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cheapest solution for quad core?

E

excellsior

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jun 10, 2006
Messages
323
using the xeon cpu with 2.6 quad core at my school with INSTANT reaction is like heaven and i want the same experience or similar at home if the price permits.

right now i have a amd x2 dual core 2.2 but it is on the 939 socket

what is the cheapest way to quad core? will i need to buy new ram as well?
 
There are no quad solutions in socket 939. You'll need a full upgrade. (Mobo/CPU/RAM)
 
I am not an expert on AMD boards but my understanding is the socket 939 boards do not support quads so you will need another motherboard. So another motherboard is the first decision and then deciding if you wish to stick with AMD or go Intel. It is highly likely you will not be able to use your existing DDR memory as AMD2 and AMD2+ boards use DDR2 memory and same for Intel boards.(there may be some odd ball boards out there but I highly recommend biting the bullet and not going with some strange solution with no upgrade path now that you are going to have to do a major upgrade anyway)

I recommend going with Intel as currently they are the performance leader but you specified "cheapest" as the primary criteria and currently it is cheaper to put together a quad AMD system and still get excellent performance as I am guessing it is the task switching with a lot of applications open that impressed you as opposed to high performance in a game. An AMD system with a decent amount of memory will be very smooth and responsive.

Here is a list of both AMD and Intel quads by price to help you decide. As the motherboard and memory will be about the same (maybe AMD board little cheaper but not by enough to really matter) it is the CPU selection that will mainly determine the total price.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...E&N=2010340343 1302825342&bop=And&Order=PRICE

You did not mention if you where interested in OCing, There is a huge potential performance increase built into current Intel chips if you choose a motherboard that supports OCing by having decent options in the bios (setup). For example the least expensive Intel quad the Q8300 has a stock speed of 2.5GHz and with no additional special hardware in a case with decent airflow it will easily do 3.0GHz with the stock Intel cooler with no degradation of life or reliability. Some much higher.

The point is Intel chips have the desirable attribute (for those of us that like to do this kind of thing) of being able to buy the least expensive chip and just by knowing how to set them up, can have them outperform the much more expensive versions of the chip running at stock speeds. Free horsepower.

The AMD's will OC some but not nearly as easily as the Intels.

Again I am not an AMD person, at least not since the old Socket A NF7 days.

Just for budgeting sake.

Intel q8300 2.5GHz quad - $190ish
board - 80-100 (dont skimp too much a quad requires more current than a dual and you want a good quality motherboard that can handle the extra power requirements for long life)
memory 2GB min and much much better if you go ahead and spring for the 4GB as that will help with the "snappy" task switching as less things get swapped to disk page file. Good news is that memory is dirt cheap now and you dont really need anything fancy, Any PC6400 or PC8500 will do the job $60-$80

so roughly $200 CPU + 100 motherboard + 75 memory is about $375 ish INTEL

AMD you can knock almost $100 off of that as their least expensive quad is $99 so you are looking at about $275 ish AMD.

This assumes you have a decent power supply that you can still use.

This is just a rough cut of your options, More details like if you are willing to OC, do you wish to jump to the Intel side and what your primary use of the machine is, would be helpful and allow us to give more specific recommendations.
 
Cheapest Motherboard + power demands of a quad under full load (if you play games or do other intensive tasks that would actually put a decent demand on the cpu) is not a wise idea.
 
Thanks for the great info. I'm guessing I would like somewhere around 2.5ghz each core and I do not mind OC'ing. So essentially that means I can meet the low cost by buying something lower than 2.5ghz and then having it overclocked. I do not need 2.5ghz stock and then OC to 3.0ghz- I believe that would be too much for my needs and therefore money wasted.

I use this system for multitasking.

I usually have 10+ tabs open, utorrent open, winamp, maybe a video of bleach playing, and sometimes I'll have to use adobe indesign/photoshop open but not always open with the other programs listed.

I rarely have time to play games but the one's I do play don't require much power. I play TF2 and Day of Defeat using a 8600 gts which I feel is good enough for me and supports horizontal span since I have 2x 20" monitors.

Since it seems like I will need a psu, I will take some time to see how much money I will need to spend. It is not a necessity at the moment so I will be patient and look at some second hand stuff as well.
 
ah excellent info, applications like that likely would not even start to heavily load all four cores and so I take it back, a modest motherboard of decent quality would do the job fine.

I hesitate giving specific recommendations but will just toss out a board I think is an excellent buy for the money

I like Gigabytes and if you are really needing to keep the budget down this would work fine for what you want to do. Solid caps for long life, plenty of OCing options, lots of features.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128380

$80.

Wow memory even cheaper than I thought. This is a deal on 4GB of excellent memory. Adata is not as popular as some of the better known brands but is reviewed very well.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820211188

$41 free shipping .

So my price estimate above where on the high side.
 
That is a nice budget, but the cheapest quad is 170$

Judging from my needs and taking into consideration that the processor might become slower, should I make the jump to quad or would you think a triple core would suffice?
 
Triple core just might do what you want but all I see require the AM2+ socket boards with the least expensive being about $78 and I would have to really really think hard about going for this for $99 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819103244 since there is no way to go where you want to go without a new board and memory.

If your power supply has 16A on the +12 you would likely be ok with it at least for now as your games would only use 2 cores as far as I know.

Not up enough on the AMD boards to make a recommendation but the memory should work on either Intel or AMD so $40ish is a fairly solid number for budgeting use.

If DDR was not still so silly expensive I would almost recommend putting in 4GB in your existing machine, It is really amazing how the performance jumps over a 1GB (or less) machine but I am assuming your existing machine is light on memory and that may be an error on my part. And if you had a 5400 rpm hard drive - the added memory and a new fast 7200 rmp drive with 16MB cache for your OS and applications (use the older drive as data storage or backup) might also get you where you want to go.

Task switching is more memory and hard drive performance orientated than raw cpu speed. So more memory and a fast hard drive would run you around $100 total and might be the ticket. Just depends on your current hardware but I will almost bet you are light on memory. With my OCed 4 core machine jumping from 2GB to 4GB made a noticable difference in "snap" even when I had to reduce the OC slightly.

Still - just throwing ideas out, you have a lot of options.
 
excellsior said:
Since it seems like I will need a psu, I will take some time to see how much money I will need to spend. It is not a necessity at the moment so I will be patient and look at some second hand stuff as well.
Click to expand...

What PSU do you currently have?
 
Hmm, you'll be on the edge but that PSU should still survive a quad-core upgrade.
 
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