[Captain M]

I'm thinking of building my first computer. I want it to be pretty good, but not too pricey. Maybe around $1000 or something. I'm thinking I'll go with an AMD processor, but I don't know which. Dual Core looks nice, but do I really need it? I'd want to run pretty good games fast. Probably and console graphics and speeds. I don't understand what " 2000MHz HT" and the Cache as well as why there is a city name in the specs such as San Diego. What does this mean? Does anybody know where to buy it at? I usually buy my parts (ram, hard drives, etc...) at newegg.com. I'll probably put Ubuntu Linux on it, needing at least 200 gigs of hard drive and maybe windows with like 50 gigs.

This post has been edited by Captain M: 14 February 2007 - 02:07 PM

[capty99]

your probably gonna need to get a dual core pc nowadays if you want any kind of lifetime out of it.
the p4 is being faded out right now and so the end of single core processors isnt that far off, that just means as the hardware gets better the games will be more intensive so you just probably need dual core.

2000 mhz HT is for hyperthreading its just a technology that improves speeds on the processor.

yeah someone who knows better will get the rest.

250 gig harddrive < 100 bucks.

ram, the processor, and graphics card should take up a large part of your budget.

[William_Wilson]

dual core is the next wave, but i don't know if i would actually spend the extra $ just to have it. It is anarchitecture which must be implemented mostly in the software application level, but i believe Vista is partially able to handle it on it's own. It increases the number of threads and piping available at the same time, but for now only 1 core is allowed to access the kernel at a time to ensure data stability for the most part (pending the app) so as long as you are running a decent processor with 2GB+ RAM behind it, i wouldn't worry about the dual core

[Thorian]

Dual core is sweet if you are going to be encoding a lot of video or other processor heavy tasks.

For example Yesterday I was encoding about 15 GB of data and both cores were being worked to the max. (basically I kicked off my job and left but when I got back it was all done)

[Captain M]

Yes but the real question is whether or not I want a Dual Core, It's which one I should get. I wouldn't be encoding video, but I figured I could run the Operating System on one of the cores, and a game on the other.

[eLliDKraM]

i think we should condense these processor topics into one. i'm sick of reading and typing up the same whatever on different threads. especially when they're adjacent, the forum rules state to look for an answer before you post a question. there's been a couple ongoing ones so.. yeah