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Motherboard upgrade


clonesauce

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Hi all.

I'm upgrading to a new system with these specs:

AMD Phenom II X4 955

HD5770

Corsair TWIN2X2048-6400 (From my old system), DDR2

I'm confused as to which mobo should I pick, and how much power should I just need for my PSU.

Any advices?

Thanks.

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AMD Phenom II X4 955

Just curious why you picked that. Yes, the L3 cache gives a few percent boost in some applications (~10% for games), but the Athlon II X4 635 is nearly as fast and a lot cheaper.

Mobo wise, I'd much rather move to something that uses DDR3 than picking an old board based on DDR2. Something like the GIGABYTE GA-870A-UD3 perhaps. DDR3, 2x USB3 + 8x USB2,

6x SATA 6 Gbps (SATA "3"), 2x PCI-e x16 2.0 slots, 2x eSATA, 7.1 HD audio with spdif and toslink, firewire, etc, on a high quality board (solid polymer caps, 2oz PCB, good mosftets, etc) -- all for about $100

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should I pick the i5 instead?

Well, the i5 is faster, but it's also more expensive. The choice is yours.

The Core i5 750 is about 25% faster (not saying you'll actually see games or apps run that much faster) than the Athlon II X4 635 but it costs a bit over double, and a similar board for a i5 will cost around $50 extra too.

To put things in perspective, the motherboard I listed and the Athlon II X4 635 is about $200 total. Something similar with a i5 750 (about 25% faster) would be more like $350 (75% more $ overall). It's really fast if you really need it, but it's not an amazing value.

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I found a store here in HK that sells the X6 1055 forjust around 150-200 HK$ more than the 955BE

Yeah, the 955BE isn't priced so nicely, that's why the 6 core isn't much more expensive.

Will the power be worth the upgrade? I do renderings and ACAD stuff

If you think you can make use of 6 cores, by all means. Rendering, well, I'm not into that stuff myself, I'm not sure what apps you're using for that, nor the complexity of your scenes so I really can't say anything. As for autocad (people still use that?) I just don't see it benefiting from it, unless things changed drastically since the last time I've used it. Honestly, keeping 6 cores busy is pretty darn hard, short of certain specific jobs like encoding video (and even then, only with modern codecs & proper settings)

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I do renderings and ACAD stuff.

That depends on what you render; if they are clips of a few minutes at 1080p I would go for the 6 cored CPU, but if it's just a still image render even a quad core would be overkill.

AMD has the best price/performance ratio, like coffeefiend said ;).

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I've decided: the 1055. Thanks guys, I guess the "future-proofing" factor did it for me, usage, and yes the price/performance ratio too.

I'm looking for a motherboard that supports both DDR2/DDR3, if there is one, since I cannot buy new RAM sticks atm, I'll just buy the DDR3 sticks sometime later.

Do you guys have any suggestions?

Thanks a bunch again.

Edited by clonesauce
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I'm looking for a motherboard that supports both DDR2/DDR3, if there is one, since I cannot buy new RAM sticks atm, I'll just buy the DDR3 sticks sometime later.

Do you guys have any suggestions?

Sell those DDR2 and go with DDR3, that's what the 6 cored CPU is made for. I've not seen any motherboards around that would do DDR2 or DDR3 on the same board, but ASRock is one of few that would make such a thing if it exists. The 785G chipset was released on DDR2 and DDR3 boards. But again, get a DDR3 mobo with the RAM and sell what you have now "as is", so basically your whole system as it is, put what you wanted to spend with that, and buy something new with that cash.

EDIT: Not even ASRock was that crazy :P.

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I have seen a few mobo's with two DDR2 slots and two DDR3 slots. Made by Gigabyte if I remember correctly. Can't remember the model but should be too hard to find. Also can't remember if they were AMD or Intel...

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