Forced upgrade, what to do ?

Rickster said:
Why do you think a product is more expensive than its competitor, because there is a reason its more expensive.
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um no. Companies price at what the market will bear. So usually better marketing, means more loyalty, means you can price higher. Apple being a perfect example.

You don't actually need to be better to price higher. You just need to get everyone to think you're better.
 
The only problem with going AMD at the moment is stock levels. I am not aware of any suppliers that still have Phenom or other AM3 parts in stock.
 
Rouxenator said:
The only problem with going AMD at the moment is stock levels. I am not aware of any suppliers that still have Phenom or other AM3 parts in stock.
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Rebeltech still has Phenom 965's in stock and Prophecy has the Athlon X3 in limited quantities. They are still out there id you know where to look, but at this stage its still better to go with Intel for the better performance and efficiency.
 
Good thing about them being in short supply is that you easily sell them 2nd hand for a good price:)
Sold mine, went green and got me an AMD E350 ITX setup for R750, best up/down grade I did in a long time and if you have decent case like the CoolerMaster Elite 120 then you can add a monster of a GFX card too.
 
Well I have the SSD already so it makes sense that if I upgrade now to get a board that is SATA 3. A part of me is just starting to think I should just get an i5. One more try at hardware diagnostics and I think I will just bite the bullet.
 
+1 to ponder. Reports about memory changes and beeps indicate memory problems, not neccessary controller.
 
Apple is a exclusion, they just make every thing 400% more expensive. I'm comparing AMD and intel, you will never find a AMD with such great performance as Intel's 2nd generation I5 CPU. Apparently AMD's Bulldozer was a fail please correct me if I'm wrong.
 
No the AMD units do not compare that well with i5 or i7 but you still get a lot more bang for your buck if you look at the total cost of the setup.
 
Rickster said:
Apple is a exclusion, they just make every thing 400% more expensive. I'm comparing AMD and intel, you will never find a AMD with such great performance as Intel's 2nd generation I5 CPU. Apparently AMD's Bulldozer was a fail please correct me if I'm wrong.
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WTF has apple got to do with anything.
 
NAG - Wesley said:
Depends on your budget and needs. The FX-4100 is in the same price range as the i3 and both will perform similarly. The FX is a quad-core CPU but its not in the same performance bracket as an i5, for example. So your options are:

Low-end:
Intel core i3-2120 @ R1204
GIGABYTE B75M-D3H @ R838
TEAM Xtreem Dark DDR3-1600 4GB @ R251
or
AMD FX-4100 @ R1305
MSI 970A-G46 @ R935
TEAM Xtreem Dark DDR3-1600 4GB @ R251

The FX-4100 setup is a little more expensive depending on where you purchase your parts from, but can be overclocked. The Intel one, on the other hand, uses less power and has better long-term prospects thanks to a huge upgrade path and the possibility of upgrading to Ivy Bridge, as well as front-panel USB3.0 support and Intel's RST tech for SSDs.
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+1 for that AMD setup, made a FX-6100 system for a friend and it blows away every game we tried. Cost less than my Intel Quad core system.
 
I decided to go with the i3 and B75 board in the end because later on I'll just upgrade it with an i7.
Unfortunately its not the best way to go but is cheap for now and the board has things like SATA 3 and usb 3 that I can utilize, I have an SSD. Also its only 2 RAM slots but I think 8 gig will do well and after I get the i7 I can upgrade the MB at a much later stage before that CPU becomes EOL.

Its still a major upgrade but I hope that the CPU will cope as well as the QUAD did.
 
Rickster said:
Apple is a exclusion, they just make every thing 400% more expensive. I'm comparing AMD and intel, you will never find a AMD with such great performance as Intel's 2nd generation I5 CPU. Apparently AMD's Bulldozer was a fail please correct me if I'm wrong.
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Well it depends on which performance metric you're looking at. Most games these days are GPU limited so if your CPU is beefy enough to feed your graphics card/s, then there's little difference that you'll be able to feel beyond seeing higher points in benchmarks. That said, Intel is on the ball with efficiency, which is why I'm hesitant to recommend AMD these days because they just allow their APUs to consume more and more power. At least they leave overclocking options open with the FX series, but its not enough when your octocore chip gets beaten by a year-old Core i5 2500k at stock speeds.

Mind you games are shifting back to being GPU limited for both multi-and-single player campaigns, so as time passes the CPU performance (in particular floating-point math) presented by AMD will become less of a negative point. With Trinity on the way and apps becoming OpenCL-aware, AMD might get back on track but I wouldn't hold my breath. They're still good choices for the value buyer, but here in SA their parts get priced up unfairly. I made a whole rant about this earlier online elsewhere, so I'm not lis for repeating that again.
 
Not all APUs are that thirsty, I'm running an E350 (built in on an ITX board) and I recently tested my consumption and get 41w at idle and 132w at max load. Looks a lot better than my Phenom X6 did with 168w idle and 317w at max load.
 
FXK !

So I get everything up an running...all looking nice. Windows rating of 7.1 (SSD not running at 6gig yet)
I load up Diablo and speeds seem good... if not better, all of a sudden the game hangs. I have to reboot, its completely unresponsive.
It boots up again ok, no issues. I try Arma2 also looks fine but 5 minutes in to the game BAM hangs again !
I reboot and it takes ages, I realise what has happened. Its tryng to boot in to my other drive :/

I check in the BIOS and the SSD is gone... I try different ports, different cables... nothing, not picking up the drive at all.

FFS... drive failed after a month :mad:

The thing that worries me now is that I have had an old MB and a new SSD fail in the space of a week. Thats not cool, I'm really worried that something else is the problem.

It could only be the PS or the other drive... everything else has changed since the upgrade.
EDIT: The new GPU.. was also in both machines :erm:
 
Nerherder:
Did you upgrade the firmware of the SSD before you installed Windows on it?
 
Pada said:
Nerherder:
Did you upgrade the firmware of the SSD before you installed Windows on it?
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I checked the version and it was the latest. I did read up about the firmware update but the drive that I received was at the latest firmware.
 
Nerfherder said:
FXK !

So I get everything up an running...all looking nice. Windows rating of 7.1 (SSD not running at 6gig yet)
I load up Diablo and speeds seem good... if not better, all of a sudden the game hangs. I have to reboot, its completely unresponsive.
It boots up again ok, no issues. I try Arma2 also looks fine but 5 minutes in to the game BAM hangs again !
I reboot and it takes ages, I realise what has happened. Its tryng to boot in to my other drive :/

I check in the BIOS and the SSD is gone... I try different ports, different cables... nothing, not picking up the drive at all.

FFS... drive failed after a month :mad:

The thing that worries me now is that I have had an old MB and a new SSD fail in the space of a week. Thats not cool, I'm really worried that something else is the problem.

It could only be the PS or the other drive... everything else has changed since the upgrade.
EDIT: The new GPU.. was also in both machines :erm:
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Don't tell me you used the same power supply?

I never use a power supply again when my MOBO dies.
 
Qwikslver said:
Don't tell me you used the same power supply?

I never use a power supply again when my MOBO dies.
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Well to be fair the PS was working fine. Never had any issues, I had a spare one with much lower power and I tested the MB on that with the same result.

You make a valid point though.
 
Nerfherder said:
Well to be fair the PS was working fine. Never had any issues, I had a spare one with much lower power and I tested the MB on that with the same result.

You make a valid point though.
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Usually power surge damages PSU, which in turn damages MOBO.
 
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