1.8ghz core 2 duo e2160 or 2.8ghz pentium d 820

stringplay

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Jan 21, 2011
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Trying to save money by building around a 2.8ghz pentium d. Currently i'm running a 1.8ghz core 2 duo. Should I build with a 2.8ghz pentium d 820 or suffice with a 1.8ghz core 2 duo and wait for 2011 blackfriday for athlon II x2 processor? Why not choose the processor with the most ghz?

Current uses: video editing and rendering, autocad, casual gaming, graphing, excel, photoshop
 
I strongly suggest you avoid Pentium D's for any new build. If you have a Microcenter nearby, I recommend you buy a Phenom II x2 with the free MSI 785GM-P45. You build yourself a new computer between them and Newegg/Amazon/Fry's for under $300.

What's your budget and what components do you already have?
 

stringplay

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Jan 21, 2011
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components:
basically stock components from a dell 520 and gateway gm5066e.
-other than that i've added ddr2 2x512mb 667mhz ram sticks from cosair xms2 and 2x1gb 800mhz gold edition sticks from ocz
-radeon 2400hd
-recently bought sapphire 4650 ddr2 64bit to eventually build around as well
-these components are just off the top of my head but i'll respond later with a full component list if you must really see stock components of a dell and gateway

budget:
-really I just want to mix and match components from these 2 computers to save several $ and my original plan was to spend $100 to work with the pentium d for a mobo, psu, heatsink
-i'm willing to max out at $280 but i'd prefer to reuse components such as my ddr2 sticks & micro atx gateway case(the 4650 is definitely staying)
 
Damn, my jacket sleeve just deleted my long email. The point being:

1) The C2D E2160 is easily better than the Pentium D (cpubenchmark.net is handy). I recently overclocked my friend's E2200 (2.2GHz) to 3.0GHz in about 30min using the bios, HWMonitor, CPU-Z, and LinX.
2) You should OC your DDR2 on the video card. I got extremely lucky and was able to get a stable 35% OC on my friend's 9600GSO with DDR2.
3) There's not much you can do with that hardware, so you shouldn't invest any money that you can't carry over to your next computer. I might have some DDR2 667 1GB sticks I could mail to you--it's only 88 cents. PM me.
3) You should get a Samsung Spinpoint F3 1TB HDD. It gets great reviews.
4) Consider going by a Microcenter and picking up the Phenom II x2 560BE bundled with an MSI 785GM-P45 mobo with core unlocking for $99. Then you just need a PSU and $50 of DDR3. I just built two of these and one unlocked to a quad core and let me OC it to 3.7GHz. The other only took 30 minutes to get up to 4.0GHz stably.

I think that was it. I am gonna close my browser window and probably lose track of this page. Feel free to message me.