Hi all...

As the title states, I'm about to start buying components for my next machine. The 2.5GHz Pentium 4 I'm running now is starting to show its age.

I'm curious as to which of the following will give me the nicest/fastest/smoothest user experience for my money...?

1) Chip/Motherboard
2) RAM
3) Video Card

As for #1, I've decided to stick with Intel, and get a Core 2 chip. I've still not made a decision as to whether to go Duo or Quad. Recommendations?

#2... More is always better, right? I plan to get 4GB, if not more. RAM is cheap now, so why not?

#3... This is where I start to get a little confused.

My current P4 machine lacks any real video hardware. It's got integrated Intel video hardware, which is currently disabled in lieu of a barely capable Nvidia Geforce MX400 AGP card. My problem is that the machine is proprietary in nature (Compaq). I can only fit a low-profile AGP card in there. I tried installing a Geforce 5200 PCI card in the riser card, but apparently I don't have enough power running through it to power the card (I only got beeps and no video at all when I tried to boot it).

I do not know how much of my slow overall performance is dependent on video performance (or my lack thereof).

The motherboard I'm looking at right now is an Asus board which has an onboard NVidia GeForce 9300/nForce 730i. This motherboard is the one that was recently chosen by a Linux mag as the basis of a MythTV machine (running both the back end and front end on the same machine).

Is this going to be enough power to make things run better? My biggest complaints are usually web-related. Pages take far too long to render, some Flash-heavy sites can take the system to its knees temporarily, and I'd like to be able to enjoy as least some of the benefits/eye candy of a 3D desktop...

I'd appreciate any advice you could give me.

Thanks,
~jp

OK, so you are talking about a personal computer, not a server.

I'll leave detailed recommendations to others -- I'm sure there will be plenty. I will just make the general comment that you need balance. A good motherboard & cpu are important, but you also need plenty of memory and good fast video. I don't think it's as much a question of where should I spend my money, but rather how should I balance things. Blow it all on the motherboard and then skimp on the memory and it may still be slow.

So, then it is also a question of what your budget is.

Well, I'm looking to stay under $800(USD) for the whole thing, including a new monitor (23" LCD).

Yep, no server... this is for general use, although I don't want to be saying, "I wish I'd spent the extra money for..." in a year.

The integrated video on the motherboard, for example, has VGA and HDMI outputs, so I should, theoretically, be able to use it to watch content on my HDTV, glitch-free. Or at least, that's one of the goals. Video performance is something that I've never really cared about until recently. With the nice eye candy that's available now, I seem to be missing out.

Really, I'm looking for a speed increase across the board. I think *anything* would be better than what I have, even possibly an Atom-based system... But I want faster booting, shorter load times on apps, faster rendering of web pages, better performance on video playback (I always get glitchy playback when watching DVD images), so on and so forth..

With the Core 2 chips, what's better, a fast Duo or medium Quad?

Thanks for your sharing

Thanks for your sharing



simulation credit auto

First, what browser are you using ? If it's FF3 it can be greatly tweaked to be much faster and more efficient.

I usually recommend against an integrated video card, because you can't change it out if you need to. But, there are advantages to it perhaps, you could argue either way. Your choice.

It doesn't really matter if you get a Core 2 Duo or Quad, both are good. Technically a Duo may give you better performance (because most apps don't support many threads very well), but slightly less multi-tasking ability.

With any hardware, there is always a 'sweet-spot' for price / performance value.
That's the point to aim for. You should get more performance (than your old PC),
for your $800.

For a typical desktop machine, I would go with the faster Core 2 Duo. For a server, the quad, even if it had a slightly slower clock speed. Of course, if you were tasked with setting up a server, you'd probably be expecting to spend more, so you'd go for a fast quad. Interestingly, one of my newer servers is only 1.8GHz, but it can run 64 threads, and it has 4 GigE interfaces. It's all in the balance.

Possibly true, but don't do it (by 'it' I mean buy one of the present Atom -based systems, they don't make sense and won't until the chipsets are sorted out, and even then, will only make sense in situations in which low power is an advantage).

I'd also go for a duo on the desktop, right now, provided that it saves you worthwhile money over a quad of a similar clock speed. Be aware that it looks like s775 doesn't have the longest lives ahead of it; this may not make any difference if you are not an upgrader.

(OTOH, the i7s are not yet what you'd call cheap and it will be a few months before i5s are available and the prices are apparent; should offer a worthwhile saving over an i7, though.)

