Okay so I've decided to build my first computer. I'm generally familiar with computers but this will be the first one that I've built completely from the ground up. The purpose is for high-performance computing. I'm not into gaming so I won't need the high-end graphics. I am going to need high processor/bus speeds and large amounts of RAM. My budget is approximately $1250 for the whole thing. I'd like a quad-core processor, so I'm thinking, should I go with AMD or Intel? I'm thinking either the AMD Phenom II X4 965 3.4 GHz or the Intel Core i7 950 Bloomfield 3.06 GHz. I'm not sure which will be better when it comes to true parallelism, i.e., using all four cores for one task as efficiently as possible. I was also investigating DDR3 RAM and I'd of course like to max out my motherboard with RAM but all I could find on newegg.com was 2 sets of 3x4GB that was absurdly expensive (something like $1200 each) which is busting my budget. How much of a benefit is it to go with the DDR3 RAM over the DDR2 RAM?
Thanks in advance for your helpful advice!
Thanks in advance for your helpful advice!