in it. It runs D3/WOT/WOP/BF3 fine. 1080P Asus flatpanel x2. Decent setup, plays games fine...

[gos]

Ah so it's probably not necessary to set up a raid then.

Nope. Today's PCs have 4-8 SATA ports, so you can have a DVD drive plus a few hard drives. They simply show up as different drive letters in windows. (C: D: etc.)

[buckshotbarlow]

For memory, get as much as you can afford. I run mainly kingston, OCZ or corsair.

For PS, PC power and cooling...they just can't be beat...

For Video cards, i used to be a die hard ati, but after amd bought em out, their drivers are garbage...go nvidia and you won't look back.

HDD's, run a flash for boot, vidoes/pics/music throw it on a spindle. Apps can be mixed depending on what you're doing...

[zteknik]

I allways had good luck with OCZ.Their memory is quite easy to fine tune.
Yea same here,I was a big fan of ATI,but like you said they sucked afterwards.I was running a Saphire setup and it just kept crashing.
Definitley gonna stick with Nvidia this time around.

[streetglideok]

I've heard that with SSD's, trying to raid them usually doen't yield decent results, as one can really load the bus all by itself. With sataIII, you're screaming already. Something not said yet but should be noted, since ddr2, memory has been a little fickle on some mobo's. Certain boards don't like some memory chips, or voltages that some memory sticks run. There is a tool on newegg, and most memory makers and mobo makers websites, that allow you to find which ones are compatable.

[zteknik]

I've heard that with SSD's, trying to raid them usually doen't yield decent results, as one can really load the bus all by itself. With sataIII, you're screaming already. Something not said yet but should be noted, since ddr2, memory has been a little fickle on some mobo's. Certain boards don't like some memory chips, or voltages that some memory sticks run. There is a tool on newegg, and most memory makers and mobo makers websites, that allow you to find which ones are compatable.

good to know.
I have run into a few memory issues with certain boards,like you said the voltages were not compatible.
I had a chart somewhere that had the different specs for them but I'll have to re find it.

[Gman]

If you find a mobo that you're interested in purchasing, go to the manufacturer's site and check out the online manual for the board. They will likely have certified memory configurations based on manufacturer and part number.

These days, you'll be looking at DDR3 RAM, SATA 3 drives, and USB 3 with a new mobo.

Sent from my tactical android.

[zteknik]

Just out of curiosity,what are FSB speeds running these days?

[streetglideok]

Not really a front side bus anymore, not in the sense you are thinking. The core, and I core processors on the intel side have moved away from what was the fsb, and they tweak their speeds on demand. If you get a K suffix chip on the intel side, its unlocked to an extent, IIRC.

[zteknik]

Ah got it.
I am so glad I poste this thread up.I learned a whole bunch!
Now I don't feel so outdated...[blaster]

[buckshotbarlow]

i was on microcenter, you can get together a rock'n intel system with an i5 for under 600$ If you can reuse some of your older gear...

[zteknik]

i was on microcenter, you can get together a rock'n intel system with an i5 for under 600$ If you can reuse some of your older gear...
That is a good deal!
Unfortunately most the stuff is toast :(
I did see a few other sweet setups there,gotta check them out some more.

[buckshotbarlow]

if you want the power, here's what i'd do...
http://www.microcenter.com/product/400664/Core_i5_3470_32GHz_LGA_1155_Boxed_Processor - 150$
http://www.microcenter.com/product/408926/B75MA-P45_LGA_1155_B75_mATX_Intel_Motherboard - 70$
http://www.microcenter.com/product/382101/Ballistix_Sport_8GB_DDR3-1600_%28PC3-12800%29_CL9_Dual_Channel_Desktop_Memory_Kit_%28Tw o_4GB_Memory_Modules%29 - qty 2 120$
http://www.microcenter.com/product/380192/Silencer_Mk_III_Series_600_Watt_ATX_Modular_Power_ Supply - 88$

Core Components: 428$

(SSD) HDD:
http://www.microcenter.com/search/search_results.aspx?N=4294945779&NTX=&NTT=&NTK=all&sortby=pricelow

PICK UR VID CARD:
http://www.microcenter.com/product/403002/N660_TF_2GD5-OC_NVIDIA_GeForce_GTX_660_Twin_Frozr_III_Overclock ed_2048MB_GDDR5_PCIe_30_x16_Video_Card - 205$
http://www.microcenter.com/product/412537/02G-P4-3658-KR_NVIDIA_GeForce_GTX_650_Ti_Boost_2048MB_GDDR5_PC Ie_30_x16_Video_Card - 190$
http://www.microcenter.com/product/406543/GTX660-DC2O-2GD5_NVIDIA_GeForce_GTX_660_DirectCU_II_Overclocke d_2048MB_GDDR5_PCIe_30_x16_Video_Card - 218$

Pick your case:
http://www.microcenter.com/search/search_results.aspx?N=4294964318&NTX=&NTT=&NTK=all&sortby=pricelow

[zteknik]

Thanks!![Beer]
Definitely some good stuff!!
Now to start saving!!

[missionxo]

TSo I didn't read all replays so I may be repeating a previous post but from my experience at one point price compared to performance AMD was fairly even with Intel but that was a few years ago. Today you get more performance out of Intel processors for the price. I was always a AMD guy especially for gaming but I will stick with Intel from now on. New egg is great or take a trip to Arizona or California and visit a FRY's oh my god!!! It's like a Costco for nerds, it's like MicroCenter on steroids . Truly Awesome !!!

[Gman]

I heard a rumor about a Fry's coming to CO, but it was apparently unfounded. What a cruel joke.

Sent from my tactical android.

[jerrymrc]

My last stuff for my puter came from them in Oregon. we could use a Fry's here.