Looking to upgrade my pc soon... Your Thoughts?

[SirWinner]

My home pc died on February 12, 2006... DOH!

Used a loaner pc... underpowered for games... but at least it worked.

Using my Dad's Old pc which he just replaced with a brand new one. (HP)
- Just formatted a 250 GB hard drive with Windows XP on July 1, 2006 weekend and got it into service.

Just want your opinions on what you think I should look at for my next pc... Don't have tons of money to spend on all the latest gadgets to go with it.

Just need one that will work well for the next 2 to 3 years for gaming for a budget of under $1,000 American Dollars.

Go for an off the shelf model or build my own?

Sort of leaning towards an off the shelf model by say HP or the like.

[fliptw]

build your own.

how else would you get a dual core setup?

keeping the HD and cd drives saves a bit of money

hows this for ya:

AMD64 x2 3800 297
1 gig PC4000 100
descent motherboard 100-120 dollars

so we are now at 500 dollars, you can easily blow the rest on a high-end video card.

but we aint, so we go with a mid-range card in the 200 dollar range, like a 7600 GT for 170.

[Mobius]

Build your own, and base it on the AMD X2 dual core cpu range. 3800+ is a sweet price. Couple that with a passive CPU cooler like the Thermaltake Sonic Tower, and 2GB of fast DDR in 2 sticks. I think the nVidia 7600 is the sweet spot for price/performance in graphics right now.

My recent builds have all used passive CPU and GPU cooling, and I am using Lian-Li cases with 2 fans: both 120mm and very quiet Coolermaster \"RealPower\" PSUs also with speed controlled 120mm fans.

The results are impressively quiet, which to me is becoming more and more important.

[Mobius]

Flip - do great minds think alike?

Or, in our case is it fools minds never differing?

SNAP on the post times!

[SirWinner]

Thanks for that feedback, I'll check it out when it is time to upgrade.

[XThermonucleusX]

I'd get a HP desktop computer, or a Sony or Toshiba laptop.

I've used HP a lot over the years and it's been pretty good to me.

Make sure to do opinion poll searching to find out what the best model is, of course.

[Grendel]

Forget about AMD -- wait until the 27th and go after a Core 2 Duo E6300 CPU. A lot better oomp for your bux

click

First of all I would like to point out that new Intel processors on Core microarchitecture boast very impressive performance. The improvements Intel introduced in them have certainly helped create today’s most efficient x86 processor design. And the results of our Core 2 Duo E6300 tests prove it. Although the newcomer works at lower nominal clock speed than AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+, it demonstrates absolute advantage in most applications. Therefore, if AMD doesn’t drop the prices of its dual-core processors even lower (which is unlikely so far), we will have to state that Intel offers a way better price-to-performance ration for the mainstream and high-end segment.

And Overclocking wouldn’t help here. As we have just seen in this article, the youngest Core 2 Duo models boast very good overclocking potential. In fact, it is much better than that of other CPUs from the same price range. During our test session we managed to overclock Intel Core 2 Duo by more than 50% without touching its Vcore and using an air cooler. However, we didn’t even come close to revealing its entire overclocking potential, because of the hardware-related issues of the platform we used.

Edit: the sweet spot for video card price/performance ratio is the 7900GT BTW.

[Immortal Lobster]

aye, conroe is a beast, but as to performance per buck, AMDs latest price drop figures actually slam AMD right back into contention for still being better at that lol

Conroe is looking like a mighty fine chip indeed, =)