Good deal?

[Jakemaster]

Me and my pop started looking for a new computer today.

We went to circuit city, and heres one of the pcs we found

Emachines somethin or other with:
AMD Athalon 64 3000
512MB DDR SDRAM
200GB Hard Drive
128MB ATI Radeon X200 Graphics card
DVD-R/RW Drive/burner

All of this, with windows XP of course, for 450 Dollars

I thought that was great, but of course my dad wants to look around.  Everything else at that price has Celerons or Semprons, so I really want to get that machine to replace the Piece o' S*** that I have now.

I, and my dad, were wondering what AMD processers compared to what Intel processors, as in

Intel Pentium 4 - AMD ?
Intel Celeron - AMD ?
Intel Celeron D - AMD?

[Mehdi]

Hi Jake,

That PC for 450 smackers is, in my mind, a great deal. It'll handle FS9 well and with a 64 bit processor you can't go wrong.

BTW,

Intel P4 - AMD Athlon 64
Intel Pentium D - AMD Athlon X2
Intel Celero - AMD Sempron

Cheers,
Mehdi.

[Weather_Man]

It's a decent PC except for the integrated video. You will probably want to get a good addin card for gaming (and possibly another 512 of RAM) -- so double your price for that rig.  ;)

[4_Series_Scania]

It's a decent PC except for the integrated video. You will probably want to get a good addin card for gaming (and possibly another 512 of RAM) -- so double your price for that rig.  ;)

If your running at a budget, building your own PC is your best option to get the best possible "Bang for Buck" if you see what I mean.....

Agreed,
E-Machines are not the worlds best pre-assembled PC !  ;), however, double the price? thats Roughly,

[the_autopilot]

Me and my pop started looking for a new computer today.

We went to circuit city, and heres one of the pcs we found

Emachines somethin or other with:
AMD Athalon 64 3000
512MB DDR SDRAM
200GB Hard Drive
128MB ATI Radeon X200 Graphics card
DVD-R/RW Drive/burner

All of this, with windows XP of course, for 450 Dollars

I thought that was great, but of course my dad wants to look around.  Everything else at that price has Celerons or Semprons, so I really want to get that machine to replace the Piece o' S*** that I have now.

I, and my dad, were wondering what AMD processers compared to what Intel processors, as in

Intel Pentium 4 - AMD ?
Intel Celeron - AMD ?
Intel Celeron D - AMD?

That computer wont' handle fs2004 or any current generation game. DOn't get me wrong, its a great deal for a comp with its specs. An athlon64 is much better than any Celeron or seperon. But still, don't exspect any 3d performence from any current generation game.

The video card is much to trashy to do anything. You'll have to replace it. You might want to upgrade the RAM as well.

Here are CPU specs:
Intel Pentium 4-AMD athlon 64.
Intel Celeron-AMD seperon
Intel Pentium 4 EE- AMD athlon64 FX
Intel Pentium D-AMD Athlon64 X2

Now the celoron D is a special. Its a dual core chip, but its performence is severely hampered. Try to aviod celerons. BTW, AMD has no equivalent cheapo diet dual core.

The celeron series and seperon series are diet CPU's. Their cache and soemtimes bus speed has been reduced. Aviod them as they offer inferior performence.

Unless you do video encoding (or the like), stick with AMD CPU's.

[congo]

What ever happened to socket style and chipset?

AMD 64 has too many variations to simply state it as a spec.

Socket 754 or 939? Because 754 is inferior in many ways. Hence a very cheap price tag.

Chipset choice is paramount, and most chipsets that provide onboard graphic "solutions" are an utter pain in the posterior, and never perform as well even if an addon graphics card is implemented.

For the most part, the XP number of AMD cpu's is roughly equivalent to the P4 eqivalent.

So a XP3000+ is like a 3.0ghz P4.

Semprons are roughly the same cpu as XP's, sharing a common core but with reduced L2 cache. The cache deficit has very little impact on performance, making the Sempron good value on some platforms.

Semprons are not made for the high end socket 939 based AMD 64bit systems, which you should be aiming at, based on a nForce4 SLI or ultra chipset.

I dare say that PC is worth every cent, and not a penny more.

[Gunny04]

Please do yourself a favor and do not buy an emachines.... You may ask me why, and well its a long story I reinstalled windows some 20+ times, had more errors then you'd believe.... the comp I had was 600 knocked down with rebates to like 3-400 dollars..... might be cheap, but that is ALL it is cheaply made and not for any gameing...... I'd reckon building a computer yourself, or have one built that way you'll know what it can and can't do