best bang for buck ?

E

edzyyy

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Apr 3, 2012
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Just built myself a new rig and plan to give the old one to my mom

Specs are

gigabyte ma74gm
AMD brisbane 4000+
evga 9600gt
8gb ram

I put win 7 64 on it and upped the ram from 2 to 8gb, but it's still seems a little slow. I figure the cpu is the bottleneck here. She's gonna be watching movies and some photoshop here and there.

What's the best bang for buck cpu for this broad?
 
well the board does support phenom II/athlon II 95W or less processors. so if thats the case i'd say the best bang for the buck for that system would be an athlon II X2 250 or even the athlon II x3 435. watch newegg or microcenter(if you have one near you) the 435 is constantly on sale. the x2 250 is about 40% faster clock for clock than that 4000+. both processors should be more than enough for your mom.
 
If you have a Microcenter you could get a 960T and board really cheap, along with 4 GB of DDR3 ram.
With Windows 7 you could shutdown, replace the mobo, cpu, and memory all at once, reboot and it will get into windows. You may need to reactivate, but it should not blue screen, and you should not have to reinstall. Vista was even pretty good about this. Over the past weekend I upgraded my mom's computer from an older intel 775 board, cpu, etc to an AMD FX-4100 and she had Vista. I just swapped and rebooted, got drivers installed and all was fine. It didn't even ask to reactivate.
 
pgaster said:
If you have a Microcenter you could get a 960T and board really cheap, along with 4 GB of DDR3 ram.
With Windows 7 you could shutdown, replace the mobo, cpu, and memory all at once, reboot and it will get into windows. You may need to reactivate, but it should not blue screen, and you should not have to reinstall. Vista was even pretty good about this. Over the past weekend I upgraded my mom's computer from an older intel 775 board, cpu, etc to an AMD FX-4100 and she had Vista. I just swapped and rebooted, got drivers installed and all was fine. It didn't even ask to reactivate.
Click to expand...

what board would u recommend?
 
you can get a sempron 140 for around $25 most unlock to a regor 240 dual core
 
hotcrandel said:
get an SSD... will fix all the problems.
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+1. No telling how old that hard drive is, based on the other hardware. If you want to have a noticeable boost in performance, SSD is hands down the best upgrade for your mom's needs.
 
sempron 140 !

it usually will unlock, dunno if your board is capable, but you should look into it. its a swift little cheap cpu

whats your cpu utilization during defrag?
 
A SSD would give a good boost, but a new CPU would help as well, but don't replace a dual core with a single core ie. Sempron 140.
The sempron may unlock, but you probably just want something that works out of the box and save a lot of support time.

My advice:
Put some money into a faster CPU, x2 250 and anything above will give a good boost, if she wants to do anything CPU intensive.
Put some money into an SSD if she is going to listen to music, watch family pictures on Facebook and write emails to all her loved ones.

EDIT:
Should have read the OP post.

Movies and photoshop will love a faster CPU.
Just remember that load times will not change a lot, as they are HDD bound.
 
Why get an SSD for those tasks? I've done some of those simultaneously (1080 DTS movie stream and gaming) with zero issues. Any 7200 RPM drive over 1 TB will transfer over 40 MB/s easily.

If she's a standard user, waiting 40 seconds to fully boot is nothing. Also note: Windows Superfetch extends load in times by pre-loading her common apps during boot.
 
Solomutt said:
Why get an SSD for those tasks? I've done some of those simultaneously (1080 DTS movie stream and gaming) with zero issues. Any 7200 RPM drive over 1 TB will transfer over 40 MB/s easily.

If she's a standard user, waiting 40 seconds to fully boot is nothing. Also note: Windows Superfetch extends load in times by pre-loading her common apps during boot.
Click to expand...

Yeah I know, but a changing from HDD to SSD is often one an upgrades that makes the computer feel faster.

A faster CPU is not a bad upgrade for that computer, but I think he should consider an SSD as well.
 
960T and Gigabyte GA-78LMT-S2P Socket AM3+ 760G are on bundle deal at MicroCenter for $89.99. You could get 8gb of ddr3 ram for probably $25-$35.
 
K1tty said:
960T and Gigabyte GA-78LMT-S2P Socket AM3+ 760G are on bundle deal at MicroCenter for $89.99. You could get 8gb of ddr3 ram for probably $25-$35.
Click to expand...

