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  • Feb 16th, 2011 11:36 pm
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Feb 15, 2008
26318 posts
3242 upvotes
Calgary

What to buy?

Friend's old P3-500 is in its death throes, and I owe him a new machine for all the work he's done for me.

But I haven't a clue what to buy.

Already have a nice dual core AMD Phenom II system myself, on a nice DDR3 motherboard with great ATI onboard graphics. Which I'd like to upgrade as it is getting slow (the CPU is slow...because of virtualization stuff I do).

But the 'upgrade' would be an Intel Sandy Bridge CPU, and its not possible to buy them right now.

And the support under Linux sucks. And I really prefer onboard video to the alternatives; just more reliable that way, and fewer parts to break down, IMHO.

So what to do? Ideally I'd wait 6 months until Bulldozer has appeared and Sandy Bridge debugged. But I don't have 6 months. And plunking down $$$ on an AMD 6-core CPU doesn't appeal either.

Anyone else agree with me that we're basically in a 'junky' period for computer hardware, where there's no new platform that one can commit to really?
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Deal Addict
Jan 7, 2007
1224 posts
92 upvotes
If you need something now, just get an 1156 or 1336 system. Sure, they're not the SB systems, but they've got the bugs worked out of them (as much as they will be), and still an upgrade.

I'm sure you'd be able to find a mobo with decent onboard video; but I've always used separate graphics cards with Linux, and I really don't think one extra component is going to increase the odds of failure.

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