Bargains are always a subjective thing for many. That old saying “one man’s trash is another’s treasure” really fits here. But I do know a good deal when I see one, and I’ve taken the liberty to post the most impressive ones I’ve seen this week up here – who knows, maybe you’ll like one?
AMD Phenom X6 1055T AM3 @ R1270 from Prophecy
Edging out all the Llano-based quads and the FX series, here is one of AMD’s most capable chips for under R1300. The Phenom X6 series does a very good job of standing up to Intel’s Core i5 and i7 series, losing out to the newer Sandybridge chips and older high-end Nehalems. While not the speed demon people hoped for, it’s got long enough legs to run around other quad-cores with room to spare. Get a decent cooler and clock this baby up to 3.5Ghz stable and you won’t be thinking of upgrading for a good two years.
It was late on a Thursday night, and I found myself in a bit of a jam. Lacking certain hardware to compete, it looked as though I wouldn’t make it into this year’s qualifier. The deadline for the competition was on the coming Sunday, and I had to resort to desperate measures. A few quick calls, a few credit card numbers later, and I had booked myself a flight down to Cape Town. The reasons for this were simple: there was plenty of hardware in Cape Town, there were other overclockers to bench with in Cape Town, and most important of all, I had never been to Cape Town. I flew down on the Saturday morning and arrived at 9:30AM with one goal – to overclock as much as possible. I was on a tight deadline, my flight back to Johannesburg left at 6:00AM the next day, so every minute counted.
