Finally - My What New PC Thread!

[Bodhi]

Evening gentle folk. On Monday we had a power surge which seems to have claimed the life of my trusty old P4 upstairs. It was running

Intel Pentium 4 2.8Ghz
2Gb Geil DDR400 Mhz RAM
Abit IS7-E2 Motherboard
Radeon 2600 XT AGP
Enermax 350W PSU (purchased in 2002!)
Various SATA drives.

Anyway I got home to find the PC completely unresponsive, no picture, nada. The HDD lights were stuck on so I feared the worst naturally. However even if I disconnected the HDD's and tried to boot, the lights still remained lit, and I had no POST. No beeps, nothing. Just a red LED on the motherboard shining at me and a whirring fan. I've tried swapping PSU's, clearing the CMOS etc and still nothing. Thankfully the HDD's all spin up fine and make all the usual spinning up noises, so I'm assuming my data is OK, however I have concluded that the motherboard is fried. As a replacement would be 80 quid from Ebay, I've decided to build a new rig.

Due to the unexpected nature of the replacement I have to do it on a budget, with a view to upgrading later (and using the bits I buy now for a HTPC at a later date), so I am looking at two options.

1) Intel based

Pentium Dual Core E5300
4Gb RAM
Asus G41 based motherboard
400W PSU
640Gb WD HDD

Comes in at around 250 quid. I will be using the onboard graphics as the PC's main use is a server/workstation and games aren't really a consideration just yet.

2) AMD based

AMD Athlon X2 245 2.9Ghz CPU
4Gb RAM
Asus M4A785TD-M Evo AMD 785G (Socket AM3) PCI-Express DDR3 Motherboard
400W PSU
640Gb WD HDD

About 280 quid.

Now I'm seriously looking at the dark side here, as from looking at benchmarks, the AMD rig is likely to be much faster, has hardware virtulisation assistance and has a much better IGP. My only concern is stability, has anyone else tried a 785G based rig? What are they like?

The PC will be used for various this, from music production to virtual machines (hopefully AMD-V means I'll finally be able to try ESX in a VM, and might get decent performance out of the OSX one I've acquired), from media streaming to full 1080p transcoding if necessary. I'll be transferring over my SATA drives and SB Xi-Fi, and reusing my existing CoolerMaster case, as there is nothing wrong with it.

So folks do I do what I said I never would and go the AMD route? Or do I play it safe and lose out on a lot of performance and functionality for the sake of 30 quid? I've looked at the E7500 with Intel-VT, but it adds 50 quid to the price, and I'm not sure if it's worth 20 quid more than the AMD.

Also, if there's somerthing obvious I haven't mentioned about the death of the old PC and you feel it may be resurrected I'd love to hear from you.


P.P.P.P.S If I plug DDR-400 memory into a board that only supports DDR-333, will it automatically downclock, or will it just sit there and mock me for being so silly?

 

[Ch3tan]

Next you'll be pictured with Bill Gates cock deep in your throat. Clearly you have contracted AIDS and it has affected your brain.

I'd give you a proper answer, but 1) I don't know about the new AMD kit, and 2) I'm in shock.

 

[Syri]

Not heard of any problems with the AMD kit, and tbh, I'd say that's the better option, especially if it's going to be a media pc later on. The graphics chip on the AMD board will have a lot more hardware acceleration built into it than the intel chips have. For an extra £30, I'd say for that purpose, it's money well spent.

As for the memory, if you put too fast memory into a pc, it will indeed slow it down to the speed required by the other components.

 

[cHodAX]

The new AMD kit is just fine, Anandtech have a few decent articles on various AM3 boards and they all seem pretty trouble free. A few friends are running AM3 systems as well and as thier usual source of I.T. support I have to say that so far it has been exceedingly quiet so I don't think you will have many problems. Certainly for what you are hoping to do with virtualisation the AMD setup is the better solution at that pricepoint and as you pointed out the IGP is alot better than the Intel solution.

As for the memory speed, generally DDR3 sticks come preprogammed with a number of SPD settings so running a 400mhz rated stick at 333mhz should allow the memory to run with more aggressive timings which can often make up for much of the difference in memory speeds. If the memory only comes with a single SPD setting then 30 seconds messing around in the bios should allow you to configure the slower speed with minimal effort or you could just run the memory asynchronously at 400mhz as it doesn't noticeably hurt performance.

