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Anyone here a tech head? I'm looking at giving my computer an overhaul and its been a long time since I looked at CPU/motherboard's. Anyone have any insight into a good CPU for around $100. What chipsets should I look for? Is there any advantage of going intel over AMD these days?

intel is definitely the front runner for processors nowadays.. but amd cpus have better built in graphics, since they acquired ati. depends what you'll be using it for, whether you'll be adding a video card too. either will be fine for most uses.

I have a decent video card. I will be using it mostly for research and a bit for gaming (when the research is going poorly). I do a lot of data mining in my research, sometimes running code for days. Would you suggest a bigger bus or higher clock speed (since that looks like the trade off when it comes to price).

mgc wrote:I have a decent video card. I will be using it mostly for research and a bit for gaming (when the research is going poorly). I do a lot of data mining in my research, sometimes running code for days. Would you suggest a bigger bus or higher clock speed (since that looks like the trade off when it comes to price).

just depends on what you are doing. if you are doing more desktop related functions such as multiple applications and automated number crunching then I would go with a higher clock speed.
Most games don't support multiple CPU cores so if you are doing more gaming then a faster bus would be better.

Personally I chose faster front side buses and less cores with higher clock speeds.

mgc wrote:I have a decent video card. I will be using it mostly for research and a bit for gaming (when the research is going poorly). I do a lot of data mining in my research, sometimes running code for days. Would you suggest a bigger bus or higher clock speed (since that looks like the trade off when it comes to price).

At the price point you are looking at both AMD and Intel are viable options, Intel only clearly pulls away after $150 or so. What video card do you have? If it is the same speed or slower than a modern AMD fusion chip they can save a lot of money in electricity. However Intel CPUs on their own are more power efficient than AMD these days so if you are running dedicated graphics an Intel CPU would be better in that respect.

In terms of bus vs clock speed things just aren't as simple as they used to be. The old North/Southbridge architectures are long since obsolete and increasingly things are being streamlined with simpler and faster paths. More and more is done with L2/L3 caches, all modern chips have built in memory controls, there isn't any longer one simple unified FSB like the days of yore. Also data mining easily could be more I/O bound than CPU bound, depending on your workload. An SSD could be a much better place to put your money than a CPU. Also your workload might be simple enough for GPU processing which is often orders of magnitude faster than even the best CPUs. I would look into CUDA/OpenCL for your workload, if I were you.

No one can really get any more specific unless you can provide far more info about your data processing tools. Are they heavily multi-threaded or bound to a single core? Are they running complex high level operations or are they/could they be heavily simplified? Are your tools hitting the disk or the ram harder than the CPU? You see the issues with answering your questions, right?

Thanks, since I posted this I think I have been getting my head around the new architectures. I think a SSD would probably be the best option for me right now. In the short run I am going to overclock my current AMD and run it into the ground, then worry about what to upgrade to. I am in no hurry and it should me a boost while I figure out what best fits my needs. Plus I will probably have more money to toss at something better in six months time.

Thanks for the input.