Originally posted by Estuansis:

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Haha at 17 you should be forcing him to learn computers. I did my first build at 16 :P

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Originally posted by sammorris:

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Hmm, 32.38% faster. I was expecting a bit more than that really... :S

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Originally posted by Deadrum33:

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I like that board, its in my shopping cart, but is this one of the AM2/AM2+ boards that will run an AM3 CPU? Asking because of the Phenom II 550 CPU thats been advised. I was thinking more along the lines of this
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819103678
Its less expensive and this machine wont be hugely taxed or OC'd. Converting DVD files to PSP format will be the most strenuous task asked of this machine.

Originally posted by Estuansis:

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Haha at 17 you should be forcing him to learn computers. I did my first build at 16 :P

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He will be helping, be sure of that! I got his older brother into it enough that he recently graduated the Army National Guard choosing the path of advanced IT training.

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Agreed on the chipsets, 770 or 790FX for me.

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He will be helping, be sure of that! I got his older brother into it enough that he recently graduated the Army National Guard choosing the path of advanced IT training.

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Originally posted by Estuansis:

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Russ is right. Either board I mentioned will work just fine with a Phenom II CPU. I recommend the Phenom II especially if you don't plan to OC as it will be WAY faster at stock than the 7850. Not to mention the Phenom II X2 550 has lower power consumption than the 7850 and will save you money in the long run.

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Agreed on the chipsets, 770 or 790FX for me.

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I'm more of a fan of the newer and better 780 chipsets but I have recommended that exact 770 board to a friend for his first build and he is extremely happy with it. There's nothing wrong in particular with a 790GX chipset either but the 790FX will OC better, has better power management, and is much more reliable with the higher wattage Phenom IIs. Some 790GX boards and most 780/770 boards will burn up with a 125W CPU. Only the 790FX is actually DESIGNED to work with 125W CPU. The others only SUPPORT them.

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He will be helping, be sure of that! I got his older brother into it enough that he recently graduated the Army National Guard choosing the path of advanced IT training.

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Aha very nice. I very nearly went into "The Guard" myself. In fact, I'm pretty sure my sister is going to. We have a long family history of military service. 2 WWII vets, 1 Korea vet, 3 Vietnam vets, 2 Desert Storm vets, and 1 currently serving in Iraq.

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I might add that Russ' recommended settings for the 7750BE are magical. It just went from fast to blistering for being a Phenom I dualie. Note to self: EPP is your friend.

The NB and HT Link frequency/memory bandwidth boosts are way faster in practice than on paper. Everything went from taking a second or two to load to instant response. I've never seen such a stark difference while staying at the same clock speed.

From Russ:

Going down the settings from the top. Slightly modified by myself(Estuansis) with some stuff that that was important to me as I went through.

HT Link frequency to 2200MHz(up from stock 1800)
HT link multiplier on Auto
CPU Clock ratio to 16x for 3.2GHz
CPU Northbridge frequency to 2200MHz(11x multi for me, up from stock 1800)
CPU host control clock on Auto.
Important: Memory Clock must be set to Auto for EPP control
EPP Mode to Auto.
EPP Voltage Control to EPP Control
CPU Host clock Control to Auto
PCIE Clock to Auto
DCTs MODE to Unganged
System Voltage Control to Manual
NB volt control to +0.075.
CPU voltage Control to +0.075(may vary depending on your individual chip. ideally looking at around 1.4v)

Again, do not set the memory voltage if you use EPP! Leave it at Normal.

In the Advanced bios features.

disable Virtualization and Cool and Quiet.

In the Advanced Chipset Features(only applies to 750 SB)

NB Power management to Enabled.
SB 750 Spread Spectrum to Disabled.

In the Power Management

HPET Support to Disabled.


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I followed these settings exactly and my memory bandwidth has skyrocketed. Anyone with a 7750 BE or similar is advised to check this out. This was a completely different approach to OCing this chip than I had originally used.

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Originally posted by sammorris:

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You'd be surprised, it depends on the level of usage but people who spend hours rendering videos etc. spend significant time at load. At just three hours' load a day, even stock a Phenom II is costing an extra £8 a year. If it was overclocked, even worse. £8 a year might not seem much, but owning the chip for only 18 months at that level of usage is almost sufficient to make the price difference between it and a Q9400. If it were heavily used, say an average of 7 hours load per day, and was used for 18 months, that's more than the difference between it and a Q9550, which incidentally has recently been price-dropped, and is now £13 less than a Phenom II 955. Food for thought...

