Out of the loop a bit in terms of hardware, as I don't sell PCs and most the stuff I do is repairs and virus removals.
My current system is:-
AMD X2 4200 AM2
2GB RAM DDR2 5300 (the max my board will support )
1TB Western Digital Blue SATA 6 HD (1 month old)
Nivida 8600 GT with 512MB DDR3 GRAM (about 2.5 years old)
M Audio Audiophile sound card
FSP 400W Power Supply (very good quality and heavy item).
My current system is fast enough, but it has a fault where it takes a few times to POST (this is actually a motherboard fault) at it is limited to 2GB of RAM and only has 2 SATA ports. Now I could just replace the board but I will still be stuck with legacy DDR2 RAM and an old AM2 processor so I want to replace the board, RAM and CPU and keep the rest including the video card.
So I need a new AM3 board and a processor. I was thinking the Athlon 260 XII which runs at 3.2Ghz might be ideal as I could upgrade to a quad core later on.
I would buy a single 4GB DDR3 Corsair stick with the view to adding another one later on.
I will also need a new Windows 7 licence as I am changing the board, but I currently have Vista 32-bit so that is not a major head ache.
So I have a maximum of budget of £220 to buy:-
Motherboard
CPU
RAM
Windows 7 64-BIT OEM
Now my existing hard drive is SATA 6 (but works fine on legacy SATA connections) is it worth buying a SATA 6 board (they cost about £30 more) so the hard drive gets the benefit or in the real world is the speed difference minimal? I don't play games or anything like that, but I do like a fast computer and my lack of RAM is getting to be a bit of a problem.
So what would you buy with a £220 budget? I am well out of the loop when it comes to modern hardware. I am keeping the PSU, case (probably), optical drive, video card and sound card.
The motherboard is four and a half years old btw :eek.
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Well you could get a new system minus Windows for that, and use the money you get from selling your old system to pay for the OS?
tinyurl.com/6kjxd43
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Not with a decent sized hard drive, motherboard and power supply though. Want to build it myself so I know the quality, I spend a lot of time repairing cheap crap white box systems :) I've had a look at ready made systems but nothing really to the spec I need considering I have a 1TB hard drive already etc.
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I would go with an Intel chipset and CPU.
One stick of memory will only work at single channel, try to get both at the same time as a matched pair.
Crucial memory top quality and usually best prices, look at www.crucial.com/uk.
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Didn't even think of that dual channel issue, so 2 x 2GB DDR3s then, which means I need 4 slots so I can add another two in the future.
The reason I suggested AMD as I am just more familier with them, and it seems they still offer the best bang for buick. The cheapest i3 for example is £80 way out of my budget, so it might be cheaper to buy a ready built one by the time I've added the cost of a windows licence.
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I've decided to go for an I3, as it seems the best compromise. Now SATA 3/6 is there a real world difference for general tasks?
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Been doing further research, and it seems AMD are bring out a brand new processor in the next few weeks called the Bulldozer, which is supposed to be on par with Intel's Sandybridge. This should mean that AMD might once again be a great option which means Intel will need to reduce the price of the i3.
If I can stick with AMD though he motherboards tend to be about £20 cheaper too.
So I will probably wait till July/August as it just seems the wrong time to buy new according to my research.
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>> If I can stick with AMD though he motherboards tend to be about £20 cheaper
>> too.
Have you looked at the AMD X3s, such as this?
www.ebuyer.com/product/238326
Compares very favourably with the i3s in terms of price/performance
www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_list.php
I put one in the cheap home PC I built in the new year.
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After my recent motherboard disaster I've been getting up to speed with what's available and being lazy I've looked at Novatech motherboard bundles www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/bundles.html
AMD's Sandy Bridge rival for laptops doesn't get a glowing report here so let's hope they are getting better at desktop chips: tinyurl.com/6eo58w8
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hey rattle i built a new pc as my old one is even more older than yours it was a athlon 3200 xp with a via kt600 chipset a msi board populated with agp slot and ide hard drive, still use it for surfing and nothing else. Time moves on, built a spanking new cutting edge pc, intel i7 sandybridge, 2600k ati 6990 card gigabyte z68 ud7 corsair 8 gb ram, 2 1 tb hard drives am adding a ssd later on prob 120gb, got windows 7 64 bit retail, the cooler a corsair h70 and case is a corsair 650d, power supply a corsair ax850.
