Posted: 10/6/2013 4:13:31 AM EDT
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Lets hear it.
I am needing to start a new build and leaning to the AMD. My laptop has the AMD A8 and has been pretty good for what I do. Plus the price savings is pretty big. No gaming just VM stuff and ham stuff so lots of applications at once. |
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AMD 8-core FX processorr for AM3+ motherboards (I like Asus) is around $200
According to benchmark result sites, some of the Intel I7's and of course the Xeons beat it, but you have to get into the upper $300 range to go the next step up. |
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Quoted:
Lets hear it. I am needing to start a new build and leaning to the AMD. My laptop has the AMD A8 and has been pretty good for what I do. Plus the price savings is pretty big. No gaming just VM stuff and ham stuff so lots of applications at once. Microcenter wipes out any price advantage AMD has over intel. |
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Probably not directly relevant to your interests, but I fell into a 2010 circa (that's what the asset tag reveals) Dell t5400 workstation for about $50 w/ 2x Xeon 4 core processors and 8GB of memory. I threw some 1TB drives in it under RAID, added Windows 8 (which I hate, but hey I use classic shell), and a sub-$100 nVidia GFX card. This thing screams like a bat out of hell. Its outrageously fast -- and its just running the 2.6ghz prior "core" generation of Xeons. Stupidly wicked fast though. And its the standard size of the typical mini tower.
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Quoted: Probably not directly relevant to your interests, but I fell into a 2010 circa (that's what the asset tag reveals) Dell t5400 workstation for about $50 w/ 2x Xeon 4 core processors and 8GB of memory. I threw some 1TB drives in it under RAID, added Windows 8 (which I hate, but hey I use classic shell), and a sub-$100 nVidia GFX card. This thing screams like a bat out of hell. Its outrageously fast -- and its just running the 2.6ghz prior "core" generation of Xeons. Stupidly wicked fast though. And its the standard size of the typical mini tower. That's an insane deal for $50. |
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Quoted: AMD 8-core FX processorr for AM3+ motherboards (I like Asus) is around $200 According to benchmark result sites, some of the Intel I7's and of course the Xeons beat it, but you have to get into the upper $300 range to go the next step up. i5 4670 spanks the FX-8350 FX and costs about the same. |
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Thanks everyone for the advice. That Dell t5400 sounds like a heck of a deal! On ebay they are going for about $300
This will be my first build. I am currently using a Pentium D with 2gb for my radio stuff. It works fine but now and then I ask a little bit to much from it. Down the road I need to be able to run windows 7 in a vm pretty efficiently on the side so I was under the impression more cores the better. School me. |
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Thanks everyone for the advice. That Dell t5400 sounds like a heck of a deal! On ebay they are going for about $300 This will be my first build. I am currently using a Pentium D with 2gb for my radio stuff. It works fine but now and then I ask a little bit to much from it. Down the road I need to be able to run windows 7 in a vm pretty efficiently on the side so I was under the impression more cores the better. School me. That may be with better processors, hard drive(s) and cd/dvd rom drives, mouse, keyboard & OS. Mine was nekked 'cept for the processors, heat sinks, and memory. Didn't even have the SATA cables. Sticker on the case was for Vista 32 bit. I paid $100 for Windows 8, $180 for 3x 1TB WD blue drives, dropped in a DVDR I had sitting around, and probably will add a hot swap bay for the final unused ATA header on the mobo. (If its supported -- I have the three TB drives set up using the motherboard's built in RAID controller as a RAID 5 array). If you can find one stripped as mine was, I imagine you'd get closer to $100 or $150 maybe. Oh, and here's the skinny on the Xeon processors: The only higher speed option I can see are the 3.0ghz non "x" version. That has the same total heat dissipation as the stock processors. The 3.2 and 3.4 ghz versions have WAY too much heat for the stock heat sinks, and you can't go bigger on the heat sink because of where the hard disks live. I'm very happy with it though. The bonus for me was the PS2 keyboard port on the back, so I can use one of my IBM big heavy "noisy" antique keyboards! ETA: Forgot to mention this uses FULLY buffered 667 clock memory ... its not slot compatible with pretty much anything else and costs an extra cycle or two of latency compared to unbuffered stuff. Main point is that you're better off buying one that comes with the amount of memory you need rather than thinking you can use existing memory in your inventory -- you can't. |
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Quoted: Oh, and here's the skinny on the Xeon processors: The only higher speed option I can see are the 3.0ghz non "x" version. That has the same total heat dissipation as the stock processors. The 3.2 and 3.4 ghz versions have WAY too much heat for the stock heat sinks, and you can't go bigger on the heat sink because of where the hard disks live. I'd love to find a deal like you got but with the 3.4 GHz CPUs, that would make a fun watercooling project  |
| I've always been an AMD guy. My main comp (desktop) has an old AMD X2 oc'ed from a 2.6 to a 3.0. Been running great since Jan 2007, no hiccups. It will do anything I need it to do. While 8 core (and even 6) are all the fad, there is not many programs out there on the market that actually utilize that much power. Besides, your processor only runs as fast as your RAM can go. I know it nanoseconds, but still, most of the time our processors are sitting around waiting on the RAM. |
