Thanks for the advice!!!

Is the Artic Silver thing necessary? with my current AMD the heat sink just sits on the CPU? Is the stock heatsink good enough, or should i buy a better one?

Are Opteron server CPU's even faster then?

cheers!!

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Barry, if you want cheap RAM, go to Mplex, out the back of Castle Court in Smithfield market, they do 1Gb of Kingston RAM for £55.
Mind you, the processor is more important than the RAM.

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quote:

Originally posted by RickyM Barry, if you want cheap RAM, go to Mplex, out the back of Castle Court in Smithfield market, they do 1Gb of Kingston RAM for £55. Mind you, the processor is more important than the RAM.

my processor is a 3.0 ghz at the minute. the ram is only 256 as my 512 burned out on me.

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quote:

I have a Core2Duo E6600, 2gig DDR2 and an M-Audio Delta 44 audio interface

Got the same thing, totally in love with it. If the AMD prices are the same as they were when the core2s came out, then you can still get more speed for the same money by buying an intel system. Just check the cubase and protools forums, there are test proving it all over that site.

But if AMD have dropped their prices even more since then, maybe that isn't true any more, after I got my system running I stopped keeping up with the cpu prices.

I would suggest getting a new heatsink only because the stock ones tend to make more noise than the ones you use the arctic silver on.

If your looking in belfast then as above, mplex is your best option. I have bought all my stuff in the last while from overclockers.co.uk

Good guys to deal with and some serious components, downside is delivery charges that your face, the same with any mainland company.

Mplex i find slightly limited when it comes to the high end of the market and they are either amd biased or cant get a deal to sell intel stuff.

Try to avoid cheap generic ram, unreliable as fcuk.

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quote:

Originally posted by Zombie0915 If the AMD prices are the same as they were when the core2s came out, then you can still get more speed for the same money by buying an intel system.

You're joking, right? The Intels outperform the AMDs, yes, by about 10-15% (and not on every test), and they're twice the price.

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quote:

Originally posted by messytechie Thanks for the advice!!! Is the Artic Silver thing necessary? with my current AMD the heat sink just sits on the CPU? Is the stock heatsink good enough, or should i buy a better one? Are Opteron server CPU's even faster then? cheers!!

Arctic Silver is just a tube of thermal compound. Its quite cheap and you will get about 6 or 7 uses out of it easily.

You should always use some kind of thermal compound between the heat sink and the heat spreader of the CPU because it helps to propagate heat transfer. I recommend Arctic Silver because its probably the best thermal compound you can buy. If it sounds a little too complex you can simply buy thermal pads which are also cheap and you simply stick one on the CPU heatspreader and stick the heatsink on top.

However, because these pads are sticky if you ever wish to change your CPU in future, it will be tough to remove the residue. Stock heatsink is usually enough but first check your CPU temperature by downloading CoreTemp (its freeware) and Prime95 (also free).

Switch on your PC and run CoreTemp and then Prime95. Select torture test. This will make your CPU load shoot up to 100% and you probably wont be able to do much else. Leave it on for about 20 minutes and check your CPU temperature. It should really be under 60 degrees celcius. The lower the better. If you are already well under 60 degrees celcius with your CPU being literally tortured, then your stock cooling is just fine. The thermal paste will help to lower the CPU temp by a couple of degrees provided it is applied properly (follow Arctic Silvers instructions at ArcticSilver.com)

Opteron CPUs arent necessarily faster. It depends on what you do. Opeterons generally overclock well and they have loads of cache on the CPU. But lower clock speeds.

X2s these days have low cache on the CPU and much higher clock speeds. AMD built their memory controller onto the CPU itself (eliminating the need to route instructions to a memory controller on the motherboard) and the instruction pipeline is quite short. Because of that, AMD chips are generally quite good at working with very little cache RAM.

As a rule of thumb with AMD chips of this generation for home use:

1) Clock speed is more important than cache. If you find an X2 3800 with 1mb of cache and a 4200 with 512kb of cache and they cost the same price, go for the 4200.

2) Clock speed is not the same between chip families. an X2 3800 is actually 2 cores running at around 2.0ghz (i.e. its about the same as 2 single core A64 3200+). Therefore, X2 clock speeds only mean something in relation to other X2 chips. It doesn't make any sense if you compare an X2 to a single core A64 because the numbers won't work out right.

Opterons however usually tend to overclock to insane degrees. I say usually because this type of thing isn't guaranteed and your mileage may vary. If you don't know what you are doing, dont bother with overclocking because if you overvolt the chip too much it will die. Similarly if you don't monitor temperatures whilst overclocking you may end up with a chip running at like 80 degrees celcius and that will shorten its operational life span a hell load. It might even die from the heat.

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About Core2 (aka Conroe). If you can get an E6600 right now, then that thing destroys anything AMD has in terms of price/performance.

Dont bother with the E6700 and E6800. They are vastly more expensive than anything by AMD and the E6600 and they have less overclocking headroom even if they are fast as hell.

The E6600 is the Conroe to buy at its price point. The E6400 and E6300 are ok. They are amazing if you can overclock and you get a good chip because they clock like crazy too, provided you get the right motherboard.

Conroe's use less power than equivilant AMDs (the non Energy Efficient CPUs). They are cheaper than AMD Energy Efficient CPUs. They run cooler and tend to overclock higher.

If you are buying a new PC and you can wait till christmas, get a Conroe system.

If you already have an AMD system, stick with AMD - its cheaper and less hassle to change over to an intel system and the speed boost in my opinion isn't really worth the money.

wow, this is a very cool thread.

the carillon systems look pretty awesome, its cool to see a pc that was build for producing (not for gaming) in the first instace.

gives me much inspiration because im also planing to buy a new pc during the next weeks.

this is the system i arranged for myself.

cpu: intel core 2 duo e 6600
mainboard: msi p965 neo-f
sound: emu 1212m pci
ram: kingston hyperx dimm 2 gb kit (ddr2 - 750)
hd: western digital caviar se (200 gb)
plextor px-750 a dvd burner.

im not sure about the graficcard yet but together with tower, cooling and power supply the acutall price will be something around 1200 euros.

get your self a mac, =)

www.apple.com

nah dont go for mac unless your going to use logic. alot of the vst plug ins dont run on it. i was going to get a mac but wouldnt suit me.

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Just won my new chip on ebay!!

AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 4400+ 2.2GHz L2 1MB SKT 939

£155!!! BONANZA!!!

Retails at £315 on Amazon. Sweet.

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