Now the cost was around £2100, i also bought corsair 2.1 speakers the sp2500 and a mechanical keyboard a raxer black widow ultimate, for performance intel to go for, but i wanted amd waiting for bulldozer but i couldnt wait a few months whilst i got the parts for my pc.
in terms of performance there a site where it tell you how powerful your cpu is compared to other thinks it called pc stats, anyway looked at it and it gave 499 points on my athlon xp and the current intel is around over 20000 points so a massive gap in performance.
intel are expensive cos they know that amd hasnt got a cpu to match them until bulldozer comes around then i reckon their prices will drop.
One thing rattle get a good case and psu and spent a lot on the graphic card if you gaming the card makes alot of difference.
A ssd will make a massive difference also load windows in 15 secs !!
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It is not a gaming machine, but I am just getting sick of my current PC lagging when working in Photoshop and perhaps checking emails at the same time. Not in a rush as my current PC works fine, apart from the faulty boot issue which I can live with.
Will wait till August and then bite the bullet then, hopefully with a slightly upped budget to £250.
I am not planning of building a completely new PC as my graphics card (8600 GT 512MB DDR3), PSU (a very heavy 22 amp unit), and even case (Coolermaster Elite 330) are still up to the job. Might want a new case just to keep it fresh though. My 1TB hard drive is only a month old too so I shall keep that.
It is looking like the Sandybridge is well worth the extra money, even the i3 Sandybridge seems to trounce all but the most expensive of the older pre Sandybridge i7s.
What I will be using it for:-
Photo editing/graphics
Web development
Web surfing/Email
Watching HDTV
Some video editing
Virtual machines
I aim to have 8GB of RAM by the end of the year, but 4GB is plenty for now. E.g I need a good base for something I can slowly upgrade. So by the end of a year a new power supply may be added etc.
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>>it was a athlon 3200 xp with a via kt600 chipset a msi board populated with agp slot and ide hard drive,>>
Ironically that's basically the same system including CPU I replaced about a year ago (still in networked use for some programs etc that Windows7 won't run); the MSI board is a KT6V LSR and I bought one of the last of the AGP boards, an Asus AH 4650, about 15 months ago as an upgrade.
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I'd spend on an SSD drive and not bother with the rest just yet. The speed is amazing.
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It's all greek to me, but someone I know has had issues with an SSD and W7.
This is what he said,
"I don't know what others have found but I am less than impressed with the stability of SSDs (solid state disks).
It's still early days for them - Windows 7 isn't too clever at identifying them, Apple Macs are supposedly a bit better.
I've had issues with a sort of creeping corruption in Windows 7 64 bit which I'm inclined to lay at the door of the SSD - there is certainly mention of corruption issues in the online forums.
So, in brief, I swapped the 128GB ssd for a traditional 1TB hard disk that was 'spare' in a slightly older PC.
This also has the advantage of giving me the capacity for all the junk that MS and Autodesk place in your system partition ;-)"
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>> Windows 7 isn't too clever at identifying them, Apple Macs are supposedly a bit better.
Windows 7 has better support for SSDs that MacOS X on the Macs. The Macs try to overcome this with the controller used for SSDs.
Whilst they essentially behave like a hard drive they have key differences including how you need to batch writes (because of the way data is written in blocks) and move data about to not keep writing to the same area and wearing it out (flash memory can only be written to so many times). One thing Windows supports and MacOS X does not is TRIM.
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I have a client in the realm of RAID data storage systems, high end data storage, they wont currently entertain SSDs, they are much less stable than a good quality hard drive.
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SSDs are all about performance. And you need to buy a decent one. The cheaper ones may still be faster for reading than a hard drive but they easier cheaper multi-cell flash memory. For fast read and write performance then single cell flash is the way to go and the costs start to rise.
SSDs also won't last forever as the memory cells get worn out. For a system drive on a computer I think that fine but I'd not trust it for long term storage of my important data. But I don't trust a single hard drive and have Apple Time Capsule doing continuous backups to a 2.5" hard drive and I also sync periodically with a NAS (mirrored) and copy all important files there straight away too (video/pictures).
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Been using two SSDs for over 16 months with Windows 7 with no problems, but I don't doubt people have problems. The significant data on each is backed up regularly anyway, just like that on my other drives. The speed gain was impressive.
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just installed a ssd drive now its a corsair force 3 120gb the revised version as there was problems with the earlier ones, makes a lot of difference now, my windows experience level is 7.6 before it was 5.9.
i had to reinstall windows 7 and boot into ahci mode, download all the latest drivers and updates and reinstall the games.
well worth getting the ssd, total amount now is £2300 my old pc cost me roughly £1500 that included the upgrades like gfx card and monitor.
Rattle try getting a new m/b and cpu bundle, and reuse some of the old pc parts if you can, in my case nothing was reusable i guess that what you pay for progress
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Well just three weeks later my motherboard decides to die, its like it knew I was thinking of junking it.
The motherboard strangley now turns on everytime but it gets stuck on the welcome screen (e.g the motherboard brand and press F2 for setup etc) and doesn't POST. I've known a few of these boards do exactly the same thing. I suspect it is the ROM which holds the BIOS which is faulty, but the BIOS chip is soldered on so being so ancient it is not worth bothering to repair.
A bit bad timing though as I have a music festival to go to in two weeks time.
So for now I am thinking of still buying a Sandybridge but running it on Linux until more funds permit.
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you have done the basic fault finding steps?
Take everything out of it except a video card and one stick of good memory?
I had one do this - it was caused by something plugged into a usb port
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Done all of that, removed all SATA cables from the motherboard, removed all RAM and replaced it with a new one I had in, removed all USB cables, removed graphics card and sound card. I've had this problem with this type of motherboard before, And it is nearly five years old so it has had its life.
So all it has now is CPU/RAM and built in graphics.
I will swap the RAM out once more just to be certain.
However it is now switching on first attempt, before it took two attempts, so I suspect what ever was causing it none to boot is also the same fault as this.
Oh ans I have also removed the battery so the BIOS should be reset.
Last edited by: RattleandSmoke on Sun 24 Jul 11 at 10:07
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Ordered it all now, its costing me £285 in total:-
The specs will be:-
d
New parts
Intel i3 2100 Sandybridge 3.1Ghz
Intel H67 Motherboard with USB 3.0 and SATA 6
2 X 2GB Kingston 13333 Value RAM
Coolermaster Elite 335 case
Windows 7 Home Premium 64-BIT
Parts to be carried over:-
Western Digital 1TB SATA 6 Drive
8600GT Graphics
M Audio 24/96 Sound card
FSP 400W PSU
LG 22" 1080P TV
Optical drive
So hopefully I will end up with very nice PC which would have a shelf value of around £800 if it was all new and ready built. It took me several hours to choose the Intel board as does not use 100% solid state caps, but the important caps are all solid state and it comes with a threre year warranty,
I decided to buy a new case, so I can use my existing AMD X2 system as a bench system. I always thinks its nice to have a brand new case with a new system.
In the next six months I will get an SSD and a better PSU too.
Also it has 4 x DDR3 slots, so to upgrade it to 8gb it will cost me an extra £22, so I will also do that in a couple of weeks.
So I am jumping from an X2 with 2GB of RAM to an I3 Sanbybridge with 8GB, overkill and a lot a of money but it will last for as long as I needed it to.
Last edited by: RattleandSmoke on Mon 25 Jul 11 at 15:58
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All up and running now :). Decided to ditch the 8600GT as the built in HD2000 has similar benchmark scores, so it will do nothing but add heat and use electricity.
First impressions it is very fast, I just hope opting for a basic motherboard doesn't come back to haunt me, but it has SATA 6 and USB 3.0 so it should be future proof. There is also no floppy, IDE or VGA ports on it, which is wonderful.
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My next main upgrade will be to get an SSD, but I need to spend at least £100 for a decent one.
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Sounds good Rattle, nice components, the 8600GT will have its own memory when the built in will share RAM - though with 4GB yet alone 8 that should not be an issue.
USB3.0 is very fast, I have it on my laptop.
SSD are fast though less relaible than a good quality conventional drive.
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Where are you getting this not as reliable stuff from?
Same MTBFs on SSDs as Spinning devices, its only the lack of large capacities that stops all the major Storage array vendors from using them.
Last edited by: Zero on Wed 27 Jul 11 at 22:19
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>> Where are you getting this not as reliable stuff from?
>> >> Same MTBFs on SSDs as Spinning devices, >>
I have a client who make high end RAID storage DAS and NAS units, they have fantastic credentials and have extensively tested SSDs and simply wont use them yet, enterprise class drives are much more reliable.
No doubt one day all memory/storage will be SS though today for reliability good quality conventional drives are the choice.
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NetApp use SSDs. EMC has used them for years. Maybe your client is behind the times?
Compellent, Fujitsu, HDS, HP, IBM all also use/offer SSD options.
