Rate/slate proposed AMD (AM3) build

anewman

Hi everyone,

My current system is an AMD 2800+ XP system with 1gb DDR. I managed a modest overclock and upped the ram speed to 400mhz (from 333). Graphics are supplied via an Nvidia Geforce4 Ti4200 AGP 4x. All good bits back in their day (and cost me quite a bit), but I would now like something a little faster so I can play something a little more modern than CounterStrike source which it struggles to play at the settings I'd like. A chipset fan is noisy, and Windows 7 is on pre-order, so I figure now is a good time. Been holding off upgrading for a while as I'm aware this stuff constantly improves, and now I feel out of touch of all the new stuff having not kept up with the techie/review sites as I used to.

I guess main priority is bang for buck with hopefully some room for future upgrades if felt needed, here's what I've come up with...

Gigabyte GA-MA790FXT-UD5P 790FX ATX Motherboard - £123.48
AMD Phenom x2 550 black edition - £74.71
Xigmatek HDT s1283 heatpipe cpu cooler - £25.48
Arctic MX-2 thermal compound - £3.75
Crucial 4gb (2x2gb) DDR3 1333mhz cl9 - £56.00
MSI HD 4850 OC 1gb GDDR3 - £89.29

Total £372.71

I already have SATA hard drives, IDE DVD writer, and bought a decent PSU when my old one blew about a year back (which I can't remember the exact brand [Antec I think] but it is quite high wattage and I believe supposed to be able to support crossfire) so hopefully that side of things is taken care of for now.

On the motherboard I'm aware there is a £30 cheaper version with the 790xt rather than the 790fxt chipset (my understanding is this only affects crossfire graphics performance?!, and I'm not sure I will use crossfire yet) and 8 sata ports rather than 10. Processor chosen as I hope the 2 cores can be unlocked by the mobo, and if not then maybe the 2 good cores will clock well and will still be good bang for buck.

Thanks in advance for any thoughts or comments

banger9365

i thought the asrock mboard was one of the only ones that could unlock the cores and that was the tri cores not duel cores

HTML200

Going by the specs, that looks to be a decent rig for gaming. Had a quick look at the specs for gfx card and apparently it can get up to about 60fps on Crysis, so can't be bad.

Haven't been able to afford to upgrade my PC for ages now, so I don't know the quirks of the current crop of hardware - it's this sort of info I find most valuable, so every time I upgrade I spend literally days researching everything on every review site and forum I can find.

The only comment I'd make is that I don't find thermal paste worth the effort. I used it in the first couple of builds I did and despite carefully lapping and polishing the heatsink it just never seemed to work as well as a simple thermal pad - the pads seem more durable and reliable, on one processor I had to re-apply the paste twice over the years as it seemed to gradually lose contact with the CPU die (causing localised hotspots and sudden shutdowns).

Maybe I was just unlucky

asininity

What shop are the components supplied from?

anewman

I got my info on unlocking cores from http://www.overclock.net/amd-cpus/535501-amd-phenom-ii-core-unlocking-guide.html but I never had any luck in getting good overclockable processors in the past. I guess it's more down to luck that sort of thing and I'm just not lucky, lol. But apparently the BE is still a good processor with just the 2 cores.

Shop is Ebuyer.com. Have used them quite a bit in the past. Only ever had 2 problems with them being missing bits, first one apparently the courier must have stolen some bits, second one they forgot to put something in the box and admitted this after looking at a photo of the order and quickly sent out item.