My New AMD Athlon II System

Well it was time and I finally decided to get a new computer. I didn't want to spend a lot as I just got a new Asus Netbook last month. I did need a new desktop computer badly as I hadn't bought a new one since 2002.

I just never seemed to want to upgrade given that I really didn't find any use for one all those years. I had been running a custom built AMD Barton system which is probably just as fast as a Pentium P4 system. Yes, I didn't get to play those great games that came out but I never really had the time to devote to it.

My new system is great. No, its not one of those quad core beasts but something quite less than that. Here's the components:

• AMD Athlon II 250 (3.0Ghz) - $78
• MSI 770-C45 motherboard - $79
• Corsair 4GB DDR3 1333Mhz RAM - $85
• 640GB Western Digital SATA - $75
• Antec Sonata Designer 500 tower case - $99

Total: $450 including sales tax

Now I can tell you that I have noticed a huge performance improvement in some of the programs I run. One of them is a program I wrote to do stock market calculations and I clocked it to execute its batch job in 15 seconds. After running the same program on the AMD Athlon II 250 system, it took only 1 second. To pull down 100,000+ records off a MySql database on the old system took 16 seconds. Now it takes less than 2 seconds.

My Internet surfing is just so much more smoother and faster too. Before I was getting 3Mpbs download/6Mpbs upload. Now I'm getting 10Mpbs download, 7Mpbs upload.

AMD Athlon II X2 250

This chip just came out in June 2009 and is the first Athlon II dual core processor. It runs at 3Ghz and comes with 2MB of L2 cache. It will run in all socket AM2/AM3 motherboards along with DDR2/DDR3 memory. Yes, it uses faster DDR3! Ok so it doesn't have an L3 cache but AMD designed the X2 250 to have 1MB per core.

Though its not as fast as the AMD Phenom II dual core line, I swear this $75 chip is fast, at least for my purposes, and I am enjoying every bit of it. Now I could have put in a $189 AMD Phenom II X4 945. PassMark shows a PassMark of 1673 for the $75 AMD Athlon II X2 250 compared to the $169 AMD Phenom II X4 945 has a PassMark of 3157.

But why bother! If you want to save some money and don't demand high intensive computing, go with an Athlon dual core system based around the X2 250. The price point to performance suits me just fine.

MSI 770-C45 Motherboard

This is my first MSI motherboard. I've normally go out and buy Intel or Asus mobos but this time I actually got my hands tied. The reason being that I have too much invested in old PCI card technology like my Linksys wireless card and PNY dual monitor cards. So I needed a system that had at least 3 PCI slots and fortunately MSI had one.

The MSI 770 C45 is a nice little mobo. It suppors the AMD 770 and SB710 chipsets and allows up to 16GB of DDR3 memory. It comes with 1 PCI x16 slot, 2 PCI Express slots, and 3 PCI legacy slots. Other goodies include:

• 6 SATA II ports with RAID 0/1
• IDE port w/Ultra DMA
• Realtek ALC888S audio, Blu ray
• 9 USB ports
• Serial port
• SPDIF out connector
• Front panel includes 3 USB and in/out audio
• PS/2 mouse/keyboard ports
• RJ 45 10/100/1000 Mb/s LAN

Antec Sonata Designer 500 Tower Case

The Antec Sonata Designer 500 is a very strong product.

I strongly recommend this case! As I write this, I can't hear a thing. It is just so quite. The case has special sound deadening panels. It comes with a 500 watt power supply which is more than suitable. The power supply is 80PLUS certified that will help save money on energy bills. The enclosure holds four 5.25" and four disk drives. The drives can be suspended making it even more quite.