Anyone into PCs?

[Jon K]

Total respect fella`s but my valve Marantz works fine and Sony Vaio`s do what it sez on the label! The weather must be a bit hot on your planet Jon to need that much cooling!

Heh the CPU has 4 cores (overclocked almost 1GHz above spec) on it combined with this killer video card, it gets HOT

[PScalfano]

I built a PC last october, caught one of the last single core AMDs at a good price and Newegg threw in a free SATA hard drive. Total cost was $1200 including OS. It runs half life 2 good, and hopefully will run Hellgate london good. I am not planning on upgrading to vista. I never liked the lights and such because I store my PC in my bedroom and the lights keep me awake, so it's definitely not much of a sight to see. Future plans: maybe 2gb more of ram (I know xp can only handle like 3.x gigs), another 7600gt for SLI, and maybe an ubuntu partition depending if someone develops linux drivers for my sound card.

Processor: AMD FX-55 2.6ghz single core socket 939

Motherboard: Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe

Hard Drive (1): Seagate Barracuda 250GB 7200 RPM SATA

Graphics Card: EVGA 7600GT

Sound Card: Creative X-Fi Platinum (this thing is the bomb)

Optical Drive (1): ASUS DVD-RAM capable drive

Optical Drive (2): Sony NEC Optiarc 18X DVD±R DVD Burner With 12X DVD-RAM Write

Power Supply: In Win 460w (this has a blue light on the back. sucky.)

RAM: 2gb Crucial DDR 400 (PC 3200)184-pin

Case: Lian Li PC60

OS: XP pro

guts... looks pretty nasty.



The heat sink took a little bit of "persuasion" to get into the case (sliding motherboard tray), but it got in there.

[M20Turbo]

I noticed that some of you guys use AMD and others use Intel? Why would you chose one over the other?

[Tiger]

Does the Vista Ultimate recognize 4 procesors? I know XP pro is only good for 2 processors.

[PScalfano]

I chose AMD cause it was on sale. For single core, AMDs are considered better for gaming and real time "reaction" processing, while Intels are better for repetitive calculations such as encoding MP3s and other multimedia functions. I have not kept up with multi core stuff, but the same may hold true.

[Jon K]

I noticed that some of you guys use AMD and others use Intel? Why would you chose one over the other?

AMD used to be the best bang for the buck, and often outran Intel clock for clock.

For instance, the XP series processors were modeled "2500+" but really ran at 1,883 MHz or so, yet they out performed, or performed like a 2,500 MHz P4 hence the modeling. And so a 3200+ was supposed to be similar to 3.2GHz Intel. However, Intel began with the dual core and 64 bit stuff that became way more affordable than AMD's X2 and Athlon 64 x 2 stuff. And, to top it all off, AMD made it clear they were concerned with trying to wring horsepower from their chips without making them any more power efficient. Higher power consuming processors run hotter, so performance is worse, in effect.

Vista does recognize 4 processors. I am sure Home Basic may not but Ultimate will recognize 128GB+ RAM and I think something like 32 CPUs I am not sure.

[winfred]

it's different for every processor series on which one does something better, i know in the past intel units were hot as ****, which seriously sucks when you pay for a fast processor and it's running 2/3 speed due to heat, and in some cases it's ford vs chevy, i just like amd because i do, and so do the computer guys i am around

[BMWDriver]

When I bought my AMD cpu, it was for the economical side of things a few years back, and the good reputation compared to Intel equivalents when compared to price. Nowadays, Intel chips have been proven to be the best overclockers giving a superb opportunity of performance for the price.

AMD still gives good performance for the money, so it's still a somewhat tight race between the two, but Intel is still the most popular since reviewers always consider overclockability.

[Jon K]

yeah I went AMD to Intel simply because of affordability and overclock potential.

The quad core I have was like $285 - $290, and SMOKES everything in terms of overclocking and processing. At least for 30 days

[indierthanthou]

My new H4xb0x: