best single processor system on a budget

[PI]

hi, can anyone recommend the best single processor setup if one was on a budget?

 

tnx

[Greg Hess]

The word budget is synonomus with AMD.

 

Cheapest AMD system to build right now....

 

1600+ Athlon XP (Around 50 dollars)

ECS K75SA Motherboard (Around 55 dollars)

 

Probably a coolermaster HHC-001 as the heatsink.

 

Board supports either 2 SDRAM or 2 DDR dimms, Up to athlon Tbred (2200+ and beyond), has onboard ethernet and sound.

 

Its really a fantastic solution on a budget.

 

These prices from www.newegg.com

[PI]

i was thinking of choosing between 4 motherboards but different sites gave different results..tell which of these board is the best in thems of price and performance ...

 

1. ASUS V333

2. MSI KT3 ULTRA

3. GIGABYTE 7VRXP

4. ECS K75SA

5. EPOX-8K3A+

 

btw...tnx greg

[Greg Hess]

The ECS board is 1/3 the price of the asus one. Its got less and more features at the same time.

 

The decision really comes down to the exact amount of money you have to invest in the system. When I hear the word budget, I think around 500 USD or less, which requires the ECS motherboard to eliminate having to purchase new ram, an ethernet card, and a sound card. Throw a 1600+ XP on that, and you've got motherboard, sound, ethernet, and 1.4 Gigahertz of power for about 100 USD.

 

If you have extra cash, of course get the Asus A7v333. Its only board on the list with Cpu overheating protection.

 

Both the asus and the ecs board have tbred support.

[bigcahunak]

Just to add to what previous had been said...

I have one of those ECS boards - very stable, and definitely the only board you can say that you get more than what you pay for.

If you have more to spend, than any of the other boards you named is a good choice. I like MSI boards a lot - great stability, performance, design and features. Epox are establishing themselves a reputation of the most overclocking friendly boards around (if you are into it...) and Asus is ... Asus...

As a coment to what Greg said about the Asus board - never had any overheating problems anyway, so unless you put some cheap heatsink with a dead fan, this is no serious advantage, and again with the ECS and 1600+ price you can afford buying 2 CPUs to begin with...

 

If you want to spend as little as possible, go with the ECS, get all the other stuff you need (Memory, CD/DVD, case, floppy...) than get a CPU with the amount you have got left.

Good luck.

[Guest keats76]

MSI KT3 -- Revision 2 is out now and this board is super stable (granted it has a VIA chipset, but I haven't seen as much as a hiccup). Get the ARU version if you want to save on a soundcard and use the onboard 6 channel sound (not too shabby). The ARU version would also give you the option for onboard RAID if you ever wanted to set up a mirrored array in the future. Checkout the AMDMB.com forums for the lowdown on them all. The KT3 version can be had for well under $100 and I'm not 100% sure but I think it also has the Processor overheating cut off switch as well. GL . . . of course to some extent it depends on the Graphics card you want to pair with it as well. You could get a an older Geforce 2 or Gefoce 3 for cheap and then use RivaTuner to turn it into a Quadro . . . throw that in with the with a 1600+ or better, and as much DDR RAM as you can spare, and you should have a pretty nice setup

[nisus]

(well hello! I'm in Chinatown!)