New system

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RainDownMyBlues

New Member
This is kind of broad, but i couldn't find another general enough sub-forum to post this.... but:

Alright, well I'm considering useing my tax refund, and check bonus to build a new system.

I've always used Intel, but as of now I'm NOT going to pay for an I series. And I'd like to try AMD, as I'm kind of disapointed in Intel, and I hear a lot of good things for AMD.

Anyway, i'm undecided on a specific motherboard at the moment, but as of now I'm probably looking at the quad core phenom AMD processors. I'm curious if there is a point of jumping to a quad instead of a dualcore. I've not built a computer since the single core days, and don't know how the multiple cores and speed(aka 2.2 vs. 3.0) relate.

Also, I might have randomly heard somewhere last night that ATI video cards are made or more supported by AMD and the same for Intel and Nvidia(but don't quote me on that, i was drunk) Is this true? And if so is it smarter to match the two?

As of now I think those are my only questions... I know most of everything else. Oh wait! Are the Terabyte drives stable now? Or are they still very unreliable and iffy? Thanks guys!
 
You can build a very good AMD Quad system for pretty cheap, relative to an Intel system. It may not beat Intel in benchmarks, but for real world pc use,
they're perfect.

The Dual and Quad core cpu's are built for programs that utilize more than
one cpu core at a time, thus spreading out the workload over 2 or 4 cores
rather than stressing just one to 100%. The multicore cpu's work great for
video editing and multitasking.

ATI must be a division of AMD or such as that. Both products are at the same
website. Nvidia and Intel are two separate entities. I don't know about matching ATI with AMD or vice versa, but I know you can mix and match any
video card with any board really. There may be studies that prove otherwise,
but I've seen lots of ATI cards in Intel machines.

Lots of people are using Terabyte HDD's nowadays. Very popular so there must not be much if any issue with stability. IMO of course.
 
What are you doing with your computer?
If gaming then a faster dual core tends to be better than a slower quad in current games. Quad will eventually have uses in gaming but as of now duallys rule the roost in price/performance in games.
If you are doing any video editing/rendering/etc... anything CPU intensive that is highly multithreaded then quad is definitely the choice.

While Intel and nVidia have worked together for various purposes ,they are separate companies. As of 2006, AMD bought ATi so those two are tied together now.

Terabyte drives are fine, I have one and it has been working great. HDD techology has much improved in the last couple of years and a 1TB HDD is no less reliable than a 500GB HDD.
 
I game small time, not all that muich. The system is primarily used for school work, and I record a fair bit of multi-track music. sometimes I get a bog when recording too many tracks, or filters.

I'd like the fix that, but I also did buy COD WAW and my video card won't run run it like it should. But my computer is getting older now, so in general it's probably time to rebuild.
 
the multi-track recording, since it does a lot of buffering would benefit from a nice sound card and a lot of RAM along with a quad core, not even a fast quad core is needed, just something that could handle multiple threads.
 
I have a pretty good sound INPUT card... so i can use XLR cables and the like.

What would be the performance comparison in a 3.0 Ghz quad core, and a 3.0 ghz dual core? In say a game.
 
RainDownMyBlues said:
I have a pretty good sound INPUT card... so i can use XLR cables and the like.

What would be the performance comparison in a 3.0 Ghz quad core, and a 3.0 ghz dual core? In say a game.
Click to expand...

The only way you would see a performance increase with the Quad (if both are at the same speed) is if the game is heavily multithreaded. Most games have a few threads but not enough that a dual core CPU can't handle them so if both were the same speed ( and had the same amount of cache and other specs) then you would only see a negligible difference.
 
Alrighty then, thanks. That makes me probably think I'll stick with a dual core. I have a Pentium D 3.0, but being one of the first dual cores, I hear they aren't up to the standards of current dual cores. So what's the verdict there? Why are the Pentium D's not up to the standards of Core Duos or AMD's line?

Also my buddy runs all his programs on one harddrive, and documents and files and stuff on another one. I don't know if the drives are different speeds, but is there any advantage to that. And also, is there an advantage on having two 500 gigs as opposed to one terabyte drive? I could see how having to go through that much data could slow it down a bit I suppose.
 
Well for one, Pentiums are no longer even made so no matter what, they aren't going to be up to standards. The Pentium line was binned because it just ran hot even at modest speeds. Intel noticed that their Pentium M ran very well on laptops without heating up and so decided to make a beefy desktop version of their Pentium M and thus the Core Duo line was born, it is more efficient, runs faster with less heat, it now supports newer/faster memory standards (DDR2 and DDR3) and they have more cache so they are better than P4Ds in every way.

As for your hard drive question. It is a good idea to run your OS on a separate drive (not to be confused with partition, i'm talking about a completely different physical drive). The theory behind it is the same principal as dual core CPUs, you have things happening simultaneous which increases performance. Since you record music, I would recommend you to use a drive as your recording drive that is different from your OS drive, it will minimize any potential bottlenecks since realtime recording can be pretty demanding on a drive.
 
If you want the biggest HDD out there, then I suggest Western Digitals new 2TB Cavalier (i probably SO spelled that wrong) HDD :P
 
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