Building an AMD PC... a few questions

[CaseyDDR]

Garcian Smith said:

CaseyDDR said:
Before you waste money on AMD, check out the i5 by Intel. They are faster for the most part than the phenoms (especially for gaming), and very comparible in price. I got my i5 for 149.99$ at microcenter. The new 1156 motherboards are very cheap also in comparison to the older i7 boards.

I got a MB, 4gb 1600 DDR3 OCZ ram, and the i5 for 340$. MUCH better than anything you can build from AMD for that price, especially since AMD still uses DDR2 (if I remember correctly).

1) At the resolution you're running at, and for the uses that you stated in the OP, you don't need to spend more than $100 on a CPU. Anything more is overkill. The cheapest i5 seems to be $200 on Newegg, and that won't give you a significant performance boost on games over the $90 AMD tri-core that I linked above.

2) AMD boards do indeed use DDR3.

3) As I said before, DDR3-1600 is overkill for gaming (or for anything else except heavy A-V editing or game development or something). Get some 1333 and don't look back.

I edited my post so you might want to check it out, but I'll say a few things.

 

1. DDR-1600 is the exact same price as 1333, no reason to buy the lower quality (i got 4gb for 100$ out door, with 20$ mail in rebate on the way), and it's a quality brand. 

2. As I also stated, Microcenter has i5's for 150$ out the door, I Couldn't pass that up myself, especially for the huge performance boost it gives over AMD. 

Thx for clarifying on AMD and DDR3 though, didn't know they finally made the jump.