6 core goodness

[jaydee]

I was going to upgrade my AM2+ dual core to a quad core and add another 2gigs of DDR2 but the price would have been $150ish. Then I saw this 6 core Phenom II for $197.00 and though why not. The MSI board I got for it has all kinds of options. The cores are on auto clock which raises and lowers the mhz on the fly. I used the stock AMD cooler and have yet to see the temps go above 40C even when gaming. This chip has the Turbo Core thing that allows each core to clock to 3.3ghz when needed. Stock ghz is 2.8. This thing has plenty of power.

Right now I am running Vista 32bit but will be installing Win7 64bit soon and maybe add another 4gigs of dual channel ram. Then I should be set for another 4-5 years on this machine.

13-130-293 MB MSI|880GM-E43 880G --- $79.99

19-103-851 CPU AMD|PH II X6 1055T AM3 --- $197.99

20-161-279 MEM 2Gx2|WINTEC 3AXH1333C9WS4GK --- $79.99

Not a bad upgrade for $357.97.

[ben333]

Doing some CAD or video work? What's your reasoning for six cores? Sounds pretty sweet though, keep us posted!

[jaydee]

Originally Posted by ben333

Doing some CAD or video work? What's your reasoning for six cores? Sounds pretty sweet though, keep us posted!

Best bang for the buck mainly. A quad core is only like $40 less. Just aswell get the 6 and not have to upgrade for another few years. I play a lot of online games. I can run 3 different games at the sametime pretty smooth with this setup and stream netflix and browse the web at the sametime. Money isn't a big deal either. I made enough in overtime last week to pay for the whole thing.

[ben333]

Originally Posted by jaydee

Best bang for the buck mainly. A quad core is only like $40 less. Just aswell get the 6 and not have to upgrade for another few years. I play a lot of online games. I can run 3 different games at the sametime pretty smooth with this setup and stream netflix and browse the web at the sametime. Money isn't a big deal either. I made enough in overtime last week to pay for the whole thing.

That's nice. I've been saving my dough... I could upgrade from my cheap lil C2D /w 2 GB RAM but don't see a huge need. 4 gigs and an intel quad would be nice, but then again my motherboard is a little flaky. I think I'm going to wait till I see a used OEM box come my way for cheap and buy that. Seeing a lot of RAM in em these days...

[ben333]

Ever build that setup? If so, how'd it turn out? Was just checking out that CPU... 6x 512k L2 cache... that's only 3 MB! Good reviews though.

EDIT: I see it has 6 MB of L3, still a bit behind the Intels though. Wayyy cheaper still.