danm Wrote:
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> I also liked the look of the ASUS P5V-VM DH Socket
> 775 Core2Duo ready P4M890 onboard 5.1 audo and VGA
> mATX (those words exactly haha) at £47 quid
> including vat. Of course there are cheaper out
> there, but this isnt quite the budget of budget
> boards so could hold its own for a bit longer.
There are no budget boards really - none will last more than any other, within reason - all you really need to look for is that any board satisfies what you want from it. I really would advise against VIA boards though - they've gone horrifically down-hill since about 2001 or so.
I'm going to assume you'll never use the onboard graphics, in which I'd get something like the
Asrock CONROE945G-DVI (comes with onboard graphics, but if you can add another card in to replace them if you wish).
If you intend to overclock the chip (and Core 2 Duos will overclock A LOT), then I'd get an
ASUS P5B Deluxe (this version comes with WiFi, though there's one elsewhere which has no WiFi for a fiver less or so). Much more expensive, but I'll leave this to you. £125 for this board, and if you get the E6300 or E4300 CPU (both around £100), it WILL overclock beyond the speed of Intel's fastest speed Core 2 Duo - probably up to 3.0GHz and more, though you may need a slightly better cooler (such as a Zalman or an
Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro. It's up to you whether that's better value for money than buying a cheaper motherboard and running it at stock speeds.
For RAM, you won't use the current sticks if they're DDR. All new CPUs (as Athlon64 S939s are now almost impossible to source) now require DDR2, and they're not backwards compatible.
Graphics card's OK, but it really wouldn't be doing any Core 2 Duo justice. They're really not very good compared to the rest of the system. As you said, you don't play many games, but I'd imagine it would start to struggle with games out in a few months. Again, only you can judge that one really. Take a look here to get an idea where things are and what you could expect with some now relatively old game engines:
Tomshardware Interactive VGA chartsFinally, frankly, if you're getting a new system, you'd have to be utterly mad to buy an AMD setup for all but the most budget of systems right now. They're decent value for money, but they're left for dead by the Core 2s.
//edit:
harjinator Wrote:
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> i've just had my hard drive fail-don't buy> WD hard drives)
Sorry mate, but I've bought WD drives since I started building PCs, back in 2000, and I've gone through 11. All of those are still working, 9 of which are still in daily use, the remaining 2 sitting in a drawer as spares now. Conversely, I bought 2 Seagate 7200.10s last year, and both are dead. Other than WD, I'd only ever consider Samsung Spinpoints now.
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/05/2007 09:09PM by gav.