AMD vs INTEL

[Pathion]

What you guys think?   I am thinking about going with the AMD Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition Deneb 3.2GHz Socket AM3 125W Quad-Core Processor.  For the price?

[TrailMyx]

So far, the best bang for the buck I've gotten is the Phenom II 2.8.  At the time, it was a great processor for the price.  I'd love to have DDR3 and the higher clock rate, but even without it, I'm not complaining.  And the 2x price savings was nice at the time.  Personally, I can't justify the extra cost of the Intel unless you are a MIPS phreak and dripping with extra cash.

[xenoglyph]

10-12 months ago i'd say intel, but you can't beat that price.  tbh i think a Q9400 will OC just as high as that chip, but if you're not overclocking then i'd go for AMD for sure.

i've got my intel C2D 3.0 ghz (e8400) easily running at 4ghz on air (and it runs very cool).  i'll probably upgrade to quad one of these days.

[Coragin]

I am currently running an AMD Phenom II 940 with 8 gigs of 800 DDR2.

Now, I rip and burn blu rays, but I have to re-encode them to fit on a dvd+r.  With my amd athlon 64 4800+ dual core, it would take about 5-7 hours per movie.  With this new setup, it takes 3-4 per movie.  And it dont bog my system down.  Also, if I use task manager and put all resources to the re-encoding, it dont bog my system down much either and thats setting it to realtime.

Just make SURE you get a MB that CAN support the 940.  I originally bought an ASUS model that said it did, but only the 920, not the 940.  I went through hell trying to figure out why that processor would not work, I tried everything and I mean everything.  After I Was done trying everything, I took it to my local computer shop to have them look at it and told them everything I did to check it.  They had it for three days before I finally called them and told them that I called ASUS and they told me that it wont work with that MB.  Needless to say they didnt charge me, but I updated bios, changed ram around, went with no ram, little ram, max ram, no vid card using onboard, with vid card, with no hd or dvd and with and every combo of all that you can think of.  I finally got a gigabyte with onboard video/hdmi/spdif ect and am happy with it.

So google the MB when you pick it out, thats all im gonna say, will save you a headache later. 

And the short answer, YES!  And go with XP x64 over vista, XP takes up a lot less resources, 1gb of ram compared to like 2gb for vista or 7 and thats with bare minimum OS stuff.

[xenoglyph]

i'm a fan of XP64, but nobody makes drivers anymore.  hell, there were barely drivers for it when it was current.  remember that Vista/W7 and 2k3 x64 have different driver architectures.

i'm currently running a customized, trimmed down W7 and couldn't be happier.  use vlite to remove a lot of crap, then after install manually disable services you don't need.  you can disable a lot. (don't delete services like some vlite users do)

check out the vlite forum @ msfn:
http://www.msfn.org/board/vlite-f153.html

and about RAM usage, it's comparing apples to oranges.  Vista/W7 keep a lot of stuff in RAM on purpose.  It saves the OS from having to load it from disk again.  As soon as RAM is needed by an application the old stuff gets cycled out.  it's actually more efficient and the OS tries harder to use your RAM for the purpose it's designed for.

[Pathion]

Currenlty what I am thinking about getting.

 

    ASUS M4A78T-E AM3 AMD 790GX HDMI ATX AMD Motherboard

    ASUS M4A78T-E AM3 AMD 790GX HDMI ATX AMD Motherboard - Retail
    Item #: N82E16813131366
    Return Policy: Standard Return Policy
    G.SKILL 4GB (4 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory Model      F3-12800CL9D-4GBNQ - Retail 
    Item #: N82E16820231193
    Return Policy: Memory Standard Return Policy
AMD Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition Deneb 3.2GHz Socket AM3 125W Quad-Core Processor Model HDZ955FBGIBOX - Retail

$481.96

[xenoglyph]

it looks good to me,  i like ASUS.

wow, just looked up my RAM (ddr2) and it literally costs twice as much now compared to when i bought it 8 months ago.

[Pathion]

now my goal is to be able to buy without wife killing me.