Last edited by: rtj70 on Wed 27 Jul 11 at 23:13
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EMC use them, the biggest high end raid storage vendor in the world. IBM offer them. You can specify Oracle(Sun) storage arrays with them.
The biggest drawback with SSD is the cost per GB. Reliability is an old SSD myth,
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>>Maybe your client is behind the times?>>
>> Reliability is an old SSD myth,>>
Nope, this is really high end specialist kit and today they wont use SSDs based on very extensive testing, it's not just failure it is bad sectors etc.
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Bad sectors are more prevalent with spinning drives than SSDs. The only issue with SSD's is wearing out in high read ratios, less of a problem now with wear balancing technology.
Anyway - its raid, a bad sector is not an issue, unless they are using raid level that does not use a spare or two.
I am sure every other storage vendor cant be wrong.
Last edited by: Zero on Wed 27 Jul 11 at 23:50
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With the RAID levels in use in NAS and SAN systems, a failing SSD is not a problem.
I would therefore surmise the product line of Cheddar's client is very specialist. They aren't going for high performance storage that is on offer from other vendors. Well all the big ones anyway.
If I was competing against EMC and NAS for instance, I'd try calling their solutions into question to push mine. So saying you don't use SSD's might get you some sales. It might not be totally a true reason why they don't offer SSDs.
You'd have thought they would offer the higher performance as an option at least. I suspect they are trying to create a niche before they end up with a product nobody wants. EMC and NetApp are so big. And then there's all the others too.
Last edited by: rtj70 on Wed 27 Jul 11 at 23:58
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>> Bad sectors are more prevalent with spinning drives than SSDs. >>
To the contrary according to the experts.
>> Anyway - its raid, a bad sector is not an issue, unless they are using raid level that does not use a spare or two.>>
RAID 5 or 6 generally, there is no such thing as a spare, while RAID 6 can suffer two h/d failures without loosing data all h/ds are effectively employed because the data, parity and spare capacity are spread across all h/ds to achieve equal utilisation.
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What about mirroring your RAID5 volumes?
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>> What about mirroring your RAID5 volumes?
>>
The term mirror usually refers to RAID level 1 where you simply mirror the contents of one h/d on another.
Yes, if you have, say, and 8 h/d unit you can either run it at RAID 6 or (if the RAID controller allows) 2 x RAID 5 however if the latter are mirrored it acheives a lower utilisation, i.e. if you have 8 x 1TB h/ds then RAID 6 gives you 6TB working capacity where as 2 x RAID 5 mirrored only gives you 3TB working capacity.
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I think your clients business is very specialised and will soon have few customers, That's all I will add.
You raised reliability as an issue. Some applications need speed and will pay for it. The trouble with SSD is cost/Gb. Otherwise for some applications a no brainer decision. I suppose it depends on your budget.
Take a really high performance system (e.g. 10 petaflops) and storage costs are insignificant. A bit of an extreme example though.
But all the known storage vendors offer SSD... I doubt these will be clients for long as they will have no business. But I do see you example has less storage as an example than my mobile :-)
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>> 8 h/d unit you can either run it at RAID 6 or
Forget SSDs, how do I get to say 1000Tb of storage with 8h/d?
The other companies use SSD where they offer a performance advantage but also still use HDDs too.
For a fast computer that is also very efficient:
www.engadget.com/2011/06/20/fujitsu-k-supercomputer-now-ranked-fastest-in-the-world-dethron/
If you can afford the electric you can afford SSDs.
Last edited by: rtj70 on Thu 28 Jul 11 at 01:16
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>> I think your clients business is very specialised and will soon have few customers, That's all I will add.>>
It is specialised though is also on the cusp of a boom, there are many sectors where cloud etc are simply not appropriate.
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>> >> What about mirroring your RAID5 volumes?
>> >>
>>
>> The term mirror usually refers to RAID level 1 where you simply mirror the contents
>> of one h/d on another.
You are thinking of a single storage array. Its simple, and common, to mirror the DATA into another array. Doesent matter what format raid you are using to split the Bytes into Bits, the full Bytes are mirrored.
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>>
>> >> Bad sectors are more prevalent with spinning drives than SSDs. >>
>>
>> To the contrary according to the experts.
What experts? Spinning disks are the most unreliable part of of any computer (if you take tape out of the equation) The most common failure of the most common failing part of the system is defective sectors.
Could you provide me with a link to the experts reports?
