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Need to bulid the Wife a puter, thoughts?

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Niku-Sama said:
I saw that but it was OOS
I take it the 860k is more efficient per Mhz?
noticed it was 28nm...

if we are saving a little but on the mobo then we could spring for a bit better cpu
Click to expand...

What exactly did you have in mind? I'm not familiar with how the 860 is better than the 760 on the AMD side. I can tell you that I'd take the Pentium G over either of them though.
 
Well since the and mobo was less I was thinking we could get an A series processor but at the same time none of my existing video cards will hybrid cross fire with the apu and they are all much faster than the apu

The AMD cards I have are 2 r9 270 and a 5770. Or I could stick a gtx 660 ti in aswell for n nvidia stuff
 
Don't get an A series if you have a 270 on hand. Get an Athlon 860K or G3258.

Those FM2 athlons are basically A10's with no GPU cores active. Good deals on them.
 
that's what I was thinking...

so the MSI mobo I had listed above isn't on sale for $48 any more, I got my ads mixed up and thought the prices were good till the 27th...might as well wait for black Friday/cyber Monday at this point
 
well I got parts ordered, I waited till cyber Monday and it sort of paid off.

here the run down so far:

MSI A78M-E45 A78 (Bolton D3) $42 $2 Shipping
Crucial M500 CT240M500SSD1 2.5" 240GB SSD $79 Free Ship (Amazon)
G.SKILL Sniper Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) 2133 9-11-10-28 1.65v $60 Free Ship
AMD A8-6600K $60 Free Ship (Amazon) = $243 total shipped

I know what some of you guys said about the A series but it was pretty freaking cheap at $60 bucks and I figured I could just disable the GPU or use it to run a second monitor if she wanted such a thing.
she scoffs when I use more than one but I know it'll come in handy when shes researching and typing a college novel...I mean paper at the same time.

no case yet. It might be an amazon or new egg case for a while, which ever fits the best and isn't shreded
 
Alright final product shall consist of

BitFenix Prodigy M in BLUE "$FREE" essentially (TigerDirect)
MSI A78M-E45 A78 (Bolton D3) $42 $2 Shipping
Crucial M500 CT240M500SSD1 2.5" 240GB SSD $79 Free Ship(Amazon)
G.SKILL Sniper Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) 2133 9-11-10-28 1.65v $60 Free Ship
AMD A8-6600K $60 Free Ship (Amazon)
Corsair H50 $20 (BestBuy)
OCZ StealthXStream 700Watt $FREE (Spare part laying around)
SAPPHIRE Vapor-X Radeon HD 5770 $FREE (Spare part laying around)
SAMSUNG BX2231 21.5" 2ms $FREE (Hand me down, I HATE IT)

TOTAL=$263

The case is essentially free because my parents didn't know what to get her for x-mas and she said she really liked that case and might as well spend some amount on a decent case since it'll probably last a while.
Its not here yet and she doesent know shes getting it either so it'll go in a temp case soon, when the mobo gets here (probably tomorrow)


If any one want to see some final build pics lemme know
 
For around 300-350 get an AM1 platform, Athlon with built in Radeon graphics, AM1 board, 64 gig SSD since I assume shes not gonna be storing lots of huge files and 4 gigz of RAM and good to go.
 
Zakarro said:
For around 300-350 get an AM1 platform, Athlon with built in Radeon graphics, AM1 board, 64 gig SSD since I assume shes not gonna be storing lots of huge files and 4 gigz of RAM and good to go.
Click to expand...

AM1 is huuurrrtin. Almost better off getting an A4-5000 BGA integrated on an ITX board.
I built my mom an AM1 rig. It's as fast as a tortoise with 3 legs blown off.
 
for around 300-350 bulid a system that costs more and performs less?
I imagine some games will be played on it some day that's why I went the way I did, nothing hard core but room to add incase it gets hard core.

also the only part that isn't already on my desk is the case and the mobo so money spent

as fast as a tortoise with 3 legs blown off by what?
if it came down to it I could have jammed an AM2 system together out of spare parts and had her use that but I wanted her to have something of her own.

speaking of, do you think an AM2 with 8 gigs of DDR2 and a 720 trike would be faster than an AM1 system ocnoob?
 
Faster for what? General computing or gaming? For general computing the tricore AM2 might be faster but for gaming it would depend on the video card installed. But I would still go with the AM1 because the technology is much more up to date and any performance differences will probably be negligible in general computing.
 
Even with SIms 3 installed on SSD, the AM1 5150 takes 4 minutes to load a game. FOUR minutes. If that's not a crippled tortoise I don't know what is. Had I known the perf was so low I would never have built my mom an AM1 rig.
 
Theocnoob said:
AM1 is huuurrrtin. Almost better off getting an A4-5000 BGA integrated on an ITX board.
I built my mom an AM1 rig. It's as fast as a tortoise with 3 legs blown off.
Click to expand...

Yes they are not really fast, but I dont think his girlfriend is gonna be joining you guys for HWbot benching ;) catch my drift?

