Upgrading Rig

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A second vote for Overclockers, used them for years in the UK, dealt with any warranty work very easily.

Sidejacking slightly: That i5-2500K system at 4.9Ghz GBL - was that on air or water? I'm presuming water.

 

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That was both. Corsair H50 cooling in antec 1200 case. Although with air only (titan fenrir cooler) I got it 4.6GHz so adding the water cooler only got me .4 increase. Both max temps after 24 hours under prime 95 were below 60 degrees c. If I remember right the air cooling was 58 and water cooling was 52.

 

They seem to have decent prices and I have used them on odd occations in the past.

Just stay away from their forums though. Seriously, if you want to see people crawling and bumlicking like never before to get into favour with the people that run the place ... it's not a pretty sight. Not so long ago also a mate linked me to a thread where the boss was being racist, then when he was called out, he tried to bluster it out, then if I recall just started to ban the people who'd pointed out what he did. Tut tut.

 

Yep their forums are full of dickheads. Apart from that you can't fault the service and quality.

 

+1 Overclockers. One of their best features over, say, Scan is the ability to choose between delivery companies (depending on the size of your order). Scan use DPD exclusively and they're a real pain in the rear for me in Birmingham. Whereas with OCs you can choose Royal Mail and their depot is right around the corner from me. Sweet

 

You sure? Last order I had from Scan was by CityLink.

 

Citylink are worse! My original PC was from Scan. not sure I would bother with them again to be honest. Nothing stands out, but I wasnt blown away. It was a while ago though

 

Hmmm, maybe it depends on where you live. I've ordered from Amazon and they used DPD too, but I'm told they use different companies elsewhere...

 

Probably yeah, I've had stuff from Amazon arrive by both CityLink and HDL ...

As for the topic at hand ...

I was considering getting an Athlon X3 3.2Ghz as it's cheap and got very good single core performance for games. I'm leaning towards a Phenom X2 3.2 Black now though. It's a few quid dearer, but overclocks quite easy and also is meant to be a great performer. I'm not sure I really need more than 2 cores atm, as I don't do much that really ever utilizes them.

 

Don't spend loads of money to play games, buy an xbox, but remember multi-core is the future. CPU Processors with 30-100 cores will be common soon, GPU's already have 200+ cores in most cases, some over 400.

My Windows 7 laptop shows 74 running processes and I've shut down most non essential services. Each of these processes in turn can launch multiple threads. Since many of them are service hosts thats very likely, also add the ones doing disk or network I/O, webservers and databases, etc. Its really not that hard to chew up a few cores, modern processors have core parking too so they can turn them off to save power when not needed.

Some people report being able to turn Phenom X2's in X4's...
http://www.anandtech.com/show/2927

Personally if buying a desktop processor at this point I'd want a 64 bit CPU with 4 cores minimum and at least 6 MB of L3 cache, based on a 45nm process or better, sooner or later more applications will become inherently more concurrent in their design.

 

Yeah I heard there is about an 80% sucess rate of getting them to run as an X4, but you need a particular mobo apparently. I'm getting it for what it is at the mo and I'll worry about unlocking cores in the future maybe.

I'd like to get something more powerful etc.. but I'm on a budget, so this will do me for now.