 

[Kryten]

Most the important stuff has been covered above. I'd like to throw in another idea for you though - instead of the 640gb WD, take a goosey at the Samsung F3 drives - they stomp all over just about everything else in the "normal" hard drive stakes in performance terms. They're in 500 and 1tb flavours at the moment, 500 is 36 new, 1tb is 55 new. Silly money for silly performance!

 

[MYstIC G]

You should clearly buy a sony vaio...

 

[TdC]

Evening gentle folk.

dudezor, I recently got my i7 working (dodgy mobo), and it's sweet as fook. if you think you can tell the diff speedwise, then go with that, otherwise Dr Teeds says get the cheapest one and spend the diff on beer

 

[Jupitus]

So folks do I do what I said I never would and go the AMD route?

I had a foray into AMD-land once upon a time, with an AMD K62 processor back in the day. It was stupid fast in it's day but that's the only AMD I've ever tried.

I know that's no use at all to you at all, I'm just posting for posting's sake

 

[Bodhi]

dudezor, I recently got my i7 working (dodgy mobo), and it's sweet as fook. if you think you can tell the diff speedwise, then go with that, otherwise Dr Teeds says get the cheapest one and spend the diff on beer

Lol I'd love to build an i7 (or more specifically, a Xeon W35xx based rig), but I'm strictly budget limited on this build, hence the AMD. I really can't spend more than 300 notes, and I'm already pushing that. This mainly thanks to the reviews I've read which seem to indicate that it's worth spending the extra on a Phenom II X2, so I'm looking at those now instead. It would also appear that the step up to DDR3 isn;t really worth the extra, so unless someone can come up with a really compelling idea to go DDR3, I shall stick with DDR2 and put the extra tenner towards the Phenom.

Thanks for the heads up about the Sammy drives Kryt, I shall see if OcUK have any when I order. If they do I'll go for the 500Gig Sammy, if not I'll go for the WD.

Now I just need to wait until payday, maybe mull over my choices a little.

P.S The DDR-400 worked in the DDR-333 mobo fine The reason I was asking is I have a P4 Media Centre PC, but it was crawling with only 512Mb of RAM. The 2Gb from the fried P4 upstairs has given it a right boot up the arse, it flies now. Just a shame it's got shitty Intel graphics and can't play HD films

 

[Ch3tan]

Bodhi, although I've never had a problem with ocuk, their prices when not on offer are hardly competitive. Check out Ebuyer, Dabs, Microdirect etc as well.

 

[Bodhi]

Most of the prices on OCuK loo in the same ballpark as Ebuyer. I might be able to save a tenner in total by shopping round, but I can go up the road to OC and pick everything up. Makes things a lot less of a hassle if I need to RMA anything.

 

[Ch3tan]

Ahh, in that case it is better, you'd save on shipping costs anyway.

 

[Bodhi]

Reet, I went up OcuK's new premises yesterday morning and got myself

AMD Phenom X2 550 Black Edition
Asus 785G Evo Mobo
4Gb Patriot Sector 5 DDR3 RAM
Corsair 400W PSU
Western Digital Caviar Black 500Gb

Put it all together last night and gotta say, I'm impressed. It is deathly quiet after my P4 and makes this C2D laptop seem distinctly underpowered. I'm currently copying 180Gb of data across to the new drive and the CPU usage is sitting below 5%. That used to cripple my P4!

 

[Kryten]

Aye, the difference between even the better P4's (prescotts and whatnot) and Core2Duo/modern Phenoms is stonking - especially when you think back to how much those P4's cost on average

 

[Kryten]

Well, that's rubbish

"Best" these days is subjective - and both sets of hardware are good enough to feel confident buying to suit your taste in brand.You might slightly edge it out on performance with an i7 on a decent motherboard over the best Phenoms but just about anyone would question how much those last few FPS are worth - sure as hell not the difference in price.

 

[cHodAX]

Good to see it is working out.

 

[Bodhi]

10 days in I am still pretty impressed. Videos streamed to my PS3 load up instantly, what PC Games I have (so far Doom 3 and CnC 3 :|) seem to run pretty well. However I am becoming more and more aware that as excellent the 4200 IGP is for an integrated solution, if I want to play anything more recent than 2006 I'm going to need to get a gfx card in the new year. I'm currently looking at the 5770's thinking they seem to offer excellent performance and power consumption at a price that doesn;t take the piss? If I get one will I finally be able to play Crysis?

