Advice on motherboard purchase

[Franz Waldmüller]

Hi r,

r wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> the other important thing to state when building a PC is the budget!
> 
> clearly if your budget is 1000000 quid the advice is different 
> 
> from if its 300 quid.
> 
> perhaps if you can give your budget and give online URLs that you
> 
> intend to purchase from, people can then shop around for you relative to that.
> 
I would like to keep my budget small, but I know that often it is better
to invest some extra dollars. My performance demands are most of the
time quite low but when editing image collections and videos I need
quite lot of processing power. Sometimes I need to have some virtual
machines running as well. That is why I want to go for an AMD Phenom II
955 and 4 GB of ECC memory. I think this CPU should have enough power
to start an LTSP-server for one client (I want to avoid to buy a new PC
for my girlfriend as well. (I will start a separate thread on the LTSP 
question.)

I don't like to shop online, but I will describe my setup more in detail:
Part	Model	US$	Euro	
CPU	AMD Phenom II X4 955 (C3) Black Edition, 4x 3.20GHz, boxed	US$181
Euro 132	[1]

Motherboard	ASUS M4A89GTD Pro/USB3, 890GX (dual PC3-10667U DDR3)	US$162
Euro 118	[2]

Memory	Kingston ValueRAM DIMM Kit 4GB PC3-1333 ECC CL9 (DDR3-133)
US$136	Euro 99	[3]

harddisk	2 hard disks from different vendor for RAID 1 (1,5TB)	US$247 
Euro 180	
				
With a case and a PSU for 60 Euro each I end up with 650 Euros or 890 
US$ for the complete setup. When shopping in the United States of 
America this setup would be much cheaper as vendor tend forget the 
exchange rate and only exchange the currency symbol when selling their 
products in Europe.
			
[1]
http://www.amd.com/us/products/desktop/processors/phenom-ii/Pages/phenom-ii-pib.aspx 

		
[2]	http://www.asus.com/product.aspx?P_ID=eCWbkolMf0DOW0IV&templete=2			
[3]	http://www.valueram.com/server/server_memory.asp			
[3f]	KVR1333D3D8R9S/2G	,

The CPU is quite a work horse, but I need a quite a high single core
frequency as Gimp and Inkscape are not multi threaded. And I think I will
need more than two cores quite often.

Thanks for the suggestions to look for a dedicated video card. I 
consider buying a motherboard without IGP, too.


> 
> 
> As building a PC is extremely specific, and depends on what components
> 
> are available at that precise moment in time from a precise set of vendors.
> 
> 1 week later and the advice is different. eg I usually go for "sale" graphics
> 
> cards, eg reduced in price from 100 to 50 quid. end of season cards, save a 
> 
> lot of money. And I go for a cheap Microsoft keyboard, logitech optical mouse.
> 
> quality for some things, value for others.
> 
> 
> I tend to use dabs.com but thats if you are in the UK. Their choice is so huge
> 
> you can spend hours deciding on just 1 component.
> 
> 
> 
> perhaps also people reading this discussion can recommend other online stores
> 
> they found useful, and say for which country the store is.
> 
> 
Thanks for the suggested online stores.
> 
> 
> [snip]
> 
Franz