Almost forgot, there's a comparison of processor performance vs cost:
http://techreport.com/articles.x/17023/14
possibly useful.

Thanks for the link.... I'll read it in detail when I get home from work today.

I generally agree on not using integrated video. However, I am planning a mATX build, and space savings and power consumption are a factor. Many of the medium-to-higher-end video cards I've looked at draw a lot of power on their own--some require more than my current power supply is capable of supply to my whole system!

With the integrated video I know there's a slight performance hit as well, although again, the decreased power consumption and lower heat production are part of the trade-off.

After posting last night, I did see mention of a Duo being better than a Quad for most desktop machines... I think I'll go that route.

Being curious, what would be the reasons for your decision to go with Intel and not AMD.

IF you plan on a graphics card, I would suggesting getting any nVidia one although ATi is more bang for the buck, it still lags behind in Linux support and doesn't play nice like nVidia. Not yet, maybe in the future, but just not yet. Of course, this is if you intend to use Linux. If not, if gaming is your forte, then I would suggest to get the Ati HD4700s and above cards.

Any reason you insist on buying Intel? I have just assembled a system around an Athlon X2 550. It is faster than an intel 8400 at only 60% of the price ...

Quad - same thing. Intel does not offer anything that matches the 955 unless you are willing to spend considerably more. The 9650 costs 60 % more, the i7 920 is about the same price but it can be combined with ludicrously expensive motherboards only (even the entry level costs about as much as the CPU itself!) and the average user won't notice any difference between the AMD and i7 unless they edit movies 24/7.

Plus: 775 is done with as a socket; AM3 has just arrived. Does it make a difference? Well, yes, if your mobo dies in a year or three, you won't have many alternatives too choose from. I am getting rid of a s939 AMD CPU for just that reason (there was an abrupt break between s939 and AM, just as there now is between s775 and i3/i5/i7 - and even i5 and i7 are not interchangeable!).

Yep, get Nvidia rather than ATI. 9600GT or 250GTS will last your for years unless you are a heavy gamer and they are not too expensive. But you will want to stay away from them if you prefer a quiet system. Alternatively, should you decide on AMD, you can get the full Dragon platform with the 790X integrated graphics. It will handle HD and the average game just fine - not the high end stuff, of course.

Yes, RAM is cheap but why waste money. Most of my systems have 4GB and the most I have ever needed is just over 1.8GB; I did put 8GB into the the quad, though, because I am doing more and more multimedia, which tends to place greater demands on the system. So it really depends on what your system will be used for.

Bad web performance almost always is rooted in bad connectivity to the web. Your CPU and video card could be ten times faster and it wouldn't make a visible difference.

I have observed that dual core (vs. single core) makes a bigger difference than it logically ought to in web performance. You have some thread spinning its wheels waiting for some event. Other threads should get most of the CPU time and the system should be responsive. But it isn't. Maybe the constant requests into the kernel by the spinning thread (to find out whether what it is waiting for has happened yet) aren't managed as well as they should be. Empirically, a second core makes a big difference.

But you aren't questioning one vs. two core. You are questioning two vs. four. After some recent playing with recompressing large video files, I'm not as negative on four cores for a home system as I used to be. But I still generally think four cores are a bad idea for a home system vs. a cheaper and faster (per core) dual core chip. Most of what you do on a home system never uses more than two cores at once.

I'm also generally negative on add in video cards (vs. integrated on the motherboard). The add in card adds a significant fraction to total system cost. It places a heavy extra demand on your power supply (probably increasing that cost). It doesn't give you much in return.

When I watch a video (even full screen 1920x1200 resolution) the motherboard integrated graphics keeps up with the native speed of the video. Anything faster would be wasted. My sons have compared very similar motherboard graphics to expensive cards in games on Windows. There is a significant difference in frame rate when maximum game display details are enabled. Even there I'm not 100% convinced there is a significant difference in the user experience.

When I shopped for motherboards for AMD CPU's I saw surprisingly little price difference between motherboards without integrated graphics and motherboards with all the same other features (including slots for plug in graphics cards) plus integrated graphics.

I'm not sure how that compares in Intel motherboards. But if you pay next to nothing for the integrated graphics, I think the strategy I used for my sons' computers is sound: Start with just integrated graphics and see how it performs. If you don't like it, buy a video card and disable the integrated graphics (two sons did, one didn't).

But maybe that means you should buy the PSU that would be needed for that video card even when you aren't necessarily buying the video card.