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Hello everybody this is Claudia Miranda from Linux Basement and on this my debut episode for
Hacker Public Radio I not only wanted to record one episode but I actually wanted to do
a series of episodes entitled How I Upgraded My PC and my reason for doing this was that
I thought it would be helpful for anybody out there looking to build a new PC from scratch
to know how I went about coming to my decisions for my purchases
what research I did, what websites I looked at and the comparisons that I made
and in this episode I'm going to cover how I did that for the processor that I purchased
but before I go into that I wanted to give you a little bit of background on the PC that I currently
have and it's a PC I built back in 2003 and it's an AMD system the processor is an
AMD Athlonic SP 2400 plus the system originally had 512 megabytes of RAM and I've since
upgraded to one gigabyte and it's been at that ever since the hard drive that it's using is a
200 gigabyte SATA hard drive and the motherboard that it's using is an Abit NF7S motherboard
and if any of you are familiar with Abit they were a company that specialized in making
motherboards specifically for the enthusiast market they had some budget boards and stuff but they
were well known for their enthusiast PC enthusiast boards and this one in particular is one of them
that was rated very good by a lot of websites unfortunately the company no longer exists they
actually closed shop at around mid 2000s I would say just bad case the case of bad luck really
and even though in the end they tried to come back it just didn't happen they didn't have the
money or the resources anymore and so they just decided to call it quits but all know I'll
still a very good motherboard one of the first ones that came out of the time was serial ATA
connectors and it also has fireware ports and aside from that it also has the the optical
audio connectors I think it's SPF I don't remember but anyway a very good board for its time
and it's done very well and still continues to do well the video card that I purchased for this
system is a or was a instillist it's still in there but when I purchased it it was in
Sapphire Tech radio 9600XT and it was the Sapphire Tech is actually one of the company third
party companies that licensed ATI's reference design for the radio 9600XT now what interested
me particularly about this video card is that this one was I believe the only one that came
with 256 megabytes of video RAM while all the others including ATI's only had 128
and on top of that it got very good reviews from a lot of websites one of which is
the one that I will be referencing later on for this for the processor purchase that I made
but anyway so that's been my system since 2003 and it still is a very good system and runs
Linux very well it's still very usable but for some of the in some of the more intensive tasks
like when I was editing the ILF promo with Riklaudio Montalban as you as you all well know now
I did have some issues where and even with this episode I had some issues where recording
more than one track in audacity resulted in very choppy audio on the second track and their
moments were when I tried to do more than one thing at a time it kind of especially with fire
fox it starts to slow down a bit and it's starting to feel longitude so despite the fact that
it's still a very good system still can keep it's own I figured starting a new year starting
a new decade why not start with a brand new PC so this episode as I mentioned we're covering
the processor and so the processor that I decided to go with this time around is the AMD
phenom2 x4 965 black edition now the reason why I went with AMD not Intel has the
core series chips and they're very very good I've always liked them since I've always liked the
core chips since they were released and of course the core i series are a lot improved a lot more
improved from their previous generations and now you have the sandy bridge ones that have everything
on the actual processor itself including the video chipset so very good design now the reason why
did not go with Intel was aside from the cost because they tend to be very expensive the issue was
sandy bridge was of concern to me because as you all know it's been recorded reported that
Intel sandy bridge chipsets have a bug in the in how they handle the serial ATA I think it's the
three gigabit serial ATA ports and I didn't want to spend money considering how expensive they are
I didn't want to go I mean I wouldn't go with a sandy bridge anyway because it's just to
expensive and it's still too new but it even more black I too the sandy bridge was the fact that
it had this bug and so Intel just was pretty much out of question for me and so I want to
head and I looked again to AMD and as everybody knows AMD is always known for getting a good
bang after your buck so you get good performance for for a good price and this processor is no
different it's actually a very good processor and how I came to purchasing this processor is actually
from a website that I did my research on called a nantec and you can find them at www.anantec.com that's
a and a and d t e c h dot com and I'll provide the link in the show notes now a nantec has been around
if I would say for about a decade or so this I actually use this I actually use a nantec to
put together the PC that I have now the Athlanix P2400 so it's definitely been a good resource
for me for many years and what's interesting some history on a website is that the the guy who
started the website his name is a nantec named after him he started this when he was in
his teens I believe he was about 14 when he started the website and since then it's grown to be a
very respectable and a highly reputable website for just reviews on on on various PC hardware
and even benchmarking and and various opportunities I mean they at now they even cover max
and they they've covered Linux as well but they're very good as far as reviews on hardware they're
very very good and and I've always turned to them for for recommendations on hardware so
this time around is no different I went ahead and I checked out an nantec and what they have they
actually have these these system builder guides that they put out every few months or so and when I
