€600 on mobo/cpu/ram @ 1920X1200

romperstomper

right boys,

my opteron based rig is no longer cutting the mustard so its time to upgrade. got case/psu/gfx card sorted (antec P183/antec cp-850/ati 4870 1 Gb) so now only need mobo/cpu/ram.

haven't kept current with latest and greatest in pc land and only need those 3 parts. BUT the must be able to have some future-proofing hopefully make the CPU the bottleneck once more.

thoughts?

thanks, RS

Solitaire

You got a CPX-based rig... to run a ~€700 PC with a single HD4870?!

:eek:

romperstomper

the Rig's purpose is to run quiet. as i said i'm outta the scene but the primary purpose is Quiet. I can stretch the budget if it means power With silence. any suggestions?

thanks, RS

jonny72

romperstomper wrote: »

the Rig's purpose is to run quiet. as i said i'm outta the scene but the primary purpose is Quiet. I can stretch the budget if it means power With silence. any suggestions?

thanks, RS

Look up i7 860 chip review. Couple that with a 1156 board and 6 gig triple channel ram, and you'll have an extremely fast machine.

Unregistered.

jonny72 wrote: »

Couple that with a 1156 board and 6 gig triple channel ram, and you'll have an extremely fast machine.

FOILED! By Intel's bogey new branding stratagey. The i7 860 fits in to socket 1156, but neither of those support triple channel RAM. :cool:

Only socket 1366 ones do.

romperstomper

am more confused that ever now!!

so is i7 the way to go?

Unregistered.

romperstomper wrote: »

am more confused that ever now!!

so is i7 the way to go?

i7(particularly socket 1366) stands above i5 and Core2, does that make it more futureproof? I don't think so - it would be like using the Xeon platform over the Core2 platform to "futureproof" it.

romperstomper

xeon was primarily a server platform. is i7? what do ppl recommend for 6-700 for ram, mobo & cpu?

Unregistered.

romperstomper wrote: »

xeon was primarily a server platform. is i7? what do ppl recommend for 6-700 for ram, mobo & cpu?

Socket 1366(new Xeon's and earlier i7's) is a server platform.

Solitaire

Although its not that black-and-white (was Skulltrail a server board? ).

X58 can be used as a server board (i7-Xeon) but also with enthusiast-grade CPUs (i7) for general high-end and heavy workstation duties. Thus it comes under the wonderfully ambiguous "Enterprise" bracket

romperstomper

so any chance of getting back on topic and getting some recomendations for mobo/cpu/ram
for around €700

Effluo

When you have €600 to spend on these things, you can spend too much.

Don't expect a huge performance increase just cause it costs €300 more...

If I were you i'd just get a 3ghz Phenom II x 4, AM3 mobo and ddr3 ram for around €350.
This will be more than enough for any game for quite some time to come... Even then if you find that you need a couple more cores or Ghz, it's fine cause AMD are staying with AM3 for at least another 18 months.

But if you really wanted to blow all your money get a good SSD with it!

romperstomper

is the intel stuff not better future proofed? is the AMD the definite winner bang vs buck??

Effluo

Well in 95% of games there's no difference in performance when running a virtual 8 core processor or a 4 core processor.
As most games can only use from 2 cores. A few benefit from 4 cores and fewer again benefit from 8!

Games right now really don't need that high processing power(1 or 2 exceptions)...

A 3ghz quad core is gonna stand you quite a good amount of time!

On the subject of futureproofing..... It kinda doesn't exist!
Get the AM3 system with 4g's of ram then save the rest and get a new graphics card in a couple of months time. Whenever you want to get dx11

Solitaire

Bang-for-your-buck only exists at the time of purchase. Do you really want to wait six months to see if i5 comes down a bit closer to AM3 price levels?

At the moment Intel dominates the high-end and AMD has impressive lock-down across the middle, with a tie at the bottom (although once you get that low AMD's better chipsets become more of an issue). Problem is that at this point all but possibly one game I can think of will happily become GPU-limited with nothing more than a decent mid-range Phenom2. If you need heavy-duty apps capability or any Photoshop at all then it quickly swings in Intel's favour but at this point in time if the main thrust of the system is mid-heavy-duty gaming then i7 is overkill and both it and i5 too expensive to compete with P2 in any meaningful way. Spending more on GPU (or saving for a new one) would be far more pertinent.