Re: I'm a light gamer, so why can't I build something much cheaper?


<portions snipped for brevity>

I do a lot of photo editing [no animation or 3d modeling] and use
programs to encrypt, encode and compress a lot.

Well you'll be wanting a dual core CPU then. Single core Athlon 64s are
available in the LE range and are extremely cheap (like half the price
of the low end dual cores in some cases). However, the extra core will
not cost all that much more in terms of total cost.


So, is it possible to upgrade to a modern system for cheap?

Yes, but that depends where you're starting from. I just did so for
$181AUD using an Athlon 64 X2 4200+, an ASUS M2N-MX SE board (not
recommended unless you're comfortable flashing the BIOS straight away,
judging from many user reports, but there are plenty of others for just
$10 more), and 1GB of DDR2 800. You'll want to add the cost of a mid
range PCI-e video card to that.





I agree...for Photoshop CS/2 CS/3 a dual core cpu is the way to go...
the above mentioned X2 4200+ will do the job fine.

Yes to the PCI-e video

and as for RAM I'd try to use 2gigs.


For any cpu-intensive application that can take advantage of dual cores...
there wil be a very nice boost in performance over a single core. It's well
worth it


.

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