Hi techies.

My motherboard and cpu have commited suicide.

Been looking on ebay and there is loads of these bundle offers -

AMD Athlon 5000 Dual Core Processor & Motherboard & 2GB on eBay, also With AMD CPU, Motherboard CPU Bundle, Desktop PC Components, Computing (end time 28-Oct-08 19:30:00 GMT)



eBay.co.uk Shop - Envizage Solutions Ltd: CPU Motherboard Bundles: AMD Athlon 5200 Dual Core CPU Motherboard 2GB RAM

Now, are they a good deal or cheap and nasty crap and if so, why?

Cheers

2nd linky no worky.

1st linky - I've not heard of Biostar, but I've been out of this game for a couple of years now so dunno. Personally I'd always go for a better brand name board manufacturer like Asus or Gigiabyte.

I've been buying Asus and only Asus for years now. If only for no other reason the manuals are in intelligible English - very important when you're trying to hook everything up.

The price on that at £105 is pretty good though, I'd say.

Cheers Pax, sounds like good advice on the motherboards, engish helps.

Try this link -

AMD Athlon 5200 Dual Core CPU + Motherboard + 2GB RAM on eBay, also With AMD CPU, Motherboard CPU Bundle, Desktop PC Components, Computing (end time 26-Oct-08 20:33:15 GMT)

Obviously the better deal of the two. Just had a google for Biostar - they have websites in USA, Europe and Taiwan -where they're from. So it's not some faceless Chinese generic shite and you should be OK for drivers. I reccommend going to the nVidia site and using their chipset drivers anyway. These will probably run the onboard sound for you too (last time I used Realtek drivers directly the machine as a whole ran slower).

Seems all right to me, though I'm not going on much <shrugs>. Just make sure you have the right number of PCI slots for any hardware you're moving over from the other machine. Do you have a graphics card already? Is it a PCI Express (PCI-E) one?

That one on ebay looks like sata only, is your cd roms and hard disk sata?

Originally Posted by Rolfe66

That one on ebay looks like sata only, is your cd roms and hard disk sata?

Pax, yes that side of things I've got covered, cheers.

Rolfe, which one? they are both on ebay.

The harddrive also died, so thats not a problem, not sure about the cd roms though I shall have to look into that.
Nothing's straight forward with PCs is it?

Originally Posted by big bald one

Pax, yes that side of things I've got covered, cheers.

Rolfe, which one? they are both on ebay.

The harddrive also died, so thats not a problem, not sure about the cd roms though I shall have to look into that.
Nothing's straight forward with PCs is it?

The first link. I have a gigabyte board that is SATA and ATA, might be worth looking again for one that supports both.

Stay away from AMD atm, they are getting owned by Intel in every department, speed, power consumption, heat effienciency etc.


Intel Core 2 Duo E2200 "LGA775 Conroe" 2.20GHz (800FSB) / Gigabyte GA-N650SLI-DS4L nForce 650i SLi (Socket 775) PCI-Express DDR2 Motherboard / GeIL 2GB (2x1GB) PC2-6400C4 800MHz Bundle

Originally Posted by Chr!s

Stay away from AMD atm, they are getting owned by Intel in every department, speed, power consumption, heat effienciency etc.


Intel Core 2 Duo E2200 "LGA775 Conroe" 2.20GHz (800FSB) / Gigabyte GA-N650SLI-DS4L nForce 650i SLi (Socket 775) PCI-Express DDR2 Motherboard / GeIL 2GB (2x1GB) PC2-6400C4 800MHz Bundle

How about price? If AMD offer 90% of the performance for half the price then I'd have one.

Originally Posted by Pax

2nd linky no worky.

1st linky - I've not heard of Biostar, but I've been out of this game for a couple of years now so dunno. Personally I'd always go for a better brand name board manufacturer like Asus or Gigiabyte.

I've been buying Asus and only Asus for years now. If only for no other reason the manuals are in intelligible English - very important when you're trying to hook everything up.

The price on that at £105 is pretty good though, I'd say.

What he said .I only use asus now , and to be future proof you should really go for the intel quad core cpu
Overclockers UK

they do good bundles and you can return none working items very easily

You can buy a terrabit hard drive now for very little cash

Originally Posted by Chr!s

Stay away from AMD atm, they are getting owned by Intel in every department, speed, power consumption, heat effienciency etc.

Ah, the ever-lasting battle of AMD vs Intel

I've done a lot of research on both, but that was nearly 6 months ago, probably all things change again...
Whatever the situation now, don't forget the main puter mantra - depends on what you want to use it for.
If you're an "average" computer user I can't see why you shouldn't save yourself a bit of cash and go for a decent AMD.
I've got one of these
AMD Athlon? X2 Dual-Core Processor - Boost Your Computing Performance Up to 80%
nothing too high-tech, even without overclocking it's more than enough for what I do, and I like the Cool'n'Quiet thing.

As others say, go for a reliable brand with the MB, like Asus. Apart from the other stuff mentioned above, check what RAID configurations it can support, if that could be useful to you.

What hard drive did you have? I did hours, nay, days of research, and the only one that comes up consistently as the most reliable is Seagate.

Originally Posted by slogger

What he said .I only use asus now , and to be future proof you should really go for the intel quad core cpu
Overclockers UK

they do good bundles and you can return none working items very easily

You can buy a terrabit hard drive now for very little cash

no such thing as futureproofed computer components now moore's law has been shattered and intel have founbd their feet again. Any bleeding edge components always cost a wildly disproportionate amount. The guys with the latest, most powerful chipsets are paying through the nose for the privilege.

IMO far better to buy something that will do for now for pennies, then buy another for next to nothing when the current one is looking a bit shonky.

Originally Posted by ryan

IMO far better to buy something that will do for now for pennies, then buy another for next to nothing when the current one is looking a bit shonky.

That's what I have done for a long time and it works well if you aren't playing cutting edge games. I am running Vista on a cheapie AMD 3000 single core and it is fine, all I've done is upgrade the RAM when I installed Vista. I reckon I'll get another year out of it at least.
BTW my vote is for ASUS motherboards, I was well impressed with mine.

I'll add another vote for Asus. Solid kit that doesn't seem to have the high failure/glitch rate with their sockets that some others seem to.

What do you use the machine for BBO? Are you a cutting edge gamer? If you're not, you may as well decide how much money you want to spend, then spread it out over the components you need.

In the past I've spent 1/3 on the board, 1/3 on RAM, and 1/3 on processor. Worked well for years - but then I'm not a gamer.