Intel's new duo core?

[FHCNICK]

folks, i'm in a dilemma and want to ask your opinions. my budget for a new pc is around £600 and i primarily want it for gaming hence the post being in this forum.

not looked very hard yet but so far i seem to come up with a pckard bell pc using the new duo core processor running at what seems to me a bit meagre 1.8ghz running at ighz bus speed with a 2mb cache but with 512mb nvidia graphics card and 1gb of ram.

your thoughts please or anybody know of a better package for the price?

thanks
Nick

[robbieduncan]

Whilst hardly new anymore it is foolish to compare the clockspeed of a CoreDuo or Core2Duo CPU with that of a Pentium IV. The newer Core based CPUs do a lot more per clock than the wastefull PIV ever did. At 1.8Ghz you are probably looking at 2.6-3.0Ghz in PIV terms.

£600 seems low for a gaming PC. More important that raw clock speed will be the graphics card provided. Look for a current generation NVidia or ATI card on a PCI Express 16x bus with at least 256Mb of dedicated graphics RAM. Also you will want at least 1Gb of main system RAM.

[FHCNICK]

robbieduncan said:

Whilst hardly new anymore it is foolish to compare the clockspeed of a CoreDuo or Core2Duo CPU with that of a Pentium IV. The newer Core based CPUs do a lot more per clock than the wastefull PIV ever did. At 1.8Ghz you are probably looking at 2.6-3.0Ghz in PIV terms.

£600 seems low for a gaming PC. More important that raw clock speed will be the graphics card provided. Look for a current generation NVidia or ATI card on a PCI Express 16x bus with at least 256Mb of dedicated graphics RAM. Also you will want at least 1Gb of main system RAM.

It comes with an nvidia geforce 7300se (lowest end of the 7300 range) which is PCI express with 512Mb of graphics RAm and the system RAM is 1Gb. I have no experience of the new core2due chips but if you say its roughly equivalent to a 2.6/3.0Ghz PIV then it should be ok for me. thanks

[egomeister]

I've been looking around this price point for a new machine itself (I'll probably end up posting a topic of my own soon!)

I've seen it suggested that it may be better to go for a faster graphics card with lower memory (ie a 256mb 7600) than the 512mb 7300 as the lower spec card cannot make good use of the extra memory so your cash would be better spent upping the processing power of the card.

[matt173407]

I reccommend checking out www.meshplc.com

Check out the award winners or special offers, at your price range they do excellent machines, i have had many from them over last few months both work and domestic and cannot fault service or machines

[FHCNICK]

thanks for that link, the mesh system is using the same chipset and is very similar but the 7300gs is a better graohics card and all for the same money (well apart from an extra £35 delivery).

[nick heppinstall]

Their you go. Had a quick look on ebuyer. Do yourself a favour and build it your self. It's dead easy. Total including VAT and deliver is £566.16

Forgot the PSU ! Add another £30 for a decent one. Still well within your price range. This is of course asuming you will be using an existing monitor.

Connect 3d Radeon X850XT 256MB GDDRIII DVI + TV PCI-E 084934 144 in stock £80.84

Extra Value DRACULA Shiny Black Case With Silver Chrome Front & Side Panel - No PSU 065296 33 in stock £37.43

Antec Cooling Fan 120mm Blue Led Lights 049388 64 in stock £8.23

Western Digital WD4000YR Caviar RE 400gb Sata - 7200rpm 16mb Cache Raid 094515 189 in stock £87.01

Ebuyer 1GB DDR PC3200 400MHz 184pin Extra Value Ram 063128 349 in stock £59.73

AMD Athlon 64 (ADA4600BVBOX) X2 4600+ socket 939 Dual Core 2.4Ghz 512kb and 512kb Cache 091325 11 in stock £133.83

Gigabyte Black Wired PS/2 Keyboard and Wired Optical Mouse Desktop Set 107526 7849 in stock £4.24

LG GSA-H10NBAL 16x16DVD±RW 12x RAM Dual Layer Writer Black - Bare Drive 112582 169 in stock £17.62

Microsoft OEM Windows XP Home SP2B (Release 2) x32bit - 1PK 114048 683 in stock £47.80

Cart Total: £476.73

Edited by nick heppinstall on Tuesday 24th October 16:38

Edited by nick heppinstall on Tuesday 24th October 16:40

Edited by nick heppinstall on Tuesday 24th October 16:41

Edited by nick heppinstall on Tuesday 24th October 16:43

[mr_yogi]

Personally I wouldn't bother with self build unless you know what your doing. That eBuyer spec relies on you already having a monitor, has a slower CPU based on an end of life CPU socket and has slower RAM. Also if you have any problems it can take a long time to track down what's wrong and you have little or no tech support to call on. However if you are going self build try and get all the core components from the same place

Your original pc looks good just budget some spare cash for a GPU upgrade incase you're not too impressed. Even that X850 from the eBuyer spec would prove a heafty upgrade for current games, and you can get 7600GT's, 7900GS's and X1800GT/O's for very good prices these days.

