Re: [LUG] New computer: RAM, CPU

On Mon, May 25, 2009 at 12:01 PM, Rob Beard <rob@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Max Siegieda wrote:
> It's been said before, and it will be said again, depends on what you
> want to do however I recommend the Intel E5200, and just about any new
> RAM will do. At stock speeds it's a powerful CPU and it runs cool, if
> you want a bit of extra performance, it will easily and safely
> overclock to 3.5GHz, at which speed it will beat CPUs much more
> expensive than itself.

Actually I'd say look at an AMD system. They're a good option at the
moment as you can get an AM2+ motherboard (for about £30 upwards) which
takes the cheaper DDR2 memory. You could start with an Athlon X2 such
as the Athlon X2 7750 Black Edition (2.7GHz) for about £50 (or for a
lower power system the Athlon 4850e which is a 45w CPU). You'd find it
would pretty much do everything you want (I have an Athlon X2 4400+ in
my media centre PC and it is fine for games and media in either Linux or
Vista). Further on down the line you could drop in a Phenom II or maybe
one of the newer Athlon II
chips which will be cheaper and get an instant speed upgrade without
having to replace the motherboard or memory. You could also drop in an
AM3 CPU too which is backwards compatible. The beauty of this is it
allows to upgrade to a DDR3 compatible CPU without having to get DDR3
memory and a new motherboard. Then when the prices on AM3 motherboards
and DDR3 memory come down (which no doubt will be within the next year I
guess) you could upgrade the motherboard and memory without replacing
the CPU.

With an Intel system, with a Pentium Dual Core E5200 you could upgrade
this at a later date to a Core 2 Duo or Core 2 Quad but then after that
you'd be looking at a new motherboard to upgrade to a Core i7 or Core
i5. I have a Pentium Dual Core E2180 and I find that it is pretty quick
but I ditched the stock heatsink and fan after a while as it was noisy
and didn't offer very good cooling. Now I have a big Zalman copper
cooler on the CPU (about £35's worth) although I would also recommend
the Akasa AK-965 coolers which are pretty big and offer reasonable
cooling at a lower price.

As far as graphics go, NVidia seems to be the better option at the
moment. The official drivers are proprietary (as are ATI drivers) but
unlike ATI they do provide drivers for cards going back to the old TNT2
cards which are going on 10 years old now. I'd be surprised though that
VMWare supports 3D acceleration. I was under the impression that only
VirtualBox supports 3D acceleration at the moment by installing a
special driver. Personally if I was going to be running newer Windows
games I'd run them through Windows or something like Crossover Games
(not had much luck with Wine). Saying that most games I play are on
emulators anyway or on a console.

Rob

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