After that how things go with work will dictate my next purchase for it. If I'm feeling naughty a beefier PSU and a couple of Velociraptors in RAID 0 might go in. I'm sure SSD's are lovely, but I'm a luddite, and like spinning disks.

 

[cHodAX]

Depends on the resolution but 1680x1050 will run just fine with decent detail settings, if you go above that resolution though you can expect a fair bit of a performance hit. That said Crysis is a greedy bitch, most other new games will run at 60fps and above on the 5770.

 

[Kryten]

My 5770 chomps Crysis for breakfast in the stupid detail settings at 1680x1050, same for FarCry 2 which I've finally started to play after owning it for over a year :/

 

[Bodhi]

That's handy, as my current monitor won't go above 1280x1024 :|

I have FarCry 2 downstairs on my PS3. I played it once for 20 minutes, never went back to it again....

 

[cHodAX]

That's handy, as my current monitor won't go above 1280x1024 :|

I have FarCry 2 downstairs on my PS3. I played it once for 20 minutes, never went back to it again....

There is nothing you can't run maxed out with a 5770 on that screen Bodhi, kick up the AA and AF, sit back and enjoy super smooth framerates.

 

[Kryten]

One thing that really, really surprised me going to this ATI card after years of nVidiaism was the ability to crank up to 24xAA and not suffer any slowdown. Really quite pleased

 

[Bodhi]

Right, it's time to ressurect this thread as I am purchasing a graphics card this week. My question to my fellow Freddies is this - 5770 or pay that little bit extra for a 5850?

I'm leaning towards the 5770, but am open to compelling arguments to go 5850.

 

[Kryten]

The technology is pretty much identical - but with the 5850 you're looking at higher clock speeds, double the bandwidth on memory IIRC - in short the performance is really very rapid. And considering it's still only a "mid range" card it's definitely worth a goosey
If you feel you might use the extra oomph - in case you get a bigger resolution monitor or just want to play with some of the newest games in silly resolutions it might be worth it.

I'm *very* happy with my 5770 - nothing is even remotely sloppy on it but then again I'm just about given up with games, no attention span for them

 

[Rubber Bullets]

My new build has a 5850 in it, my first ATI graphics card for 10 years!

I have no idea about the 5770, but this card is superb, finally I can play all my games in full 1920x1200 resolution, and with pretty much everything up high. I know the games are perhaps a little old, fallout 3 for instance, but they really do look stunning, all at standard clock and the card is meant to be reasonably easy to OC if the need arises.

RB

 

[Wazzerphuk]

I haven't yet tried my 5770 with Bioshock 2, should probably install it and report back (even though I've a rubbish monitor with no resolutions).

 

[Kryten]

BS2 runs smooth as day on mine, very happy with it. Still can't get into the game though :|

 

[TdC]

ooooh are you saying it's about time to put my old 4870 out to pasture?

 

[cHodAX]

Tough choice.

If you can afford the extra go with the 5850, all that extra memory bandwidth will add up to alot of extra performance with future games. The 5770 is still a good card though, you won't be disappointed but in 18 months time you will probably wish you had grabbed the 5850. The kicker is the price though, you are looking at nearly double for the 5850, personally I would run a pair of 5770 in crossfire for that money but I know that isn't an option for you.

End of the day the 5770 by Saphire is on over at Overclockers.co.uk for £120 inc VAT

Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 5770 1024MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card [21163-00-20R] Graphics and Video ATI HD 5770 Series

That is alot of bang for your buck.

 

[Bodhi]

I've decided to chill and just go for a 5770. I'm getting it through work so I can spread the payments over a couple of months - they're currently getting me pricing on the Sapphire 5770 Vapor-X model, as I'm trying to keep this machine as quiet as possible.

In fact next upgrade will probably be one of those Thermolab Baram coolers, as apparently they work fine without a fan.

ThermoLab Baram CPU Cooler (Socket AM2/AM3/LGA775/LGA1366) [] Cooling CPU Coolers

Thoughts on these? is there something else I should be looking at that will be quieter than the stock AMD cooler (like a decatted TVR ).