Sempron/Asrock combo... good deal?

[dkellogg3]

Hey all,

There's this combo at Newegg:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ComboB...t=Combo.314706

Ill be building a basic rig for my wife for web, office and photo viewing/downloading. Is this a combo that would suit these applications well?

Thanks!

 

[Emulex]

yah i'd throw an 40GB SSD on it and should be fine. with a hard drive it will be a super dog. sempron is some slooow cpu man.

i'd also stick to intel chipset and intel core myself - nvidia has lost the chipset battle - for good reason. a crappy intel whatever express chipset and a celeron 420 IS going to work with the latest o/s 10 years from now (driver wise) - good luck finding drivers for a nvidia or other chipset.

my poweredge SC420 $199 special from ??? years ago runs windows 2008 server just fine- without assistance - my beater AMD sempron box which takes 30 reboots randomly to POST - can't find drivers for the life of me. both are 64bit. hell the sempron may be even faster.

 

[dkellogg3]

So I'm a little confused... you say "yeah" and. Then bring up points against the NVIDIA chipset. Sounds like I should wait for another deal - maybe an AND chipset, on an Intel combo.

 

[Absolution75]

Do you live by a fry's? There have been much better deals than that.

I picked up an E5200 + Intel board for $99 a year ago. You will see Athlan x4's with mobo's for $100-$150.

http://slickdeals.net/forums/showthread.php?t=1800959

ECS is also garbage, stay away. They don't release updated BIOS's (or even working BIOS's) after they've released a product. I've had nothing but problems with 3/3 of the motherboards I own from them.

 

[dkellogg3]

No Frys love for me, but a Microcenter is opening up in Yonkers, NY soon, which will be close enough for me to get to.

It's funny I've heard bad things about Asrock boards, but most of the reviews on Newegg for this particular board are very positive.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Ill be building a basic rig for my wife for web, office and photo viewing/downloading. Is this a combo that would suit these applications well?
Thanks!

I think so. It's a dual-core 2.0Ghz at least, which isn't bad. The only disadvantage that I can see with the "Sempron", is that it only has 2x256KB L2 cache, and doesn't support virtualization. Unless you wanted to run Win7 Pro's XP Mode emulation, then that doesn't affect you. And with the IMC on the AMD64/Sempron chips, the smaller L2 cache doesn't matter as much. So I would go ahead and get it, for the price.

If you can afford more, though, I would go with an E5200 or E3300 and a Gigabyte G31 board, and overclock to 3.6-3.8Ghz.

But the bang for buck is strong with AMD.

 

[Absolution75]

No Frys love for me, but a Microcenter is opening up in Yonkers, NY soon, which will be close enough for me to get to.

It's funny I've heard bad things about Asrock boards, but most of the reviews on Newegg for this particular board are very positive.

Strange, I've only ever seen good things about Asrock. They are basically ASUS on a budget.


Next budget system I'm going to build will either be Asrock, or Biostar (or maybe MSI/Gigabyte as they tend to have pretty solid budget boards too, but the first two tend to be a tad cheaper).