5 Attachment(s)
Value AM2 testing: Biostar Tforce 550, Sempron 3600+, Mushkin HP5300
Got the biostar board, just wanted to get some pics up of the package and contents before I start the build. Sorry to tease with the title, don't have results yet. But wanted to post this to motivate myself to keep it going instead of finding other projects to work on :).
I feel that the sempron am2 will be a great budget gamers platform. While no Conroe or A64 crusher, most gamers are more bang for the $$$ people, hence the wild popularity of the 1700+AXP a few moons ago. Getting back to sub $100 cpus and affordable motherboards, let's find out if this setup can hold a candle to more top tier rigs.
Follow me in the coming days/weeks to see what unfolds.
Quickly I need to know what vid card u want me to put in this system:
choices are 6800gt, 7800gt, x800gto, x800gto2 flashed to 16 pipes(least I still think it's working lol). X850XT, X1800XT, X1900XT.
I'm leaning towards a x800gto or X850 as they are good all around performers and more indicitive of a budget oriented type card. Ideally I'd have a 7600gt or one of the newer midline ATI's but I do not have those cards.
Will run
super pi 1m
super pi 32m
3Dmark01
3Dmark03
maybe 3Dmark06 not sure yet
not trying to set the world on fire with benches, just show some basic difference between a full X2 AM2 version and this setup. See what differences are performance wise, and let u all be the judge of the price/performance.
:)
starting with the board and initial pre-build impressions. I think I paid like $82 or so give or take a few$$$. Not shabby for a new board and new platform. To be honest I'm a bit ignorant about what differences are inherent between the 550/570/590 series boards, but nothing like a little curiosity to help cure an itch. The board appears to be nice and compact. Present is a little mesh bag that contains the cables, disks etc... Maybe usable as a little lan trinket holder I dunno. Gone are 2 comm/seriel ports, and the LPT1/printer port. One Seriel port is left, but tbh I wouldn't care if that left too. 6 USB ports are present, which should be enough for most users. However, USB whores may need to get a USB hub if they have >6 devices. Layout of the board is acceptable. Component quality seems fair given price point. I don't think we'll confuse this board with a flagship model, then again, it's light years ahead of certain cough cough ECS K7S5A boards of years ago LOL. One thing I really don't like about newer intel boards and AM2 AMD boards is the limitation of one IDE channel. Would it really be difficult to retain 2 IDE channels/ports on the board? This limits the end user seeking best performance for certain to a SATA drive as sharing an IDE HD and an Optical drive ie CDROM on the same channel is a recepie for disaster at least if you want to burn cd/dvd's. This is just my 2cents, and fwiw it may work well enough, but I wouldn't want to take the chance, maybe it's just me. Otherwise, I think we have a solid board, at least to look at. Color is agreeable, and wouldn't look bad with a case window to peer into this as a base board for a system. The box elludes to some overclocking tid bits, so let's hope the engineers at biostar didn't forget about us in the lunatic frindge. Woot!
http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/...4&d=1149205477
http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/...1&d=1149205583
http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/...1&d=1149205477
http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/...2&d=1149205477
http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/...3&d=1149205477