purchased my my phenom to 1965 the review that the the guide that they had out at the time was
actually a it's it's actually the 2010 holiday system builders guide and that link in particular
I'll put in the show notes and they pretty much run the gamut of all the systems with the
components that they recommend are starting from the very low end really budget based system all
the way to the high end take out a second mortgage dream PC so definitely they do some good
coverage on there and and give you some good examples and and a good way to research what would
be some good components without breaking the bank so the one that really was of interest to me
was the AMD budget gaming system and I went with this because I figured if it's a budget
gaming system it's going to be powerful enough to run games assuming this were to be a purchase for
windows it would be powerful enough to run games and and you know not top of the line but still you
can run some decent games that that require the performance and in in that particular
page they they talk about the the 1965 and they actually say that the stock 3.4 gigahertz clock
is already more than fast enough for any games but the black edition which is the one I purchased
and the one they recommended here means you can play around with overclocking without needing to
raise bus or memory speed so it's overclocker friendly I don't find myself looking to overclock
this processor but I did want to get something that was a little more high end that's just my
personal preference but anyway now they also mentioned that Intel does have faster processor
available but for less than $200 it's going to be very difficult to match the performance of the
phenom 2.965 so right there you can you can see that they're giving it a pretty much a good review
and so they have it listed right now as of this recording the processor haven't listed there
for $166 US dollars when I purchased this I purchased it on new egg and it was selling for
$159 US I believe so definitely a good a a good price for this amount of power now this
processor is based on the denneb core and the speed is the 3.4 gigahertz processor
has 4 cores and each of those cores has a 512 kilobite L2 cache and all four of them share
the 6 megabyte L3 cache so pretty pretty powerful stuff there you you're pretty much covered
very good processor from what they say I also by chance just kind of heard on another podcast
called this we can computer hardware yes it's a twitch show but it's it's actually very good
and I recommend it they they do cover a lot of PC hardware there and if you can overlook the
windows stuff and the max stuff they they really do a good job of covering stuff covering the
the hardware and they spoke very highly of this particular processor the 9th the phenom 2.965
now when I after I purchased this I got a dent from somebody on identical tell me to go with
another AMD phenom 2 processor which is the 1090T and that one is actually based on the
fubon core which is newer than this one it's one generation newer now I would have taken
it as advice but the only problem aside from the fact that already purchased the 965 I didn't
feel too bad about it because to be honest the 1090T was about 50 dollars more than I can afford
so if you do have the money if you have $200 to 100 US dollars I don't know how much it is it
would be anywhere else but at least here in the US it'd be about $200 on new egg if you have the
money to spend on it buy it that is another one that a non-tech and this we can computer hardware
also speak highly of so if you can get it that one comes with 6 cores and has a few more features
than this one it has the I believe it has the it's called it's it's it's a feature that's similar
to the turbo boost on the Intel chips so the the the the the the 965 doesn't have that so
if you're into that and it's turbo core and this I'm getting it from Wikipedia and I'll put
that link as well in the show notes where they have a list of all the different
processors from AMD the phenom processors so anyway that the the the the 1090T has that
feature I think that's the only thing that's really missing from the 965 but if it's that important
to you then I guess just go with a 1092 but the the 965 is definitely more than enough and especially
for someone like me coming from an affluent xp2400 plus this is definitely a major upgrade so
you know definitely if if you're looking upgrade I highly recommend this processor if you're
an AMD fan definitely check it out either of the two that I mentioned if you're an Intel fan
you may want to consider this one it's actually very good but if you want to go and tell
the the options already therefore it just be aware of the issue with the sandy bridge at
the moment I don't know if they've actually resolved that issue I don't think they have but
I'd probably hold off on that still very good processor I'm very happy with this purchase
and I hope to be building this very soon as a matter of fact the next episode I'm going to
cover the motherboard that I've chosen and I've already chosen it but until I actually you have
it in my hands I'm not going to record the second episode but I've already done the research
and I will cover that in in the upcoming episode so I hope this has been helpful for you and
and looking at which processor to choose for your upgrade and I hope you'll listen to the next
one where I cover the motherboard if you'd like to send me feedback you can reach me at
Claudio at linuxbasement.com or you can reach me on identica as at Claudio M or on Twitter as
at Claudio M72 and that would be the numbers seven and two and be sure to catch linuxbasement
we record every other Friday night that may change from time to time but usually it's every other
Friday night uh Chad and I we talk about linux we talk about open source software we talk about a
whole bunch of stuff and we have reviews and discussions and you can find the RSS feeds for that
at linuxbasement.com there's also an IRC channel where we announce when the recordings happen live
and that's on IRC.freenote.net hash linuxbasement once again I hope this episode has been very
helpful for you and I hope the following episodes will be just as helpful if not more. Thanks, bye bye.