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That may be with better processors, hard drive(s) and cd/dvd rom drives, mouse, keyboard & OS. Mine was nekked 'cept for the processors, heat sinks, and memory. Didn't even have the SATA cables. Sticker on the case was for Vista 32 bit. I paid $100 for Windows 8, $180 for 3x 1TB WD blue drives, dropped in a DVDR I had sitting around, and probably will add a hot swap bay for the final unused ATA header on the mobo. (If its supported -- I have the three TB drives set up using the motherboard's built in RAID controller as a RAID 5 array). If you can find one stripped as mine was, I imagine you'd get closer to $100 or $150 maybe. Oh, and here's the skinny on the Xeon processors: The only higher speed option I can see are the 3.0ghz non "x" version. That has the same total heat dissipation as the stock processors. The 3.2 and 3.4 ghz versions have WAY too much heat for the stock heat sinks, and you can't go bigger on the heat sink because of where the hard disks live. I'm very happy with it though. The bonus for me was the PS2 keyboard port on the back, so I can use one of my IBM big heavy "noisy" antique keyboards! ETA: Forgot to mention this uses FULLY buffered 667 clock memory ... its not slot compatible with pretty much anything else and costs an extra cycle or two of latency compared to unbuffered stuff. Main point is that you're better off buying one that comes with the amount of memory you need rather than thinking you can use existing memory in your inventory -- you can't. Quoted:
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Thanks everyone for the advice. That Dell t5400 sounds like a heck of a deal! On ebay they are going for about $300 This will be my first build. I am currently using a Pentium D with 2gb for my radio stuff. It works fine but now and then I ask a little bit to much from it. Down the road I need to be able to run windows 7 in a vm pretty efficiently on the side so I was under the impression more cores the better. School me. That may be with better processors, hard drive(s) and cd/dvd rom drives, mouse, keyboard & OS. Mine was nekked 'cept for the processors, heat sinks, and memory. Didn't even have the SATA cables. Sticker on the case was for Vista 32 bit. I paid $100 for Windows 8, $180 for 3x 1TB WD blue drives, dropped in a DVDR I had sitting around, and probably will add a hot swap bay for the final unused ATA header on the mobo. (If its supported -- I have the three TB drives set up using the motherboard's built in RAID controller as a RAID 5 array). If you can find one stripped as mine was, I imagine you'd get closer to $100 or $150 maybe. Oh, and here's the skinny on the Xeon processors: The only higher speed option I can see are the 3.0ghz non "x" version. That has the same total heat dissipation as the stock processors. The 3.2 and 3.4 ghz versions have WAY too much heat for the stock heat sinks, and you can't go bigger on the heat sink because of where the hard disks live. I'm very happy with it though. The bonus for me was the PS2 keyboard port on the back, so I can use one of my IBM big heavy "noisy" antique keyboards! ETA: Forgot to mention this uses FULLY buffered 667 clock memory ... its not slot compatible with pretty much anything else and costs an extra cycle or two of latency compared to unbuffered stuff. Main point is that you're better off buying one that comes with the amount of memory you need rather than thinking you can use existing memory in your inventory -- you can't. I found a 690 with 2Gb and dual 3.2 xeons for $100 local. What's your opinion? |
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I found a 690 with 2Gb and dual 3.2 xeons for $100 local. What's your opinion? Quoted:
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Thanks everyone for the advice. That Dell t5400 sounds like a heck of a deal! On ebay they are going for about $300 This will be my first build. I am currently using a Pentium D with 2gb for my radio stuff. It works fine but now and then I ask a little bit to much from it. Down the road I need to be able to run windows 7 in a vm pretty efficiently on the side so I was under the impression more cores the better. School me. That may be with better processors, hard drive(s) and cd/dvd rom drives, mouse, keyboard & OS. Mine was nekked 'cept for the processors, heat sinks, and memory. Didn't even have the SATA cables. Sticker on the case was for Vista 32 bit. I paid $100 for Windows 8, $180 for 3x 1TB WD blue drives, dropped in a DVDR I had sitting around, and probably will add a hot swap bay for the final unused ATA header on the mobo. (If its supported -- I have the three TB drives set up using the motherboard's built in RAID controller as a RAID 5 array). If you can find one stripped as mine was, I imagine you'd get closer to $100 or $150 maybe. Oh, and here's the skinny on the Xeon processors: The only higher speed option I can see are the 3.0ghz non "x" version. That has the same total heat dissipation as the stock processors. The 3.2 and 3.4 ghz versions have WAY too much heat for the stock heat sinks, and you can't go bigger on the heat sink because of where the hard disks live. I'm very happy with it though. The bonus for me was the PS2 keyboard port on the back, so I can use one of my IBM big heavy "noisy" antique keyboards! ETA: Forgot to mention this uses FULLY buffered 667 clock memory ... its not slot compatible with pretty much anything else and costs an extra cycle or two of latency compared to unbuffered stuff. Main point is that you're better off buying one that comes with the amount of memory you need rather than thinking you can use existing memory in your inventory -- you can't. I found a 690 with 2Gb and dual 3.2 xeons for $100 local. What's your opinion? It will be wider and taller. TONS more room for hard drives in that case compared to the model I purchased. 
I want to say that model has built in serial scsi as well as serial ata, but I'd have to go look it up. That model is one generation back, so it will have a slightly slower bus speed. Which you'll make up for with the much faster processors than I've got. You'll need more memory, and remember: That is the fully buffered stuff -- although I see tons of it on eBay for pretty affordable. Hell, some drives and a video card and you're in business. My only wish with my box is for a larger case, so you're sort of set there. |
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AMD is way behind the curve and "competes", if you can call it that, only by ramping up the wattage. I'd rather my computer not be a space heater at its limit.
You need an i7 for your VM needs. It will run circles around any AMD. You are right that it comes at a premium, but I think the premium is justified. If you can wait till black friday, you will likely get a steal on an i7 combo. |