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Originally posted by Deadrum33:

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Well i have purchased the MA-770-UD3 board and last years x2 2.8Ghz AM2...my reasoning is the board is good and last years CPU is ok and clearly has an upgrade path of new CPU if stepson does so desire. If he doesnt then no big deal either I covered the basics...I gave him a choice of any NewEggs $25-50 cases and he countered by offering 2 lawn mowings and 2 landscaping jobs to bring himself up to the $50-75 bracket cause he seen Coolermaster Mystique
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811119129
Damn kids...

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AMDs probably do cost less to produce given the new fab plants that AMD built at a substantial cost to the company, but the fact is, Intel are in a position to charge whatever the hell they like for a CPU and pretty much always have, even in the dark Pentium D era.
Remember Intel also have huge production queues to sale. If they slow production it's going to take a long time before there are fewer CPUs hitting the market.
As for the last comment, I'm not really sure what to suggest, because the fact that it's only AMD chips that sell is ludicrous and you know it.

This might come off as another anti-AMD rant, it isn't. The AM3 technology puts AMD in a very nice place for tech sales, and I hope the 65W chips catch on well. AM3 is perhaps not the ideal platform to start selling everything off, but it's certainly more reasonable than i7. However, some of the stuff that posted in this thread, especially by you is mad.

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Originally posted by sammorris:

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Ok Russ, I'll start by apologising for what I said earlier. Retrospectively a lot of what I say seems to come off very rude. I'm walking a fine tightrope with my academic progress at the moment, and it's difficutlt to judge whether I'll be successful in my current uni degree, which is my last chance at further education, or else, standard fare job.
Intel's sales stagnating doesn't surprise me in the slightest, what have they offered recently that's new? Very little, the i7 975 is all I can think of, and it doesn't take much to see they won't be selling many of those. AMD on the other hand have come up with a wealth of new products, and it is only fitting that they take some of the market share back from Intel. They aren't likely to take back all of what they lost, but it'll be a good start at least, with increases in competitiveness, and very little new on the Intel front, though the reason for that is obvious, as none of Intel's products have actually been beaten other than perhaps MIPS/$, there's no reason to bring out anything new. AMD are still a way off from offering a faster quad core than Intel can manage, and a long way off a faster dual core, the E8600 and Q9650 are still happily ahead in almost everything, with the very few zones the Q9650 loses out, there's i7 to fall back on, which to this day is still falling in price.
Something to consider with intel's sales statistics, what do you consider to be a Core 2 Duo? Any 45nm or 65nm dual core? Don't forget a large proportion of, and perhaps the sales majority of Intel's dual cores go under the Pentium Dual core name. That is how my E5200 is branded, as with the E2 and relaunched E6 series, which are all rivals as far as the X2 250, encompassing every xxxx+ series chip and the 7x50 range as rivals.
For AMD, counting Phenoms and 64X2s together, what's actually left? Semprons and Opteron, server grade, and real bottom-end. With dual core CPUs from £40, there's very little reason for people to buy anything else from AMD, so it's no small surprise that these sectors account for 83% of AMD's sales, I'm not really sure what these figures are trying to prove. If it's that simplicity is on AMD's side, that's out. I still don't understand which AM3 CPUs do and don't have DDR2 memory controllers for AM2+ boards.

From a personal standpoint, apologies if this isn't the case here, or if you take offense (none is intended) but it seems to me recently that you're the sort of guy that likes to buck the trend, use something unusual to achieve results as close as possible to everyone else with the mainstream. When X2s were all the rage, you bought a Pentium D. When Core 2 Duo E6 series chips were all the range, (like myself), you bought an E4. When Core 2s with 45nm architectures were steaming ahead, you bought the X2 7750. As someone that usually likes to use brands apart from the obvious, I can sympathise with this, I genuinely can. The difference is, above this I place the priority of getting the most out of something that I need. My needs vary to compared to others, so buying products on feature merits, I for instance chose a Toshiba MP3 player over an ipod. The software is worse, the design is more simplistic, but it's a mark against the 'every man and his dog has one' argument.

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