[spot]

I'm toying with the notion of going a bit faster.

I've used Asrock motherboards before. Not often, and not with any sense of excitement, but they do trim prices well.

Anyway... should I hope to find a better price than UKP300 delivered for a black midi-tower spec'd as follows:

Motherboard ALiveNF7G-HD720p R5.0
Processor AMD Quad Core 9500 Phenom
Memory 2GB DDR2
Hard Drive 250GB SATA
Optical Drive 20x Lightscribe DVDRW
Case 8032 CASE with 400W SIlent PSU


and should I aim for better componentry and if so how badly would that dent my back pocket?

[KanoakaVirus]

have you oc'd your current components?

[spot]

The effect of driving my current components to their screaming limit, complete with peltier effect inserts and heat tubes, would be much the same as dropping an XP 2400+ processor into the board which would take 10 minutes and five quid and I'm not wildly excited at the prospect. Bringing my run times down by an order of magnitude has always been the trigger for me to act and the Phenom quad core will do that for me. My previous processor was an AMD 133 and before that a 386-33 which replaced my XT86. None of those were overclocked either. I was stunned at how fast the 386 was and the same's true of all the other jumps.

[Carbon]

400W is low for the PSU, and you won't be able to add any graphics..Phenoms are junk, and I have no idea if you work with media and really need one. I could probably find a better build, where you buying your components from?

[spot]

It puzzles me when someone's presented with a billion dollars worth of kit for $200 and it gets called junk. It's like hearing vista's junk or XP's junk or linux is junk or Japanese calligraphy's junk. There's a lot of effort in it and it works better than what I have at the moment.

I've assumed the on-board graphics will be better than using my existing graphics card.

What I use computers for includes a lot of compiling, anything that can reduce a 10 minute development wait to 1 minute is desirable especially when it happens twenty times a day. The list in the OP is off ebay.co.uk, prebuilt and soak tested, no operating system.

[Carbon]

Compilers aren't multithreaded, though. It's going to be all about clock speed. How much is the processor individually? Just because you're getting the lot cheap doesn't mean you can't change anything in it.

[philthomas]

Before buying a Phenom, try googling - phenom broken - and do a bit of reading, as the Phenom is known in the trade as the broken part.

If you want a troublesome PC with lots of reliabilty/crashing problems, go for the Phenom

Carbon is right Phenoms are junk and ASRock are low end budget boards, so the cocktail isn't a good one.

[spot]

The article I read while deciding what to go for was http://www.tomshardware.com/2008/02/...nom/index.html

I lived through the Pentium bug as well. I even swapped sixty processors one day when the replacements arrived. This one I can live with too. The Pentium wasn't junk either.

Carbon, the whole point of four processors and compiling is that you use parallel compiles to increase the throughput, they're not sequentially dependent. If I need one executable that involves generating six hundred object files, guess how many parallel processes I can fire off. Six hundred. That's quite a bottleneck even for four processors but they'll sure as hell all be running as maxed out as I can get them.

Why do I need all six hundred objects recompiling? Because I've changed the underlying file structures, most often, and the debugging routines need to incorporate all the revised offsets.

So, it was me who raised the question of Asrock's desirability and the UKP300 benchmark. What can you offer me at that price that's close in performance terms, anyone. How much more do I need to pay to have a platform that'll make you stop squirming.

I promise I'll not have any crashing problems, by the way. I'm very very good at configuring operating systems so they don't crash, and avoiding hardware quirks too if they exist.

I've always run junk, junk's cheaper and it can still be perfectly reliable. I get a new computer every six years because every six years I can reduce my run times by a factor of ten. It's happened exactly that way when I upgraded in 1984, 1990, 1996, 2002 and I'm expecting it to this year as well. The acid test is does this hour-long process run in six minutes. Every other time it did.

I do, seriously, want to improve on that Asrock combination, it's why I asked for advice.

[philthomas]

I seem to recall reading that the Phenom has a bug that means you need to use a specially patched BIOS which disables part of the CPU and comes with a performance hit .....Search TLB bug.
<me thinks> unless you get a kick out of headaches & problems, go for Intel

[spot]

Not according to that article, philthomas. It explicitly says that it looked for the buggy processor on all three it sampled and couldn't reproduce the effect at all.

Will this "go for Intel" advice - if it gets specific enough to price - increase my cost or reduce my performance?

I'm not in any way anti-Intel. AMD had a strange six years when against all expectation they turned out better maximum performance as well as better performance per dollar. That's not their role in life, they never did it before 2000 and they never did it after 2006. What AMD does is keeps Intel honest. Before AMD and Cyrix showed up, Intel could and did charge as much as it wanted for PC CPUs, its cleaning staff drove solid gold Cadillacs to and from work. AMD in particular forced prices down and forced performance improvements, it still has that primary effect. The oddity of AMD actually topping the performance charts was secondary and hugely amusing but it didn't really do anything but dent some corporate pride.