February 2009 PC Configuration Guide

Chinese New Year have passed, the non-married people got more notes in their wallets while married couples get a bit lighter wallet. During the last month, Phenom II has been released and it's performance is almost equal or better than Intel Core 2 Quad of the same price. Couple with a cheap AM2+ motherboard, and you get yourself quite a good system. Let's continue to this month's configuration guide.

• 2k pc can play games at 1440*900 or 1280*1024 or 1680*1050 resolution with medium to high settings.
• 3k pc can play games at 1680*1050 or 1920*1080 with medium to high settings

And here's the pc guide for 2k pc (Most items are based on C-zone pricelist as of 5/2/09):

• CPU: AMD Athlon X2 5200+ (2.7GHz) - RM 215
• RAM: Kingston Value RAM DDR2 800MHz 2GB *2 - RM 160
• Motherboard: Albatron KM740G- RM 200
• Hard Drive: Seagate 320GB SATA2 16MB Cache - RM 155
• GPU: Sapphire Radeon HD4830 512MB - RM 380
  
• Optical Drive: LG DVDRW SATA - RM 75
• Monitor: Benq 18.5" G900HD - RM 389
  
• Casing: Cooler Master Elite 340 - RM 125
• PSU: Cooler Master Extreme Power 460W - RM 160
• Keyboard+Mouse: Logitech G1 Gaming Desktop - RM 89
• Speaker: Logitech R5 2.0 - RM 49

Total : RM 1997
Note 1 : Performance of 9800gt and HD4830 are almost the same, so I choose the cheaper of the 2, which is HD4830. The Palit motherboard has disappeared from the list, thus I choose the Albatron KM740G. Even though it has less features, the lower price tag make up for it. Sad news is that the RAM price has increase.

And here's 3k pc guide:

• CPU: AMD Phenom X4 9650 2.3GHz - RM 490
  
• RAM: Kingston Value RAM 2GB DDR2 800MHz * 2 - RM160
• HDD: Western Digital 640GB SATA - RM 220
• Motherboard: Asus M3A78-EM - RM 300
  
• Graphic Card: Palit HD4850 SUPER 512MB DDR3 - RM530
• Optical Drive: LG DVDRW SATA - RM75
• Monitor: Benq 22" LCD (T221W) - RM 545
  
• Speaker: Edifier M1350 2.1 - RM 80
• PSU: OCZ Stealth X Stream- RM319
• Casing: Cooler Master Elite 340- RM 125
  
• Keyboard+Mouse: Logitech G1 Gaming Desktop - RM 89

Total : RM 2933
Note : I changed the motherboard for it's cheaper compared to last month's guide, and changed the PSU for more power.

Recession is still lingering around and we have to take every to reduce unnecessary money output, even on PC configuration. Hope this recession will be leaving us soon :)

Got any opinion about my configuration? Please kindly leave them here :)