Hiya, first post. I've been looking for a forum for some help and i think this categories best fits the help I need; I’ll keep this sort because i tend to go off on a tangent sometimes. I'm currently torn between buying 2 things, one is fairly stupid but i want it and the other is fixing up my broken computer… I was trying to move components from one case to a new one and something went very wrong and cut a long story short it doesn’t work and i need a new motherboard, RAM, graphics card and processor. i have £400 to fix the lot. I'm looking for some expert help to give me an idea of what would be best to get and the cheapest place to get it. If you want to reply then I’m preferably looking for a newer motherboard that can take a Intel duo 2 core processor, also the ram that would go with that and a graphics card that’s better than a Radeon 9600 Pro or a Nvidia 6800. If you'd rather contact me by MSN then I can annoy you with lots of questions, so if anyone thinks they can help me out, and has some time on their hands for me then please do, would be greatly appreciated. Thanks. (I think you can see my msn address in my profile.)
Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 Socket 775 1.86GHz (BX80557E6300) MSI S775 Intel P965 ATX Audio Lan (P965 NEO F) Kingston ValueRAM 2x512MB 240Pin DIMM PC2-4300 Non-ECC DDR2 CL4 (KVR533D2N4K2/1G) Sapphire Technology Radeon X1900GT 256MB GDDR3 PCIE CrossFire Avivo (21086-00-20) Total's approximately 410£ including vat, excluding shipping, but that should give you a rough idea of what your money can buy. I don't live in the uk so that's pretty much the only uk site I know, but there might be better prices elsewhere. Just as a side note, the x1900gt is much much faster than the 6800, let alone the 9600 pro. I guess you could grab an x1600xt which would lower the cost significantly and would be faster than a 6800 but it would be pointless imo to put such a card with such a cpu.
Btw.. Is there really much difference between the Intel Core 2 Duo Processor 2.13GHz and Intel Core 2 Duo Processor 2.40GHz i'd like to know that the extra 27Ghz are worth it for £100 extra.
Between the E6400 and the E6600, the only difference aside from the clock is the E6600 has 4mb of cache instead of 2mb for the E6400 (and E6300, the one I suggested). Personally, if I had the money I'd probably get an E6600 because of the extra cache, but I wouldn't mind getting a 2mb one either because the difference, although present, doesn't really justify the price increase. (sounds contradictory ?) It's not worth 100£ in the sense that you get diminishing returns, but if you really want it, then it's worth it. That's how I see it. As far as gaming goes, the usual bottleneck is the video card, so no matter what cpu you get, you won't see a major difference if they're similar. But for encoding/decoding for instance, each mhz and each mb of cache will be put to use.
Supreme Geek... well you certainly live up to your reputation Thanks alot for the help mate much appreciated.
