If you’re looking for a PC right now, chances are you will find yourself bombarded with tons of hardware choices. You’ll be persuaded by the sugar coated mouth of the computer store’s salesman to get hardware specifications which you might not benefit much from it. In fact, most high-mid-end hardwares are overkill for just normal usage like surfing net, e-mails, instant messengers like MSN, Skype, Yahoo Messenger, and gaming like Dota. This is why, you are wasting your money for the extra stuff you never need. And that’s why you always need consultation from any computer geek. If by chance that you don’t get any free advice from your geeky friends, or you don’t even have one, this article is best for you. For those looking to play Crysis2(out next year March), look elsewhere as this article is meant for people looking for best budget desktop computer Tadalis SX 2010 Q3.

AMD Athlon II X3 425

2.7GHz processor running with 3 cores. This is the newest CPU architecture from AMD. Well, not really that new considering it was launched more than a year already. But it was a product that make AMD competitive again at the budget CPU segment. It was actually derived from the AMD Phenom II CPU without the 2MB L3 Cache. What this does was actually sacrificing some performance(on games and multimedia applications mostly) and saving production cost dramatically. But overall, it still fast compared to the older Phenom and Athlon X2 CPU. While you may not see much benefit on the extra 1 core compared to dual core processor, it serves more like future-proof where more applications coming this and next year will take advantage of multicore architecture. Moreover, opening applications at one time like your internet browser(by having few tabs), media player, instant messengers(MSN,Skype,Yahoo),Microsoft Outlook,Word..etc is a smoother experience thanks to the more core count on this Athlon II X3 425. The speed at 2.7GHz is fast enough for normal everyday usage as you definitely won’t notice a difference if it was clocked faster even at 3.7GHz. Price ~ Rm235(USD 73).

2GB DDR3 RAM @ 1333MHz

This is the bare minimum for computers now, be it netbook,notebook or desktop computer. Windows7 is the de-facto Operating System and it uses quite some resources. Very little can you see new computers running with Windows XP. But I still prefer XP for its speed and reliability. The speed for the RAM doesn’t mean very much these days. As far as DDR3 is concern, you’ll see 1066MHz, 1333MHz, 1600MHz and even some enthusiast RAM module rated at 2000MHz. Yeah, it sure does look nice to have a faster speed. But in real world usage – 5% faster performance best case. Some applications Silagra don’t even benefit from the faster clock speed at all. Faster RAM doesn’t make much impact on “” gel the system these days as modern CPUs are very efficient in maximizing the memory bandwidth and lowers the latency as the memory controller is build into the CPU itself. Price ~ RM135(USD 42).

Asus M4A785GTD-V Evo Motherboard

Forget about the newer AMD880G chipset as it was just the AMD785G chipset rebranded as AMD880G minus the core-unlocking features. Anyway, this mobo packed a bunch of features and was priced decently cheap. It was solid as expected from the world no.1 motherboard manufacturer. Features and price much speak for themself.

• Socket AM3
• AMD 785G and SB710 south bridge
• Integrated Radeon HD4200 Graphic Processing Unit(supports OC from 500MHz to 1GHz)
• 4xDDR3 Buy online “” slot, up to 16GB
• 2xPCI express x16 graphic card slot, SLI possible
• 1xPCI express x1 slot
• 3xPCI legacy slot
• 5xSATA2, 1xIDE, 1xe-SATA
• USB2.0, IEEE1394
• Realtek HD codec, support 8-Channel
• Gigabit ethernet
• Price ~ RM345(USD100)

Western Digital 500GB Sata 2

500GB is an overkill for  most basic users. But this is the cheapest and the lowest price per GB hard disk you can find in stores. The 640GB and 1TB are slightly lower in terms of price per Gigabyte. But since we are looking at budget segment, 500GB is the way to go. And ignore the lower capacity ones, as the price per GB for 320GB and 250GB is not justified at its price. Price ~ Rm125(USD 40)

Graphic card

You never need more than the build in GPU(graphic processing unit) on the AMD785G northbridge motherboard chipset. It is actually an ATI Radeon HD4200 class GPU. This GPU is fast enough for light gaming. By overclocking this HD4200, it even matched up to the performance and speed of Nvidia 6800GS or 7300GT DDR3 discreet graphic card. Which means, games like Left4Dead 2, Call of Duty Modern Warfare and Unreal Tournament III setting at medium quality video settings is possible on this chip. This chip is very overclocker friendly which allows you to easily clock 1.0GHz from the default stock speed of 500MHz. That’s a 100% overclock! And don’t worry about frying the chip, it never goes up 45 degrees celcius on a hot sunny day afternoon.  Price? ~ RM 0 (USD 0)

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