I'm planning on building a new system very soon (actually have been reading this site and many others daily for the past month, and now am REALLY itching to get this thing going) and am wondering about the CPU.
I want the 3500+ Winchester (90nm). The rock-bottom price that I can find is $251 at Monarch for the OEM version. I realize that I need to buy a separate heatsink/fan for use with this. That's fine, as the test results I have read on various sites show that stock heatsinks get outperformed by say the Thermalright that I'd like.
As for a retail version of the 3500+, Monarch has it, but for a whopping $329. FuturePowerPC has it for $289, that is, if they get it in next Monday. ZZF is currently out of stock ($299 list price).
I'm just wondering if there is any reason to be worried about buying the OEM version from Monarch. I could even pay them $15 for a 3 year warranty, which doesn't sound too bad (still end up at only $266 for the thing). Of course yes then I still have to buy the nice heatsink, but I was planning on doing that if I got the retail one anyway.
This will be placed on either the Asus or Gigabyte SLI board, btw... any thoughts?
Thanks much.
I want the 3500+ Winchester (90nm). The rock-bottom price that I can find is $251 at Monarch for the OEM version. I realize that I need to buy a separate heatsink/fan for use with this. That's fine, as the test results I have read on various sites show that stock heatsinks get outperformed by say the Thermalright that I'd like.
As for a retail version of the 3500+, Monarch has it, but for a whopping $329. FuturePowerPC has it for $289, that is, if they get it in next Monday. ZZF is currently out of stock ($299 list price).
I'm just wondering if there is any reason to be worried about buying the OEM version from Monarch. I could even pay them $15 for a 3 year warranty, which doesn't sound too bad (still end up at only $266 for the thing). Of course yes then I still have to buy the nice heatsink, but I was planning on doing that if I got the retail one anyway.
This will be placed on either the Asus or Gigabyte SLI board, btw... any thoughts?
Thanks much.