Cleaning, cleaning, cleaning…
Recently, I started spring cleaning my hard drive. Vista to be exact because I am only cleaning up Vista services, startup programs, temporary files, updating drivers, cleaning registry keys as well as defragmenting. If you had read some of my articles before, I strongly recommend CCleaner as the cleaning software. At the time I wrote the article, it did not offer the support for Vista but it is now.
I cleaned up bits and pieces of Vista left over by some old installations of programs and did a defragmentation using Power Defragmenter. I was quite keen on trying the Defraggler, defragmenter software created by the same company that creates CCleaner. In the end, I still used Power Defragmenter because I can run the program straight from the executable file without installing it.
AMD Motherboard Players
Currently, there are only two motherboard chipset manufacturers for AMD processor; AMD itself and Nvidia. The latest chipset model by AMD is 790 series while for Nvidia, it is 8300 chipset. Since reading the reviews, there are a lot of bad experiences with AMD motherboard controllers while Nvidia seems to be less problematic.
Asus M3N78-EM
Processor: AMD Athlon 64 X2 7750
Motherboard: Asus M3N78-VM
RAM: OCZ 2GB (2X1GB) Dual Channel PC2-6400
Casing: Antec NSK 2480 with 380W PSU
Hard Drive: Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 500GB
For now, I will talk on the reasons that I choose the AMD Athlon 64 X2 7750 processor. I used to dislike AMD processor but hey, they have improved over the years and more and more users are turning their attention to AMD processors when building new personal computers.
Price
I must say that I am attracted by the price. Even though AMD performance is still a bit behind Intel when it comes to benchmarking similar processors but it is the price that differentiate both of them. AMD Athlon 64 X2 7750 is a dual core processor at 2.7GHz each with Phenom (AMD Quad Core processor) technology and it supports DDR2 RAM at 1066MHz. It comes with a £55 - £65 price tag. With almost the same processor speed, Intel Core 2 Duo E7400 will cost about £100. The latter may be faster but price makes a difference.
