Buyer's Guide - Entry Level to Mid-Range, March 2005
by Jarred Walton on March 15, 2005 1:30 PM EST- Posted in
- Guides
Memory
All of the platforms that we have recommended in this Guide use DDR RAM, which is not surprising. DDR2 is simply not a "budget" product yet. For the AMD socket 754 platform, you'll be best off purchasing a single 512MB DIMM. The AMD socket 939 and Intel platforms on the other hand will be able to run dual-channel RAM for a 5% to 15% performance increase, depending on the task. The best choice for a reasonably future-proof system will be to get 512MB DIMMs, but that is a big price jump if you purchase two DIMMs. If you can scrape together the additional money, we suggest going with 2x512MB on both platforms, and you can run with a single DIMM initially. We will, however, provide a 2x256MB option for dual-channel RAM support.
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Price: $62 shipped
"Ultra" and "Value" are normally contradictory terms, but GEIL has put both in the product name of their dual-channel RAM package. Overclocking support is rather limited, so consider this a base recommendation. As always, there are many reputable brands that should run CL2.5 timings in a modern Intel or AMD system. Corsair, Crucial, Kingston, and Mushkin are at the top of our list, but PDP, PQI, and Samsung brands are also good.
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Price: $51 shipped
Prices on 512MB DIMMs have dropped quite a bit lately, and we can now pick up a single CL2.5 module for under $60. That's down over $10 from the last Budget Guide, which is pretty impressive. PQI is not as well-known of a brand, but they are still decent, and they work with both AMD and Intel systems in our experience.
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Price: $131
With 2-3-2-5 timings and the ability to overclock to 230 MHz to 240 MHz with some tweaking, the PDP DIMMs are a great buy. More importantly, the upgrade to 1GB of RAM will definitely help out in overall system performance for demanding applications like games. PDP has come out with some very good RAM options at incredible prices, as the closest price that we could find for similar RAM was about $30 more. Many of our previous value RAM recommendations have cost about $150 and had 2.5-4-4 timings!
If you want even more stock performance, and especially if you want to try your hand at overclocking (with a 1:1 memory ratio), our recommendation goes to anything with Samsung TCCD blanks. Our experience is that anything with Samsung TCCD chips will have good to great base performance at DDR400 speeds - often with 2-2-2 timings - and overclocking performance usually extends well beyond DDR500. The cheapest brands that we have found with Samsung TCCD blanks are G.Skill, PDP, and PQI. Cost, of course, is quite a bit higher than the basic RAM recommendations above. However, $220 will now get 2x512MB RAM with 2-2-2-5 PC3200 timings. That's about $50 lower than what most 2-2-2 RAM cost in mid-to-late 2004. 2x256MB of TCCD will run about $120, for the curious. The memory is good, but it's definitely a big upgrade from the Budget price range. We'd take the $100 of the 2-3-2 RAM over the lower timings, and PC4000 RAM can be found for about $175 these days.
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LoneWolf15 - Wednesday, March 16, 2005 - link
Note on the Hitachi hard disk drives:Hitachi is the ONLY major company that does not allow advance-exchange RMA of their hard disks. To me, this is huge when looking at a hard disk. Western Digital, Seagate, and Maxtor all have advanced exchange. After the nightmares I have had with IBM and Hitachi technical support, I could not in all honesty recommend them in a system. Personally, I can't afford that kind of downtime, having an advance replacement makes it easier to try and recover data from a crashed drive if necessary, and you aren't waiting in limbo while someone receives your defective drive, checks it in, diagnoses it bad, then sends you out a replacement, also placing you at the mercy of their stock-on-hand or whomever they choose to ship to you the replacement drive.
neologan - Wednesday, March 16, 2005 - link
There's another buyers guide at http://www.pureoverclock.com/review.php?id=9 but it doesn't choose its recommedations due to a really strict budget. Worth a read though i guess.JarredWalton - Wednesday, March 16, 2005 - link
26 - Thanks. Identity crisis indeed! I was originally looking at upgraded S754 instead of S939, but decided against it. :)As a side note, RAM prices have suddenly taken a massive cut. The PDP 2-3-2-5 is now $20 less than last week, and it's about $50 less than a couple months ago. Heck, you can even get 1GB (2x512) of Corsair CL2.5 for under $100 now - again, $50 less than last Guide!
