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Building A Computer... :/


Picc84

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I'am going to be building a computer (you know, picking out most parts, ect.) and I was wondering What you would say would be the best for a lower price...

Intel Penimun Core 2 Duo

Inetl Penimun 4 Dual Core

Intel Celeron D LGA775

Intel Pentium 4 LGA775

Price is a key hear, but I'am not going to be flipping out about it... I would like to spend under 700$?

I'll probally have more questions also... so stay tuned.. haha

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The whole thing....

Alllright, thanks Rick...

Am.... Welll i built a computer on Dell.com (i'am definatly not getting one from them, i hear there expensive...) but this is what i got... How does it sound?

Note: They did not offer Core 2 Duo's with the one i selected... :(

PROCESSOR AMD Athlonâ„¢ 64 3200+ edit

OPERATING SYSTEM Genuine Windows® XP Media Center Edition 2005 edit

MEMORY 1GB Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 533MHz- 2DIMMs edit

HARD DRIVE 160GB Serial ATA Hard Drive (7200RPM) w/DataBurst Cacheâ„¢ edit

OPTICAL DRIVE 16x DVD+/-RW Drive edit

MONITOR 17 inch E177FP Analog Flat Panel edit

VIDEO CARD 256MB NVIDIA Geforce 7300LE TurboCache edit

SOUND Integrated 7.1 Channel Audio

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Since price is a factor, I recommend the Core 2 Duo E6300 (1.83ghz), http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6819115005

I have an Athlon X2 4800 (dual core 2.4ghz) at home, and at work I have a Core 2 Duo E6600 (dual core 2.4ghz) and X6800 (dual core 2.93ghz overclocked to 3.2ghz). The Core 2 Duo's are noticably faster, especially in Windows Vista.

Speaking of Vista, you might also hold off for a few months until it's fully available. Then get the Home Premium edition.

And for the video card ... go for a more high-end 7300, like the GS or something. One that isn't labelled with "TurboCache" (which means it uses your system memory too).

The Paint.NET Blog: https://blog.getpaint.net/

Donations are always appreciated! https://www.getpaint.net/donate.html

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  • 2 weeks later...

As far as processors I would recommend a Core 2 Duo of any kind. They simply can't be beat at the moment when it comes to performance and $$$ (and I'm 100% serious). You can see in this chart that Core 2 Duo's dominate pretty much everything.

With that being said, I recently upgraded from an AthlonXP to a Athlon64 X2. I wanted to go with a Core 2 Duo, but Fry's had an excellent deal where I pretty much bought the processor and got the motherboard for free. So since I was going to have to buy a new video card and memory anyways, saving $100 on a motherboard was a good incentive. So I got a socket AM2 Athlon64 X2 4600.

The older Intels, up until the C2D, were really pigs. AMD's were better overall, unless you were using certain applications that Pentiums could do better. Even the recent dual core Pentium D's weren't that much faster than some of the single core Athlon64's. The Pentiums were also power hogs and would get hot (which meant bigger heatsinks and bigger power supplies).

Now whatever brand you go with I would strongly urge you to stick with dual cores, either the Athlon64 X2 or the Core 2 Duo's. I noticed a huge difference when upgrading from the AthlonXP to the X2, especially when working with 6 megapixel pictures coming off my camera in Paint.NET. My laptop has a Turion64 which is basically a lower heat version of a Athlon64, its a 1.8Ghz. I still have to resize pictures down to like 1600x1200 or smaller if want Paint.NET to be somewhat responsive (like updating the picture as I adjust sliders).

Get 1GB of memory minimum. Paint.NET, Internet Explorer, and such can easily use 50-100MB of memory per instance, so 512MB is really too small nowadays. I have 1.25GB in my laptop and 1.5GB in my house computer...its seems to be enough for what I do (Vista may change that down the road though).

As far as video cards, if you only plan on using Paint.NET and the like, then you don't need anything too crazy. My computer at home just has a nVidia 6600 (256MB) in it and it does just fine for desktop usage. Now if you plan on gameing then ya you might want to look at something like a ATI X1800 or nVidia 7900. Also if you plan on getting a really big monitor like the Apple or Dell 30" LCD, then you will need a video card with a dual link DVI (not to be confused with a video card that just has 2 DVI ports). Single link DVI is good up to about 1920x1200 (usually 24" monitors) where as the dual links can provide the 2560x1600 of the 30" LCD's. I think all the ATI X1 series (X1300, X1600, X1800) have dual link and maybe all the nVidia 7 series have it.

For most all my computer purchases I use either Fry's locally or NewEgg online. NewEgg has awsome prices and deals, Fry's is local and can put it my hands on days when I wake up and say "You know what I need a new harddrive today" :D

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And I just wanted to say that I (and probably others in this thread and other around the net) are not praising the Core 2 Duo because were Intel Fanboys. I haven't owned an Intel since the Pentium Classic 166Mhz was a current processor. However in all my years I do not think I have seen a processor mop the floor like the C2D's have.

Now for the last 4-5 years it hasn't been any secret that AMD chips were usually more efficient and often did better at video game performance, however there was almost always at least 2 or 3 benchmarks that the Intels usually did better at (usually server stuff, scientific, number crunching, etc). So there was always room for either side to say "hey look ours is better". However with the C2D, they simply dominate every single test. I can't think of one single benchmark where stock for stock the best C2D (E6800??) gets beat by anything else, and when you take into account they overclock extremely well, they are almost unstoppable.

Admittingly I have probably been an AMD fanboy for many years, and starting about 2 months ago I completely started recommending the Core 2 Duo. Its honestly and inarguably the best processor on the market right now.

Even the last couple dual cores weren't as sensational as these have been. The Athlon64 X2's were a great step, but they were expensive and the low end could actually be beaten by several of the higher end single core Athlon64's. The Pentium D's were dirt cheap, but performance wasn't all that great compared to most single core Athlon64's, plus they ran very hot. Suddenly the C2D's come out, they run fairly cool, performance is stellar, price is very fair, and they are conservatively clocked....its win/win.

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