The Underscore Archives

					Does the £300 include buying new memory or graphics cards?

The new Intel Core chips and their desktop brothers will be excellent in
many way s but aren't widely available yet. If you can wait a couple of
month I would. If not Buy a low to mid range dual core Pentium D or AMD X2.
An AMD X2 3800+ (£190) and decent motherboard (~£90) will cost less than
£300. BUT you may need a PCI Express graphics card and DDR (or even DDR2)
RAM if you haven't got those already.

HTH

Neil


> -----Original Message-----
> From: underscore-bounces at under-score.org.uk 
> [mailto:underscore-bounces at under-score.org.uk] On Behalf Of 
> Ben Butterfield
> Sent: 05 July 2006 14:05
> To: 'underscore at under-score.org.uk'
> Subject: [_] Which CPU?
> 
> 
> Afternoon all,
> 
> I am currently in the market for a CPU to be the heart of my 
> new main PC. I am not a serious gamer, although would like to 
> be able to get most games running (not possible on my current 
> ancient Celeron). I regularly use PhotoShop, Zend Studio, and 
> TopStyle. I don't upgrade often, so the latest bleeding edge 
> chip is probably not the one for me - it's still gonna be out 
> of date in 9 months time! I have a budget of £300 for the CPU 
> and motherboard, although can be flexible on this if there is 
> a decent performance gain from an extra £50 or whatever. Your 
> recommendations please!!
> 
> Having looked on Dabs.com, I see that this 
> (http://tinyurl.com/fnbcc) AMD item is the most popular
> 
> Now I have a few questions about what all the various specs 
> mean.......
> 
> CLOCK SPEED - ok I get this one, but if the CPU is dual core, 
> does this mean that the total clock speed is twice that? In 
> other words, does this
> (http://tinyurl.com/glbeb) item have an effective clock speed 
> of 4.4GHz? If not, why would I want a dual core chip??
> 
> CACHE - What does L2 mean and what effect does a larger cache have?
> 
> BUS SPEED - Is this the speed at which the CPU passes 
> processed data on to the motherboard?
> 
> As always, your input is very much appreciated!
> 
> Ta,
> 
> Ben
> 
> - 
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
> Elan is the world's leading IT&T recruitment company. For 
> more information go to www.ElanIT.com.
> 
> - 
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
> The contents of this email and any attachment are 
> confidential to the addressee and are intended solely for the 
> addressee's use.  If you are not the addressee, you have 
> received this email in error.  If so, you must not disclose, 
> copy or take any action in reliance on this email and any 
> attachment.  If you received this in error, please contact 
> the sender and delete the material from your computer.  
> 
> Although this email and any attachment have been checked for 
> viruses, no liability is accepted by Elan in this regard.  
> The recipient should carry out virus and other checks as it 
> deems necessary to ensure that this email and any attachments 
> will not adversely affect its systems or data.
> 
> -- 
> underscore_ list info/archive -> http://www.under-score.org.uk
>