AMD or Intel etc

Back in March I realised that at some stage I would have to replace my aging pc, circa 2003 and was considering either WinXP (SP3) or Win7. My intention being to build later in the year.
http://forums.thinkbroadband.com/windows/f/4224370-w...

Anyway, last week's issue
http://forums.thinkbroadband.com/windows/f/4233381-f... has brought this forward somewhat. At least I have all my data.

So, next question is: Intel or AMD and which processor to go for? I'm not intending some super sexy pc with water cooling, but something at least medium quick.

Also of course which manufacturer of motherboard? I have used MSI, ASRock and some time back ABit.

I am not limited to size of MB, since I will be using a tower case to fill the pc hole in my desk; so will likely be full ATX size.

Grateful for any suggestions.

Thanks!

Probably Intel at the mo but I'm still running a Phenom X4 Black Edition on a Gigabyte board and I still find it pretty fast. I do the odd bit of video editing but nothing in the way of gaming so something of this standard will do me for a while yet.
It really all depends on what you use and what you envisage using your rig for.

Regarding your current problem, have you checked your PM's?

Ah...

I thought that I had returned a PM yesterday, but seems that I had mis-sent it.

Will retype up and send.

Cheers!

For a medium level system I'd suggest an AMD FX 6300. It's a decently powerful chip that sells for about the same price as Intel's i3. I've built a few systems around the 6300 and been highly impressed. There's also the new FX 6350 which has just appeared in the past few days. It's about £10 more expensive, but has a nice clock speed jump from 3.5 to 3.9.

Motherboard, Gigabyte or Asus. My preference is for Gigabyte but both are generally pretty solid.

I prefer AMD to be honest, the problem is the last few years they have not really gone anywhere, they have increased the amount of cores and that is it.

The bulldozer was not great compared to intel, still a powerful chip mind you. BTW, more cores don't mean stuff will be faster. Still a lot of software that don't support quad.

I got a Phenom II 3.5 quad core at the moment, it does what I want including video editing with vegas. If I was going to update, i would stay with AMD, go for a six core, which Vegas does support.

I've always found Novatech pretty good, particularly for mobo bundles.

I'll second that. Their bare-bones computers are also very good value.

As for manufacturer, although a fan of AMD in the past the smart money is on Intel nowadays.

Intel. Go for an i5 if you want a good balance between price and performance, the i7's are only really worth it if you know you will need the extra processing power.

Don't forget the graphics card. The ones that come integrated in intels newer processors are not too bad these days and can get quite a surprising amount done, but if you will be playing any sort of games or doing any graphical stuff then I would recommend going for a medium range nVidia card.

OS: Get Windows 7, Windows 8 is for tablets and girls as far as I am concerned lol.

The intel i series of processors have been coming in with some very nice performance figures and they run with considerably less power consumption than AMD processors.

Of course that means they run a whole lot cooler.

I have the i7 3770k Ivy bridge sitting at 40 degrees C on air cooled system and the case temp is 25 degrees C.

I would say if you can afford it go and future proof and go with a quad core i7 with win 7 64 bit with as much memory as you can stuff in it (16 or 32 gigabytes)

With recently bought ones, the cases were very tinny. I was pretty disappointed.