Budget Build Review

Saurian

Member
Ok, so I'm preparing for a budget build. I will be retaining my current case, hard disks, optical drives, etc. Basically a gut-job. Current setup:

P4 3.2Ghz
MSI Via-chipset
2x512 Mismatched DDR
FX5900XT 128MB

It's done its duty, and its time to send the parts packing. Might sell them to my soon-to-be room mate, give them to dad, dunno. Anyways, here's what I'm wanting to swap in place.

Athlon X2 3600+ Brisbane - 65 Shipped
Abit K9NS nF550 AM2 - 86 Shipped
A-Data 2GB Kit 667Mhz 1.8v C5 - 112 Shipped
Arctic Cooling Freezer 64 - 35 Shipped
EVGA 7600GT 256M Dual-DVI - 116 Shipped (-20 for MIR)

Total Price - ~414 Dollars

Budget build. Plan on doing a moderate overclock on the Brisbane from 1.9Ghz to 2.5 or so Ghz. The RAM and motherboard should support this with relative ease. I am confident that that ram should be able to run 800Mhz+ with a voltage bump. The vid card is a capable card that can cover until ATI's mainstream DX10 offerings are brought out. The only other card I was considering was the ATI x1650 XT, but its more for not much more.

Anyways, your opinions on this? I figure, I can keep my eyes peeled for somebody offloading their X2's as the C2D's sweep more over to Intel, or as K8L/K10/K-never-seems-to-get-closer comes out. Thanks!
 

Saurian

Member
I guess I forgot to mention - I'm not interested in laying out for a C2D at this point. Haha yes, I would love to have a C2D, but for a decent C2D Board, you're looking at ~130+ that is comparable to this AM2 board. Then, for the comparable C2D - E4300 is ~164 and E6300 is ~185. Just do some math - 130-80 means I'm saving at a minimum 50 dollars on the otherboard, and 100-120 dollars on the CPU. Not to mention that the C2D would require better ram (another 15 to 20 dollars I'd say), I'd be laying out a total 120-150 dollars more.

For the best of budget builds, AM2 and AMD's price drops cannot be beaten yet. It would be great to bump it up and go with the above, but I can't justify it. Thanks for taking the time to mention that.
 
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