I've been having slews of problems with the ide connectors on my xfx motherboard, and have decided to upgrade both that and get a new cpu and memory. This is on a extreme budget, because i am 15 and only make about 100 a week disposable income. I have around 200 saved right now. Although i am on a budget, i dont really want to sacrifice power. I have found a mobo/cpu bundle on computergate, and dont know much about the mobo manufacturer PC Chips. Is this a good product, or would i be better off paying the extra $47 and getting an ecs mobo?
brands can be a good indication, but there all produce lots of different models... obviously some are decent and some are not. what are the models of the boards you are looking at? personally i have allways been very happy with MSI boards + AMD processors.
you are right gigabyte tec is very good two look this one is good and it is cheap Newegg.com - GIGABYTE GA-965P-DS3 ATX Intel Motherboard - Retail
Gigabyte, MSI, ECS and Biostar have some budget boards that are pretty bare on features, but they'll be fine for what you need. PC Chips is generally regarded to be absolute garbage, so while, yes, they are cheap, you're better off spending a few extra bucks on a better brand. I don't know what your current power supply is, but you might want to consider a few extra bucks to start off with something a little more powerful. CPU: Sempron 3000+ Socket AM2 $51.99 + free shipping Motherboard: ECS C51GM-M Socket AM2 $57.99 + $6.13 shipping - $10.00 mail-in-rebate RAM: Patriot PC5300 2x512MB DDR2 $72.99 + free shipping PSU: Sparkle 350W ATX 20/24-pin $31.50 + $7.11 shipping: Subtotal: $214.47 Shipping: $13.24 Subtoal: $227.71 Rebate: -$10 Total: $217.71 Not the nicest thing, but it will offer some upgrade path down the road with Socket AM2 and a PCIe x16 slot. It has on-board graphics so you can get it going without a video card. Minimal cost with a fairly good upgrade path. The PSU has some pretty solid specs, which is expected from a company like Sparkle.
well the only problem with that is i really wanted to future proof myself. the bundle that i am looking at is found here: Intel Dual Core CPU and Motherboard Bundle- ComputerGate.com I need new memory, because my old mobo was just ddr not ddr2, and for what i'm doing i need the 1gb upgrade. So, with the upgraded mobo, and memory it comes to $266. Is it worth it to spend the extra $12 to get the Pentium D 915 instead of the 805? I will be running Ubuntu on it, with every package you can imagine installed, and dont really want to skimp on memory or cpu, but i would like to stay under 325 as much as possible.
