New budget pc, AMD or Intel?

[MadCow809]

Well thanks for the help guys.

Im expecting the UPS men to drop off the stuff in about 2 hour's time, bought the stuff on newegg last night.


AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+ 2.2Ghz
ECS 780G Mobo
200Gb HDD
DVD-RW
Rosewill Case + 450W PSU
Microsoft Keyboard + Mouse
A-Data DDR2 RAM 2 x 1 Gb

Thats it! Simple build, gonna slap XP SP3 and Photoshop CS on and its pretty much job done.

[MadCow809]

Well, got the whole PC setup already. 320gb HDD was DOA, so Im gonna send that back first thing tomorrow morning, currently using an 200gb IDE drive to run XP SP2.

Wanna see the pics of the build or should I just leave it?

[Crazyjeeper]

PICS

[cvrefugee]

Newegg is so quick when shipping, since you and I live near the CA distribution center. Except for my last order, which took a week, because they decided to ship my stuff out from New Jersey.

[jeffy777]

Originally Posted by cvrefugee

Newegg is so quick when shipping, since you and I live near the CA distribution center. Except for my last order, which took a week, because they decided to ship my stuff out from New Jersey.

Yeah, since my wife is going to college down here in Tennessee, I get stuff the next day from Newegg's warehouse in Memphis. Back home in Michigan, it would take atleast a good 3 days. Only downside now is that I have to pay tax on everything when I place an order from TN, which really adds up when buying all the components for a new PC

[MadCow809]

Originally Posted by Crazyjeeper

PICS

All the stuff I bought from Newegg, quite pleased with the purchase except for the dead hard drive : (



ECS 780G Mobo, Really nice motherboard, the 780G series, you can allocate up to 1Gb of ram to the onboard video, and it runs Vista without any lag (re-formatted and put XP back on because its faster)




Ugly Rosewill case + Freebie 450W PSU.

AVOID!! Crap plastic material used for the case, and all the teeth on the front panel broke off so I cant clip the front panel on anymore. Rosewill is sending me a new frontpanel at their cost, so Im waiting for that to arrive in a few day's time.



AMD 4200+ Bleh, what can I say, AMD really needs to catch a wake up call now, Intel is poesklaaping them around. Super Pi 1M in 40sec, what an ...... useless cpu, my sister's E2160 does that around 20seconds. But its sufficient for Microsoft Office Suite and Photoshop, so Im not complaining.



Finally, everything plugged in, apart from the dead Seagate HDD, which Newegg should RMA without any hassle.



Dead Seagate 320Gb HDD, The new barracuda 11, with the single 320gb platter. In theory, it should be less noisy and produce less heat due to the fact its running on a single 320gb platter instead of two 160gb platters. 7200rpm and 16mb cache, all sounds pretty good... but its dead : (




There, a cheap sub $500 PC. Now I just need to wait for the G45 board to be released and I can build another PC for my sister. Apprantely the G45's onboard video can decode blue-ray without much lag, and capable of light gaming as well. Sounds promising, guess I will just have to find out in a few month's time.


Oh yeah, the DVD-RW in the first pic is a Lite-On lightscribe DVD-RW. Now, Ive never used lightscribe before, anyone here know if its worth the wait to burn the image on the CD/DVD? Is it worth the extra $$ to buy lightscribe blank dvds?

[GTV V6]

Lightscribe...

If all you want to do is put titles on discs, it's fine.

Any graphics look shit in tones of brown.

Also the drive WILL burn the data faster than the image, Lightscribe is SLOW.

[awdrifter]

The 4200 Brisbane are good oc'ers. You should be able to get 2.9-3ghz out of it. AMD is releasing some new stuff (like the Phenom B3 revisions), but they are still behind Intel's offerings.

[MadCow809]

Originally Posted by awdrifter

The 4200 Brisbane are good oc'ers. You should be able to get 2.9-3ghz out of it. AMD is releasing some new stuff (like the Phenom B3 revisions), but they are still behind Intel's offerings.

And by a huge margin if you only talk about OC.

Take any of the C2D chip, and it will burn just about every single dual core AMD chip out on the market.

Unfortunately I couldnt really play around with the 4200+ because 1) Its not my pc and 2) ECS mobo is weak at OC

Originally Posted by GTV V6

Lightscribe...

If all you want to do is put titles on discs, it's fine.

Any graphics look shit in tones of brown.

Also the drive WILL burn the data faster than the image, Lightscribe is SLOW.

well... is it worth the wait? I googled for some lightscribe pics and they look kind of horrible