Ideal mobo for AMD Athlon II X4 620

wjdashwood · Post by **wjdashwood** » Mon Sep 21, 2009 3:24 am

Been gone a while but after my current PC decided to die I'm back in research mode for a replacement. Fortunately I'd already got the Athlon II X4 620 on my radar after reading a few very positive reviews, including the possibility of unlocking the L3 cache effectively making it a Phenom. I use my PC for web development (Photoshop, Fireworks, etc) but also do a fair bit of audio/video transcoding in the background, not to mention running various virtual OS installs with VirtualBox, so a budget quad core seems to fit the bill nicely.

I would normally wait for the 600e/605e energy efficient versions but I need to purchase the parts this week and those models don't appear to be available here in the UK. Plus I'm sure they'll go for a much higher price and I'm on a budget here. I can always change the CPU at a later date.

I was all set to go for a AM2+ motherboard but I came across a MSI 785GM-E51 (AM3) on eBuyer for Â£50 and it seems to have great spec. DDR3 RAM on seems to cost Â£10 more but I figure it's worth it for the extra performance. Am I right in thinking it also uses less power?

Given that I'm a bit out of the loop these days I'd welcome anyone's thoughts on what I should buy to pair with this CPU. I'll be using the onboard graphics (hence preferring the 785G chipset), having 4 DIMM slots and lots of USB ports is a big bonus. The bios seems pretty good on the 785GM-E51 too.

Many thanks,
Will

wjdashwood · Post by **wjdashwood** » Tue Sep 22, 2009 12:46 am

In the end I went for the following:

AMD Athlon II X4 620 2.6GHz
MSI 785GM-E51 AMD 785G
OCZ 4GB (2x2GB) DDR3 1333MHz/PC3-10666 Platinum Kit CL7

I'll post how I get on with it later.