Ultimate Value Intel / AMD rigs in here

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killboy

Weaksauce
Joined
Aug 16, 2003
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Prices are Canadian costs, which should be equivalent to American retail prices. I didn't provide any links but you could probably find everything listed here at NewEgg. If you're a Canadian, then try NCIX/Tigerdirect

The Intel way
Cpu: P4 805 142.75$
Ram: 2 x 512 megs DDR2 Samsung 137.50$
Motherboard: MSI 945GM2-F Motherboard (Int GFX) 107.00$
Upgrade price: 387.25$ cost for P4 Dual Core that overclocks to 3.8gighz

Extras to complete the machine....
Hard drive 160 gig WD: 89$
Case+PS 420watts: 42$
DVD burner LG: 40$

558$ for the whole machine, soo basically we're talking about a dual core p4 running at 3.8gigz with 1 gig of ram for ridiculously cheap. If you want to game on it, add a videocard (the x1600pro/6800gs is a good cheap choice) since the one i put in there was integrated (thus making it a ridiculously powerful work computer for cheap)

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The AMD way
CPU: 328$ for 3800 x2 from AMD
RAM 88$ for 2x512 megs DDR 400 Samsung
Motherboard: 72$ MSI K8NGM2-L SKT.939

488$ upgrade price for a 3800X2 from AMD that o/cs to 2.6 Gighz
659$ for the whole machine (If you include the 160gig WD, case and Burner)

This setup also has an integrated videocard, so I'd add a videocard if you wanted to game. Actually, if you wanted to game, I'd probably recommend a slightly different motherboard (one without on-board video) The MSI Neo4-F is pretty good (and cheap).

Now comparing the 2, I would personally take the AMD rig (it would be faster in games and that's what I do) but you cannot beat the price/value that comes out of the Intel machine, I would recommend that one to most people.

Note:
These recommendations assume overclocking
The Intel is simpler to overclock (raise FSB to 185-190, lower ram divider, optional cpu volt)
AMD O/C requires to lower the LDT, Raise the HTT, Lower the ram divider and increase cpu volt.
Important! The Intel o/c will generate a lot of heat and therefore would benefit from an aftermarket heatsink/fan, so possibly add 40$ for a good one.

If anyone thinks they could come up with a better value setup, I'd love to hear it.

These setups were designed to be reliable and cheap, Asus boards break too much these days to be recommend (my opinion, I build computers daily) so I went with MSI because they have been extremely reliable lately, and should be able to provide the overclocks listed. (DFI/ECS always seem to have too many bugs/issues to be recommended for a stable machine)

Samsung ram is the cheapest ram that I could find that will be solid & stable. I would of went with Kingston value ram, but often the sticks of Kingston value ram use the same samsung TCCC chips anyways, but charge a bit more.
 
budgetinteldualcore.jpg
 
yeah same idea, American pricing ^^^

I bet it could be even cheaper if you didn't use Corsair ram (although Corsair is nice to have) Good case too, even though when building on a budget, I sometimes go cheaper.

I wouldn't use a BenQ DVD burner though (they break after 1 year!), nor the Asus board( approximately 5 out of 30 defective boards in the past month), but to each his own!

For the AMD system, I haven't used the DFI board yet, so it's hard to recommend, but DFI had a tradition for being buggy and RMA times are *horrible*. However! I know they make some of the best o/cing boards around, and the ATI chipset seems to be pretty solid, so it might be a good choice.
 
ive bought 4 asus boards the past 2 months , not one dead for me , an 2 805 pentium d's :) , love these cpus , mine hits 4.15 , friends hits 3.8
 
killboy said:
yeah same idea, American pricing ^^^

I bet it could be even cheaper if you didn't use Corsair ram (although Corsair is nice to have) Good case too, even though when building on a budget, I sometimes go cheaper.

I wouldn't use a BenQ DVD burner though (they break after 1 year!), nor the Asus board( approximately 5 out of 30 defective boards in the past month), but to each his own!

For the AMD system, I haven't used the DFI board yet, so it's hard to recommend, but DFI had a tradition for being buggy and RMA times are *horrible*. However! I know they make some of the best o/cing boards around, and the ATI chipset seems to be pretty solid, so it might be a good choice.
Click to expand...

Actually, I chose the Corsair because it was only $7 more than the VS version and is CAS4 as opposed to CAS5.

The BenQ has been great for me and supports Lightscribe which is great to have.

The motherboard is subjective I suppose, I've had great luck with both Asus and DFI and the P5LD2 series gets a lot of great reviews.

The DFI RS482 board is actually a smoking M-ATX board that overclocks nearly on par with its older, larger cousin the Ultra-D, which is impressive for a mini ATX 3-phase board. It's only pitfall is the SB450 southbridge, which I would be willing to trade on the stellar overclocking performance compared to all other M-ATX Skt939 boards with integrated video available.
 
Dang, nice o/c on that 4.1ghz, is that on air? And about the asus boards, yeah i know they are usually known as the leaders in motherboards but because of that I cannot tolerate them breaking as much as they do. Now for ECS, I would consider this normal since they are often the cheapest choice (although that has changed recently, ECS is really changing from a crappy motherboard company to a pretty reliable one)

However, you pay slightly more for Asus when other companies have similar features for the same price and therefore I expect them all to work. Now I'll admit that there are probably SOME models of Asus boards which are excellent and are probably very well built. In fact, I really haven't had that many returns on Asus P5 series boards.

However, i have had a tremendous amount of defective P4xxx series boards, and 3 months ago when we RMA'ed a batch of 6 boards to Asus, 2 of the 6 boards they supposedly 'fixed' were STILL defective. We had to send them back ANOTHER time, and then 1 out of 2 boards were fixed. I just have higher levels of standards when you pay premium and I won't tolerate that from a company which is regarded as 'the best'.

Anyways... that's just a rant, I still recommend some Asus boards to customers, after all, when they work, they work pretty well. It's just that I've been incredibly impressed by MSI lately, we've gone through about 300-400 MSI K8N Neo-F boards and NONE of them have been defective so far. That's either extremely lucky on our part... or good manufacturing.

Lastly, on a surprising note, ECS, which used to be the worse for defective motherboards, has *really* surprised me lately. We've had two defective motherboards out of 500+ ECS K8M800-M2 motherboards we've been using to build cheap sempron systems (more people buy cheap systems) I'd actually recommend ECS now as a budget system, something I wouldn't have done 1 year ago.

Epox... lol complete crap IMO
DFI.. great overclockers but the buggiest boards I have EVER seen... it takes about 8 months of bios updates to fix, and probably the worse RMA system I have ever seen. (one month RMA time) and I vaguely remember having to send something to France.
Abit... medium, but they like to be on the verge of going out of business every so often. (Not to mention we had a whole set of defective Abit K8V boards that would crash when we used Sata hard drives.)
Aopen... good, but who uses Aopen ?
Gigabyte.. decent, but we tend to use them less since they are often in the same price range of MSI & Asus, and people tend to prefer those two instead of Gigabyte.
Foxconn.. heh cheapppp, you get what you pay for. I think this is what most larger corporations use.
 
The biostar tforce6100 wouldn't be a bad choice for a budget s939 mb, they're $69 at the egg, and can get pretty close to 300fsb.
 
I agree that for $7, the ram upgrade is definately worth it. (it's much more than that in Canada)

And I'll check out that specific DFI board, I haven't used it which is why I didn't recommend it. (although I have used various DFI boards in the past)
 
I work in a cage, they feed me through the gratings, luckly I have a wheel to exercise on.
 
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