Although it leaves a sour taste in my mouth the Core i5 is probably the
best choice if you can afford it (I assume you can). It is much cheaper
than the i7 and almost as fast which is what you need for scientific
apps and video manipulation. Personally, I wouldn't buy anything Intel
but that's to keep the two party system intact.
Anthony Q. Martin wrote:
swzaske wrote:
What do you want it to do?
Some of everything. I don't want it to be sucky slow at
anything....I'm not a gamer though I have tried to be...just can't
find the time for it. However, I run MATLAB a lot and need it to not
be super slow (and certainly not be in the lower rung in performance
using the bench command). I do some video manipulation but not
serious amounts. I want to create some movies too. And the rest is
typical stuff that everyone does (bluray, music, word, powerpoint, etc.).
I don't do loud systems, either. My PCs have to be quiet, so no
screaming vid cards in my boxes.
I guess I want it to be rock solid, too, as I have little time for
hacking and tweaking anymore. Life sucks. :)
I recently bought an Nvidia 8100 chipset mobo from Asrock, Athlon II
X2 240 and Nvidia 9600 GSO for a dirt cheap price and some RAM from
Ebay. Super inexpensive upgrade to the socket 939 unit it replaced
and a fast machine for a dual core with the 3.36 GHz overclock it's
running at.
Had some problems with the board not POST'ing reliably until
realizing that my Corsair RAM rated at 1.8v would not run reliably at
that setting (2 separate sets of Corsair). The EPP SPD was defaulting
at 1.8 during the initial boot after being built and I had to reset
the CMOS to get it started up which caused me to believe the board
was defective. A simple BIOS error on the part of Asrock engineers
but simple to fix now that I know the cause. I've had 3 of these
boards now which makes me feel like an idiot but the box was dirt
cheap to build and quite competent, stable and energy efficient. Just
set the RAM at1.9v and everything is peachy.
Anthony Q. Martin wrote:
What's the best "bang for buck" base system right now? Not looking
for top of the line, just reasonable power per $$.