The APU you said would cost a lot more. Newegg has combos where you get APU, mobo and RAM for 100 bucks alone. Thats what I did with my work rig. I dont care, its just a sempy quad APU. If he wants some more speed he could get the Athlon AM1 which is better and faster then a sempy
 
trents said:
Faster for what? General computing or gaming? For general computing the tricore AM2 might be faster but for gaming it would depend on the video card installed. But I would still go with the AM1 because the technology is much more up to date and any performance differences will probably be negligible in general computing.
Click to expand...

I was wondering if the AM1 set up would have been faster in general but considering what ocnoob is saying probably not, I forgot its only single channel ram and quite a few other limitations. I don't think how ever a 720 trike will be faster than a A8

Theocnoob said:
Even with SIms 3 installed on SSD, the AM1 5150 takes 4 minutes to load a game. FOUR minutes. If that's not a crippled tortoise I don't know what is. Had I known the perf was so low I would never have built my mom an AM1 rig.
Click to expand...

holy cow that's bad, hows boot up time from button press to done loading on windows start up?

the A8 6600 is up and running, considering a mobo and processor for it was roughly $100 I don't see how an AM1 could have been worth the money. I need something with fast boot and load times for all incase theres a HUGE emergency late project type of thing so its up and on and ready to rock seconds after its been turned on.
so far no version of windows has been installed. I'm trying to get her to check her school for free/discounted copies but shes being a butt about it. shes a student. its for a student, why not take advantage of it.

any way I have been burning it in, mostly memtesting the heck out of it which puts a fair bit of strain on the CPU aswell. temps suck but I am using the stock cooler at stock speeds but its fairly quick at doing a complete run through in memtest. the MSI board detected the ram speeds right away and even has support for intels XMP funky stuffs. a complete 4 core test takes about 4 hours doing one core at a time. for 8 gigs that's pretty good.

on my system, over clocked and unlocked to 6 cores it takes roughly 12 hours to memtest 8 gigs and I have a total of 16 so that's an all day affair and usually just run test #8 since its the one that it usually errors out on if theres a problem. something to be said for the efficiency on this new one
 
Niku-Sama said:
I was wondering if the AM1 set up would have been faster in general but considering what ocnoob is saying probably not, I forgot its only single channel ram and quite a few other limitations. I don't think how ever a 720 trike will be faster than a A8



holy cow that's bad, hows boot up time from button press to done loading on windows start up?

the A8 6600 is up and running, considering a mobo and processor for it was roughly $100 I don't see how an AM1 could have been worth the money. I need something with fast boot and load times for all incase theres a HUGE emergency late project type of thing so its up and on and ready to rock seconds after its been turned on.
so far no version of windows has been installed. I'm trying to get her to check her school for free/discounted copies but shes being a butt about it. shes a student. its for a student, why not take advantage of it.

any way I have been burning it in, mostly memtesting the heck out of it which puts a fair bit of strain on the CPU aswell. temps suck but I am using the stock cooler at stock speeds but its fairly quick at doing a complete run through in memtest. the MSI board detected the ram speeds right away and even has support for intels XMP funky stuffs. a complete 4 core test takes about 4 hours doing one core at a time. for 8 gigs that's pretty good.

on my system, over clocked and unlocked to 6 cores it takes roughly 12 hours to memtest 8 gigs and I have a total of 16 so that's an all day affair and usually just run test #8 since its the one that it usually errors out on if theres a problem. something to be said for the efficiency on this new one
Click to expand...


Id google boot times and load times and CPU benches of an AM1 cpu before listening to a random person maan

Yes they are slow but hey I compare it to the thingy you see in rig and to be honest I never seen the sempy ttake 4 min to load something equivalent to a sims map...
 
Ay Ay ay... You bought an A6 when you could have had an 860K for $20 more? Bad move my friend. Especially if you're using discrete GPU. You lost a lot of horsepower with that decision. I hope Wifu-san will not be doing any gaming.
 
no an A8 and the 860 was more than $20 more at the time.
the A8 6600k was $60, any 860k's I could find in stock were over $100 and not from reputable places I would buy from

also for $60 I wouldn't have any issues swapping it out in the near future and using the A8 out in the garage
 
Niku-Sama said:
no an A8 and the 860 was more than $20 more at the time.
the A8 6600k was $60, any 860k's I could find in stock were over $100 and not from reputable places I would buy from

also for $60 I wouldn't have any issues swapping it out in the near future and using the A8 out in the garage
Click to expand...

All good points.



Boot up time from button press to In Windows is pretty good on the 5150 as I'm using an SSD. Total time is about 15 seconds to Win 8 login screen. Maybe a bit less actually.

The boot time and loading times for Sims 3 are horrendous though, and it's installed on the SSD so I can only fathom that the 5150 is loading it slowly. Sims games are slow loaders, traditionally speaking, but my old E6550 @ around 3Ghz used to load Sims 3 way faster than this 5150 does, and that was off a 7200RPM HDD.

We Canadians get screwed with prices. It would have been much costlier for me to build an A6 or A8 rig than it was to build the 5150 rig. I too payed about $100 for CPU/board. If I wanted to match what you got I'd be looking at like $150.

We used to get prices at par with US prices, back when the US and Canadian dollars were about equal, but our dollar has gone down hill big time and now we pay about 20-40% more, depending on the part.

When 290's were $199 in the US for Black Friday they were still WELL over $300 in Canada. We get ripped...
 
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