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>>
>> >> Bad sectors are more prevalent with spinning drives than SSDs. >>
>>
>> To the contrary according to the experts.
What experts? Spinning disks are the most unreliable part of of any computer (if you take tape out of the equation) The most common failure of the most common failing part of the system is defective sectors. IN fact its so common they come with them brand new from the factory and have a system to detect them and deal with them as they crop up in use. Indeed there is even a large threshold for defective sectors before the disk is deemed "defective" The same system is replicated in an SSD drive tho much less frequently required.
Could you provide me with a link to the experts reports? Pretty sure you client will be crowing about the fact and may even have a white paper or two to try and prove it.
There are many reasons for using Hard disks, its grown into a very well packaged form capacity wise, and its cost per TB is decreasing in leaps and bounds. There are many reasons to use hard drives but reliability is not one of them.
I think your client is getting SSD wear (and hence planned life) mixed up with reliability. MTBF can not be used to compare SSD and hard drives.
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>>
>> Could you provide me with a link to the experts reports? Pretty sure you client
>> will be crowing about the fact and may even have a white paper or two
>> to try and prove it.
>>
No, they are close to all of the h/d manufacturers, expect to use SSDs in the future and do not want to crow about current SSD issues, however internally they have data that supports conventional drives being the choice today.
>>
>> I think your client is getting SSD wear (and hence planned life) mixed up with
>> reliability. >>
Z, I think a spin off from a prominant university with background in one of Europe's most successful scientific projects of recent times and a broad based of tech investors confident in their success has more knowledge of the subject than some retired bloke on an internet forum ...
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I gave you the chance to back it up with references
Where are they?
Till they appear it has no basis in fact.
Oh BTW this retried bloke managed the largest data san infrastructure, including peer to peer remote copy in the uk at the time.
Wasnt that long ago. Happy to be corrected by you tho if you come up with the references.
Last edited by: Zero on Thu 28 Jul 11 at 10:53
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>> Decided to ditch the 8600GT as the built in
>> HD2000 has similar benchmark scores
I'd be interested to see those scores Rattle - I know the 8600GT isn't exactly cutting edge these days, but I had assumed it would still see off any built-in graphics.
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Yes I had the same thought.
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My 8600GT only has 256MB of DDR3 which will throttle it. The benchmarks suggest the 8600gt is a bit better than HD2000 but for £60 I can get something which trounces both, so for now I am not going to risk the 8600GT.
I also want a new PSU when I get a graphics card just to be on the safe side.
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An 8600GT uses little power, I mean I have an 8600GTS and that uses little power, I would fit the GT if I were you - unless you need it to keep your old system running.
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I suppose so, my PSU is a FSP 400W (with one 18amp rail and one 17amp rail on the 12v ) but I suppose then wonder if I did the right thing buying an H67 chipset instead of a p67, but then the h67s were cheaper.
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Here are the passmark figures, compared to an E6750
CPU Mark
MS-7357 Core 2 Duo 2670 BL1.p 1611.8
This Computer 4028.9
CPU - Integer Math
MS-7357 Core 2 Duo 2670 BL1.p 235.2
This Computer 1152.6
CPU - Floating Point Math
MS-7357 Core 2 Duo 2670 BL1.p 628.9
This Computer 1372.6
CPU - Find Prime Numbers
MS-7357 Core 2 Duo 2670 BL1.p 537.8
This Computer 727.5
CPU - SSE
MS-7357 Core 2 Duo 2670 BL1.p 4.9
This Computer 18.1
CPU - Compression
MS-7357 Core 2 Duo 2670 BL1.p 2887.9
This Computer 4769.6
CPU - Encryption
MS-7357 Core 2 Duo 2670 BL1.p 8.4
This Computer 12.9
CPU - Physics
MS-7357 Core 2 Duo 2670 BL1.p 122.3
This Computer 230.4
CPU - String Sorting
MS-7357 Core 2 Duo 2670 BL1.p 1473.4
This Computer 2285.4
I am using cheap and nasty Kingston Value RAM and a standard motherboard too. I know Sanbybridge has been well over hyped, but these figures really proof why, I am so glad I didn't go down the AMD route now.
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>> I am so glad I didn't go down the AMD route now.
Did say ever since Intel dumped the P4 and went down the Core Duo, then Core 2 Duo and then all subsequent chips they have been well ahead of AMD.
Even the Macbook Air with Sandybridge looks like it was good performance.
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>> Did say ever since Intel dumped the P4 and went down the Core Duo, then
>> Core 2 Duo and then all subsequent chips they have been well ahead of AMD.
