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On 02/10/12 16:55, Martin Gautier
wrote:
Well, if you're really sticking to a low budget get yourself the I3 3225 model - 2 cores, 4 threads, VT-x instructions and onboard HD 4000 graphics. All for £100. http://ark.intel.com/products/65692 If you don't need intensive graphics support, the onboard graphics are absolutely fine and well supported for daily duties such as web surfing, watching movies, coding, etc. If you're driving multiple large monitors, are a photoshop ninja or movie editor or want to play top end games, then obviously you'd be well advised to spring for a discrete graphics card instead. Recommendations are difficult to be honest: ATI since acquisition by AMD have taken big steps and largely they've transcended their notoriously buggy drivers, and are making pretty decent steps in becoming a better open source player (releasing specs, etc) so I'm not sure the old adage of never buying AMD cards still holds. I've had a lot go through my hands recently and they've all performed well. A detailed comparison on reputable hardware sites (i.e., no Tom's hardware) and carefully tailoring the results to your budget is the best I can advise. For what it's worth, the graphics was just about the only part of my rig I didn't upgrade - I do quite a lot of graphics intensive stuff (but no gaming whatsoever) but my ancient Nvidia 8800 GTX is really well supported under Win/Mac/Linux and really still way more powerful than I actually need. I'm currently saving up though - I need to switch soon to a workstation-class card with true 10 bit output over displayport but the new Nvidia Kepler-based cards are damn expensive. I'll be filling my second PCI-e v3 slot with a Tesla for GPGPU number-crunching fun and profit as soon as possible too, but they're *really* expensive. I was running oclhashcat on a 4-way Tesla GPGPU supermicro system for a client a couple of weeks ago and it was mind-blowingly fast. In the majority of cases, I really think mostly you can get away with the onboard graphics, but make sure you get a CPU with HD 4000 though - the 2500/3000 are variants are weak. Regards |
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