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

[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

[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).