chrisd154 - Wednesday, March 16, 2005 - link
"Socket 754 Alternative Motherboard: Chaintech VNF4 Socket 939""Socket 754 CPU: AMD Athlon 64 1.8 GHz 512KB L2 90nm socket 939"
Your socket 754 motherboard and cpu are having a bit of an identity crisis (i.e theyre 939). You might want to correct that mate.
JarredWalton - Wednesday, March 16, 2005 - link
24 - you want benchmarks of the speakers? Sorry, that's *way* beyond the scope of this Guide. Speakers costing $60 or less aren't being purchased primarily for their quality; they're being selected for price.If you mean benchmarks in general, that's something that would be great to have but not practical to do. Our various hardware reviews are meant to address the theory of what makes a good component/computer. For many of the parts in a budget system, price is a bigger factor than the final performance or quality. Sure, we'd like to have both, but the truth is you're not going to get SLI in a budget system. We do not have all of the parts available in one location for testing, and some of the parts may not even be in AnandTech's possession [anymore]. This is especially true of entry-level Guides, as many of the parts were new a year or more in the past
If you'd like specific information or you have a specific question, feel free to email me.
crimson117 - Wednesday, March 16, 2005 - link
I'd appreciate if you could add some benchmarks to compare "beeps and boops" quality. This guide is pretty much worthless without them.JarredWalton - Wednesday, March 16, 2005 - link
The MSI uATX is the only ATI Xpress 200 board currently available, and it's basically the same price as the Chaintech. Given that it's still pretty new, I'm a little hesitant to go with that over the "proven" nF4. Oh, and there are *no* overclocking options on the MSI board right now. Is that a BIOS problem or a chipset problem? I don't know. If you really like ATI or if you want a uATX form factor, it's definitely an option.kmmatney - Tuesday, March 15, 2005 - link
I'd consider the MSI ATI Radeon XPRESS 200 motherboard board for a budget system as well. From reviews I've read, using the on-board video doesn't seem to degrade overall 2D performance.Pair it with an Athlon 64 3000+ winchester for $235. A decent system for the non or light gamer, and you have the option of upgrading the video later. Too bad there aren't any budget 939 cpus.
JarredWalton - Tuesday, March 15, 2005 - link
I haven't had issues with the Chaintech, but that's only one person's experience with a specific RAM/GPU setup. The documentation is pretty lacking, but other than that it works well. Are you speaking from personal experience, and if so, what was the exact configuration (RAM, CPU, PSU, etc.)? It works well in the following configuration, although I had to manually set the RAM timings:Athlon64 3500+
Chaintech nForce4 VNF4
ATI X800 XL 256MB PCIe
1GB (2x512) Corsair DDR400 CAS2.5
Antec True430 PSU
NEC ND-3520A DVD±RW
WD 200GB SATA
SB Audigy 2 ZS
As for the DVD+RW, why save $20 when there won't be anything faster than a 16X burner, and the ability to backup 4.5GB of data rather than 700MB can come in handy? (And if that sounds like too much data, consider that a lot of people take digital pictures these days. A few hundred high quality images will fill a CD.) I mentioned the possibility to downgrade the optical drive, but I'm not going to recommend it.
mostlyprudent - Tuesday, March 15, 2005 - link
Are you serious ... recommending a motherboard with compatability and stability problems just to save $10? And why put a DVD-RW drive in a budget system? Optical drives are quite simple to upgrade down the road. You would have to be crazy to skimp on the quality of the motherboard to fit in an upgraded optical drive. You can get a DVD-ROM/CD-RW combo drive for about $20 less than the NEC drive you suggest. I would take that $20 dollars and invest it in a stable/reliable motherboard -- there is nothing worse than a finiky mobo as far as I'm concerned.