If you can't get that one, the 1045T bundle isn't bad either.
 
Stayfr0sty said:
I dont think his mother needs an SSD......
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I disagree... nobody is more impatient than the common technically challenged user...

For example on a HDD system, these scenarios play out:

Experienced user:
Double clicks a large program's shortcut; a spinning icon appears, the experienced user realizes, hey the hard drive is loading something into memory, I need to wait a few seconds and then my program will appear and I can work productively.... waits 20 seconds.... program loads.... experienced user works productively.

Technically challenged user:
Double clicks a large program's shortcut; a spinning icon appears, the inexperienced user doesn't even notice his mouse cursor is a spinning icon, waits 5 seconds, then assumes that the program didn't open. inexperienced user double clicks the program's shortcut again starting to load two large instances of the same program into memory slowing the loading process down further. The program now not having enough memory, and not expecting to have two instances of the same program running at once, slows down to a halt, the inexperienced user in his/her frustration starts clicking all around the screen..... windows tells the inexperienced user that the program is not responding and offers the user to choose to end task the program..... the inexperienced user does click the end task button, closing the first instance of the program. The user just read that they closed the task, however they didn't realize that when they clicked the shortcut twice and then crashed the first program, they left the second instance of the program frozen and running in the background processes. The inexperienced user now keeps doubleclicking the program shortcut in vain, over and over trying to load a program that they already stalled because they wouldn't wait 15 damn seconds for the computer to do what it needed to do in the first place. The inexperienced user then calls ME and complains that their computer doesn't work right and that I need to "fix" it. :rolleyes:

For these very reasons, I always use SSDs on the builds I do now for people in the office, when it comes to interface, it is always better to have the computer moving much quicker than the user can process and navigate around the screen. These types of general users also don't usually have as much need for disk space as power users as well. with SSDs starting to be around $1 per GB, I would always choose a $60 60GB SSD over a $60 500GB HDD. A larger HDD can be added to a SSD system very easily later on, but it is harder to add an SSD OS drive when windows is already installed on a HDD.
 
cbutters said:
I disagree... nobody is more impatient than the common technically challenged user...

For example on a HDD system, these scenarios play out:

Experienced user:
Double clicks a large program's shortcut; a spinning icon appears, the experienced user realizes, hey the hard drive is loading something into memory, I need to wait a few seconds and then my program will appear and I can work productively.... waits 20 seconds.... program loads.... experienced user works productively.

Technically challenged user:
Double clicks a large program's shortcut; a spinning icon appears, the inexperienced user doesn't even notice his mouse cursor is a spinning icon, waits 5 seconds, then assumes that the program didn't open. inexperienced user double clicks the program's shortcut again starting to load two large instances of the same program into memory slowing the loading process down further. The program now not having enough memory, and not expecting to have two instances of the same program running at once, slows down to a halt, the inexperienced user in his/her frustration starts clicking all around the screen..... windows tells the inexperienced user that the program is not responding and offers the user to choose to end task the program..... the inexperienced user does click the end task button, closing the first instance of the program. The user just read that they closed the task, however they didn't realize that when they clicked the shortcut twice and then crashed the first program, they left the second instance of the program frozen and running in the background processes. The inexperienced user now keeps doubleclicking the program shortcut in vain, over and over trying to load a program that they already stalled because they wouldn't wait 15 damn seconds for the computer to do what it needed to do in the first place. The inexperienced user then calls ME and complains that their computer doesn't work right and that I need to "fix" it. :rolleyes:

For these very reasons, I always use SSDs on the builds I do now for people in the office, when it comes to interface, it is always better to have the computer moving much quicker than the user can process and navigate around the screen. These types of general users also don't usually have as much need for disk space as power users as well. with SSDs starting to be around $1 per GB, I would always choose a $60 60GB SSD over a $60 500GB HDD. A larger HDD can be added to a SSD system very easily later on, but it is harder to add an SSD OS drive when windows is already installed on a HDD.
Click to expand...

I would +1 on that. They also can really screw the computer up good sometimes.... Its a gift....
 
If thats a 740 chipset you might be able to stick an x6 in there like they mentioned, go for that.
 
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