[xactly]

Originally Posted by Carbon

But what makes you think the brand matters at all? What does "AMD" have as a coherent brand that outweighs the difference in architectures? "AMD" and "Intel" as titles literally mean nothing as far as how the chips perform - while Intel may have had better CPUs for a while, they don't anymore, and AMD is beating Intel at every point under the price of the i5. Even the X2 240, which is currently half the price of the E7500 in the US, is up to par with it, whereas the X3 720 meets or exceeds the performance of the E8400 with an extra core.

Saying "Oh, I really liked Athlon XP" or "I didn't like Pentium 4" or "I thought that the Athlon 6000+ was garbage" makes sense, but blanket brand statements don't, really.

Your views are valid and I agree with you, The AMD X3 720 is a better choice than the E7500, it's just that I'm not up to date with AMD's confusing barrage of CPU releases.

I am not an Intel fanboy per se, it' just that I find AMD somewhat ... Crap. It's personal really.

[Razer]

Carbon's build he suggested is very nice, I'd also go find a cheap graphics card if you're running 2 monitors. Looks like Carbon didn't include one. I'm sure a Sparkle 7200GS or something will be fine for desktop and music use. Passively cooled too, less noise. I think they're around £20 now..

[xactly]

Originally Posted by Razer

Carbon's build he suggested is very nice, I'd also go find a cheap graphics card if you're running 2 monitors. Looks like Carbon didn't include one. I'm sure a Sparkle 7200GS or something will be fine for desktop and music use. Passively cooled too, less noise. I think they're around £20 now..

The motherboard Carbon chose has an integrated GPU and has three outputs: HDMI, DVI and D-Sub.

[Razer]

Not sure if you can use more than one of these at once.. Worth looking into

[xactly]

Originally Posted by Razer

Not sure if you can use more than one of these at once.. Worth looking into

Thats what I thought to however Graphics cards allow 2 or more outputs at once I figured this should be the same.

If not then it looks like Carbon hasn't considered the issue.

[Carbon]

Yeah, for two monitors he'll have to go with a really cheap older dual-head graphics card like a 7200LE or GS.