Little Self build story said:

I've built many systems over the years, but recently I built my Brothers Core2. Everything seemed fine but it did crash once during WinXP installation, then it became a bit unstable while installing software but it worked fine No idea which component had caused it or even if it wasn't some of the software which worked fine on Win2K (Cherry keyboard extra button software, etc.). Searching web forums came up with incompatability reports between SoundBlaster FX's and nFroce4's. But nothing definate

Anyway a few hours later after we had spent about a day building the thing and installing all the software the BIOS decided to report a SMART error indicating that the Raptor was about to die

Vendors tech support asked us to run a diagnostic and agreed to replace the Raptor FOC, but that took another week to arrive and all the software had to be installed again.

As it happened the second Raptor decided to do exactly the same as the first (all be it without the crash during installation to indicate it was on it's way out ) and after an afternoon of software installation the BIOS once again disaplyed a SMART error after a small period of instability.

In the end we got a refund for the Raptor and built the system with just one 7200rpm drive (which was gonna be a data drive with the Raptor as a boot drive) The point is if a PC doesn't work it can be mightly depressing with all those expensive bits sitting in front of you not working, and even when you find the cause you have to wait for the vendor to collect the broken hardware, test it and dispach a new one before you can even try again

[nick heppinstall]

Why do Analysts/Programmers always thing they know better than the support guys ?

Runs for cover

Granted it would not be a cutting edge machine but it would happily run anything thrown at it games wise at the moment for under £600 and without having to bother upgrading the video card as soon as you've purchased. Also consider that some manufacturer built PC's are limited on the upgrade front. ie. When the machine is out of date you cant just slap another MB in. They may also be limited on expansion slots etc.

I dont agree with you 100% on the home build either ( although I do agree that if anything does go wrong it can be a nightmare ! )

Recently a mate of mine decided to build his own machine from scratch and has never looked back. He had no prior PC building knowledge but really enjoyed the whole process.

I suppose it's horses for courses.

Edited by nick heppinstall on Tuesday 24th October 19:39

[mr_yogi]

nick heppinstall said:

Why do Analysts/Programmers always thing they know better than the support guys ?

Runs for cover

That'll be 'cause I used to be OEM support

Like i said I've built loads of machines (haven't bought a PC since '98 and I slapped a Voodoo2 in that the day i got it ) and never had a problem... until a month ago when my Brother had this problem. I felt bad 'cause I told him to just buy the bits, and while he got a much better machine than he would have got from Dell, etc., Komplett and Scan will build PC's for only a couple of hundred more than the components and it's put together, tested, you do get a warrantee and a copy of XP Pro.

Plus if you're not spending mega bucks the margin is even slimer

AND the PC you speced didn't included a monitor.

Personally I just don't think it's worth building a PC yourself unless;
A) You are confident you know what you are doing and
B) You want specific hardware or you have existing hardware you want to keep in your new machine (i.e. keep monitor/ DVD ROM/ Chassis/ etc.)

All IMHO

EDIT: 'cause I R Stoopid

Edited by mr_yogi on Tuesday 24th October 23:32

[mr_yogi]

or C) you want to learn about how PC's work etc

[nick heppinstall]

mr_yogi said:

or C) you want to learn about how PC's work etc

Mmmmm. Yup I agree. Well put. #ucking programmers .....

[superlightr]

Ive just upgraded my 2.5 yr old Alien machine which was chugging on some of the new games.
went for a new graphics card for about £200 nvida 7900gt
DVD recorder £75 all singing.
Installed them myslef and was well chuffed. Was looking at getting a new one for a grand or so but this plays my BF2 and Oblivion no prob at all and has extended its life by about a year I recon.

thinking about another 1mb of ram but a bit confused on the type. (plus my machine works fine for the games so Im not messing)

The graphics card was the best money ive ever spent. Had to do a bit of searching as my mobo was not PCI-E just the other old one which i cant remember whats its called now.

Very pleased with the tinkering i did. Still wouldnt build my own. Although there is a site which you select the componants, they configure check compatability and build which I would be tempeted with.

Its fun specing up your glowing wires, cut out panel designs, fans which sing and dance..... but at the end get a good graphics card.

Sorry getting old cant remember that site/business name either.

[matt173407]

Just got my Mesh PC as above and works a treat, just run flight sim x demo perfect.

for the money i cant fault it, i would reccomend this and look at a faster video crad in the future if you can afford just up the video card spec.

Im in IT and to be honest last thing i would want is to have to start tinkering when i get home, i also find that its difficult to compete with prices like mesh.

just my advice