I wouldn't say that was true at all times/price points - when I put my current system together at the beginning of the year, the Athlon II X3 445 I chose was IIRC about £30 cheaper than an i3 of similar performance. But that was at the cheap end of the market (£50). That's also just going by a simple Passmark benchmark figure.
www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_list.php
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My processor scored 4000, for some reason 200 higher than the one listed, but I have a bang up to date BIOS which might explain the performance jump.
For my personal machines I always built AMDs and before that Cyrix, a Cyrix system was a good £150 cheaper than an Intel in the late 90's.
Been with AMD since 1999 when I built my K6.
I was very reluctant to ditch AMD and go with Intel but while some AMD processors score higher than my I3 2100 they cost quite a bit more and use more power. I also wanted DDR3 and USB 3.0, so all in the Intel system works out about £30 more than a Quad core AMD but for everything but encryption its a lot faster.
Just need to get an SSD some time now.
The 1155 socket is going to be Intels main stream socket too, so it should be around for a long time like 775 has.
Focus I think things have changed in favour of Intel even more in the past 6 months now the prices of 1155 motherboards have come down a lot. Also I don't think the I3 Sanybridges were out in the UK early this year.
I am a big AMD fanboy too and it really saddens me that Intel have beaten them on the value steaks in the mid range area.
Last edited by: RattleandSmoke on Fri 29 Jul 11 at 12:18
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>> Focus I think things have changed in favour of Intel even more in the past
>> 6 months now the prices of 1155 motherboards have come down a lot. Also I
>> don't think the I3 Sanybridges were out in the UK early this year.
>>
>> I am a big AMD fanboy too and it really saddens me that Intel have
>> beaten them on the value steaks in the mid range area.
I'm no fanboy! :) I just went for what was the best value at the time. I made the comment because rtj made a general assertion that Intel have been 'well ahead' of AMD for some years, and I was pointing out there have been exceptions (in my experience).
There was talk of Sandybridge when I was putting together my parts list, but I reckoned as it was new it would be out of my price range for a while, so didn't bother waiting.
Last edited by: Focus on Fri 29 Jul 11 at 12:23
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If I built my system at the time, I think I would have gone down the AMD route too. Even with my new system I've had a lot of tweaking to get things working because although on sale for 5 6 months now it is still new.
I also agree that Intel have not always been faster per £, although I've noticed even when speccing budget systems for customers the Core Duo has worked out better value.
I was going to wait for the AMD Bulldozer which should see AMD giving Intel a tough time again, but my motherboard blowing meant I had no choice.
Just updated Windows to SP1 as my Windows 7 DVD/COA arrived from Amazon this morning. That has increased performance even further.
Going to install Vice City on it in a bit, I want to see if I can play it max settings smoothly using the CPUs graphics processor. It is an old game so should be no bother at all for it.
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Why a h67 board rattle, either a p67 or a z68 would have been more future proof. With a ssd its around a third faster when booting from windows and also its more responsive.
I was waiting to see what amd bulldozer performance be like, however it not out till sept or nov so i wasnt prepared to wait that long.
i would upgrade the gfx card to either a ati 6950 or 6970 or a nividia 560ti, both are dx11 compatible so you get a lot more eye candy than dx9
I konw i got crysis 2 and got that updated to dx11 its wow for me.
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I think the H67 might come back to haunt me one day, but no have no interest in over clocking so the H67 did me fine. It has USB 3.0 and SATA 6.0.
This build has already gone £80 over the budget too, so I had to draw the line which is why I went for the H67.
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Thats the thing rattle, it all about how long till you upgrade and built another one, i spent over £2300 on my pc, which i know is a lot of money but its a gaming pc, watercooled,intle h67 is ok for media only, but for a few pounds p67 was a better one the best was z68 chipset you get both the feature of h67 and p67, rattle for a guy that repairs pc thought you get a 2500k cpu and build around it
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My AMD X2 was fast enough for most things, although I was getting frustrated lately. I am messing about with PCs all day, the last thing I want to do is tinker with my own. If I do play any games it will be casual only. I am not a serious gamer all I need is something quite fast for photoshop and something which is stable.
Other than photoshop the most demanding thing I do on my PC is watch Iplayer. The total cost was around £280 and have something much much faster than my old one.
Really not bothered about the over clocking features of the P boards, but if I had the extra money I would have done.
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Help choosing specs for upgrade - Focusless
