Upgrade advice

NTFS said:

The LGA775 series is obsolete. I would recommend a Phenom x4 with an 890X motherboard for a decent brand new system.

No doubt that'd be a cost-effective upgrade, but it looks more like a $300+ upgrade to me. (DDR3 would be required with an 890X MB, no?)

What's the main use of the system? Doesn't look like a gaming system, but I might be wrong. (I have what should be a pretty good gaming system, but I don't do much gaming.)

I'd suggest waiting until you can come up with more than $200, and doing an upgrade that is less of a stopgap.

(Damn. This thread really took off while I was looking around. Looks like it's turned into a real Intel vs AMD fan festival.)

jchase520 said:

The difference is I've had mine for about 5 years already with out having to upgrade

And? The time will come eventually.

bobkn said:

NTFS said:

The LGA775 series is obsolete. I would recommend a Phenom x4 with an 890X motherboard for a decent brand new system.

No doubt that'd be a cost-effective upgrade, but it looks more like a $300+ upgrade to me. (DDR3 would be required with an 890X MB, no?)

What's the main use of the system? Doesn't look like a gaming system, but I might be wrong. (I have what should be a pretty good gaming system, but I don't do much gaming.)

I'd suggest waiting until you can come up with more than $200, and doing an upgrade that is less of a stopgap.

$300 that is the newest you can get from AMD - that will last.

JChase, you have a Core 2 Quad, that's cool. If I had that right now, I wouldn't even be looking to upgrade for a long while.

But getting back to my economical upgrade, I'm essentially looking for a relatively cheap performance boost, mainly to boost the speed of my video encoding. Now, I don't do any high end editing with Adobe Premier, just some simple stuff with Sony Vegas and for the most part, like to run VMs every so often for testing and a lot of media (audio and video) watching. I do some light gaming but mostly with games that are usually pre-2007 so I'm not too concerned about the latest features currently.

And yeah, I want to avoid spending the money on DDR3 right now hence why I want to stick with LGA 775 and not go with LGA 1156 or 1366 right now. But I might have to take AMD into consideration. I've been an Intel person since I've started using computers and never had an AMD PC but having more cores may be a deciding factor. I'll take a look at combo deals and see what works under a budget.

CPU: AMD Athlon x4 635

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...-882-_-Product

RAM: Kingston Value Ram 4GB DDR3

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...-810-_-Product

MOBO: 880G ATX

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...-444-_-Product

That will do for a long while.

$300 total.

Nah, I'd go for the Phenom II X4 945 instead of that for $39 more if looking to really go for it for a little bit more.

NTFS just started all the nitpicking, hehe

That Raga 445 X3 has a chance of unlocking the 4th core also, most things aren't taking avantage of extra cores much, so it's often a non-factor.

Our spare 3rd PC is a AMD Athlon (not 64 unfortunately) 3000+, 2 gigs of DDR400, 5900XT video card (AGP 8x slot), with I think I have a SB-512 sound card in it, though might be on-board now for Win7 not liking that old dinosaur (it's all relative) hardware, it runs 32-bit 7 HP adequately for basic surfing and minor gaming needs.

NTFS said:

jchase520 said:

The difference is I've had mine for about 5 years already with out having to upgrade

And? The time will come eventually.

by the time I NEED to upgrade I would have gotten 10 times the value of if I spent money on a phenom

$39 for L3 cache isn't required, unless you are gaming.

I don't know where you're getting that PCIe 2.0 Slots won't support PCIe 1.0 and 1.1 cards. Almost all sources I've read indicate the opposite.