streetlightman

Hey everyone,

I'm looking to build a new computer for my aunt. Money is an issue and I'm looking to keep the price under $350.

I'm going to get an mATX AMD board with an Athlon II X4 620. I have two board choices in mind already:

This ASRock board
and this Gigabyte

The reason I'm up in the air about this is because of the RAM slots on these. The Gigabyte has 4 slots and the ASRock only has 2. My aunt is not a heavy user at all and gaming is certainly not an issue. she is going to be using Windows 7 Home Premium. I'm trying to keep the cost down because RAM is kind of expensive. I already have 2GB (2x1GB) that I'm going to give her.

So here's my question(s):

1. do you think 2GB is sufficent for Windows 7? I've been using it for a while now and I notice its always around 1.3-1.7 usage but I know if you only have 2gb when it gets up near 1.7, things start to slow down.

2. if I get the ASRock and get 1 2GB stick and put it in with a 1GB stick, will there be a noticeable drop in speed because it won't be in dual channel mode

3. if anyone has any suggestions about components they'd use let me know

thanks!

FREELINE57

Let's see gigabyte has the 710 chipset 4 ram slots for future upgrade. The ASRock cheaper with two ram slots and assuming the os will be 32bit and only gonna be used for surffing and email.......ASRock should be your pick.
Also instead of 1 2gb stick why not get a 2 x 1gb duel channel, she should not need more than 2gb for just surffing.

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Craiga35

Yes I agree, go with cheaper ASrock. Vista/7 uses a system called prefetching which loads your most used programs into the RAM at startup, but it only loads a certain amount dependent on the amount available. Also I ran 64-bit with 2GB and I was fine, no slowdowns or anything it never got to more than 1.3GB usage. I believe there is always a sweet spot in an operating system with the amount of RAM, anything less will be slow, anything more is just for multitasking and/or certain applications.

I found that in XP it was 512Mb, because my mothers computer had 256Mb and as soon as I threw in another 256Mb it flew.

In 7/Vista I found it to be 2Gb because my brother's laptop was fine until he started getting BSOD's and it turned out to be one of his sticks of RAM which dropped him from 2Gb down to 1Gb and Vista slowed noticeably.

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streetlightman

thanks guys!

5ILVgeARX

Why not this Asrock board?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813157154

Its on sale for $59.99 and has 710SB that can unlock some selected amd cpus

don't you think its better to have AMD cpu and AMD IGP?

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