Any reason why not to buy this CPU?

[joydivision]

I have an old AM2 motherboard out of an old acer I bought for £200 brand new back in Jan 2007. It was cheaper to buy the PC ready made than it was to build a new one at the time as I had an old Socket A Athlon XP 2000 system which was well past its best.

The current PC is very different from that £200 Acer and is in a decent case etc. I run a now old 8600 GT and an expensive audiophile sound card.

My motherboard has a fault which requires several attempts to boot and I am getting sick of it. The 4200 X2 CPU I now have (upgraded from the original Acer sempron) is also showing its age.

I have seen this Quad Core AMD for £61 but it is out dated socket AM2+ but I have seen AM2+ boards which support both DDR2 and DDR3 ram allowing me to continue using my old DDR2 and upgrade to DDR3 at a later date.

The problem is the CPU above means buying an AM2+ board (which will support AM3 chips). Apart from limited upgrade potentials are there pitfalls with this? The way I am seeing it is the upgrade will cost me £100 and I will go from having 4200 X2 to a 9850 Quad.

Am I missing something?

http://www.microdirect.co.uk/Home/Product/48253/AMD-CPU-AM2--9850-Phenom-64-Quad-core-oem-AM2-

 

[16k_zx81]

I dont think there's much difference in performance in a desktop machine going from ddr2 to 3 so in that regard the ram recycling is a good way to go. I do wonder about money on an outdated cpu though.

Personally, Id have a look at the average sale price of the parts I had on Ebay and do the maths on what an upgrade to current parts would be.

In my experience when building on a budget its often not much if a stretch to sell parts and go with a more current build.

The quad is only useful for apps that can use all the cores. I think you would find a quick current gen dual core would beat it easily for general desktop work. Current gen quad like a 955 would gazump it completely on anything that can utilise all cores, as its several generations old.

 

[vdub12]

Out of my 3 most used systems I am still using 2 AMD 2800+ CPU's and a Pentium D dual core. They work fine. However, i built an AMD quad core about a month ago and loaded OpenSUSE 11.3 on it and it was smokin fast. Its to bad I had to put Win7 Pro on it for the customer :-(. Not sure if the modern Linux kernal takes more advantage of the quad cores or not but it was unbelievable smooth and responsive. I have never seen KDE4's affects operate so smooth. Because of that system I have been thinking about upgrading.

 

[16k_zx81]

Yep. Not to mention most current boards have USB3 and SATA3

 

[joydivision]

I think my point is does it matter if it is a few generations old as I won't be upgrading the CPU with that board anyway. I would want USB 3.0 though.

 

[Vicenarian]

I recently built a Athlon II X2 250 based system for a friend. Even though that CPU is considered low-end (for current AMD CPUs), it still had plenty of pep. I mean, you can buy a Phenom II X4 for $150 or so, an Athlon II X4 for like $100 or so, and a decent motherboard from gigabyte or ASUS for $100 or so. So, mobo + CPU is only a $200-250 upgrade. DDR3 isn't that bad either right now, you can get 4 GB for like $80 if you shop around.


And if it's any consolation, I'm still running a Pentium D in my main desktop/business machine. Works pretty well...but I'm planning to upgrade to an AMD based system sometime.

 

[joydivision]

I know Intel is winning in terms of performance but do AMD still offer the best band per buck? I have been very impressed with the new low end Althlon CPUs.

The machines I have built over the last year have all tended to be Intel 775 but for personal use I am still a massive AMD fan. All personal desktops in this house are AMD AM2s.

 

[16k_zx81]

do AMD still offer the best band per buck?

Yes. Absolutely. The current AMD cpus are better performance:dollar ratio than Intel.

(Im not a Fanboi of either. This is just the current state of play between the two manufacturers in this generation of cpus)

 

[meanderer]

bang per buck, always AMD

absolute performance, still Intel.

DDR3 ram prices is dropping like flies. but DDR2 haven't. maybe you should run some build and estimate the costs.