New Computer System
My current system is starting to show its age so before it totally falls apart, I am building a replacement system. It’s going to be a quad-core system with 8GB of ram so that it has a chance to last 5 years or so my current system has.
Posted on March 21st, 2008 by Ian Cheung
Filed under: Tech
I’m on the lookout for building a new system too, my Athlon XP 3000 and Geforce 5950 Ultra can’t even play HD properly.
What quad core are you going for?
I think the new Phenom II’s are better value and offer similar performance (but better overclocking potential) than the Core 2 Quads, or are you going to go for the Core i7?
i7’s are definitely more future proof and the 920 coupled with an Asus P6T Deluxe and you should be able to overclock towards 3.6Ghz with standard cooling, I guess it depends on what your budget is.
8GB Ram suggests you are not thinking in terms of i7 as that uses triple channel memory (in which case you should go for 6GB or 12GB).
Still if you stick Vista on it, it will soon grind to a halt!
that post was written last March. I ended up going with the Q6600 in a Shuttle system. 8GB of ram was the important thing, more so than the CPU. I can’t remember if the i7 was out in march last year but when they did come out 6GB DDR3 was expensive, and 12GB DDR3 was unaffordable.
I would disagree with you about the future-proofness of the i7. It may seem so, but by the time there is enough difference to warrant an upgrade, the mb would be outdated and you would have to replace it anyway. Or it would be cheaper to buy a new mb/cpu combo. I’m talking from experience. As long as your system lasts for more than a year or two, you’ll face the same kind of problem.
Ah yes my mistake, sorry I thought you wrote it this March!
As for future proofing, as long as you don’t intend to upgrade any further then LGA775 mobo is obviously the better value choice (as you already have 8GB I’m guessing you aren’t planning to upgrade this). I suppose getting replacement parts for older models isn’t as expensive as it was a few years ago.
Having said that the famous lego set with it’s 850Mhz Duron processor is still working without any problems (apart from the constant disk thrashing and 99% of it’s 320MB memory being used…)