Wish List Puter equipment purchases...

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gamer0004
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Re: Wish List Puter equipment purchases...

Post by gamer0004 »

@AEmer: thinking about buying a new PC/upgrading with a limited budget?

Well here's a few benchmarks. Mind, these are at a resolution of 1920×1080. At lower resolutions (like 800×600), the differences are far more noticeable (as are the differences in any other task, such as video editing, photoshop, encryption/decryption, encoding/decoding &c.) But since next to all screens support 1920×1080 (or at least 1680×1050), performance at this resolution is far more important for a gaming pc.

Tom clancy's HAWX: 84 fps for the X3 450 (99 fps i3 2100; 101 fps i5 2500)
Dirt 3: 82.5 fps for the X3 450 (107.4 fps i3 2100; 113 fps i5 2500)
Crysis 2: 98 fps for the X3 (same for the others)

These were tested using an Ati 5870. Of course, a sufficiently better GPU will lead to a CPU bottleneck... The question is how much better the GPU would have to be. Since the X2 procs in combination with a 5870 already show a clear bottleneck (for instance, achieving only between 62 and 70 fps in Dirt 3), my guess would be that the X3 would bottleneck an 7970 already. Getting an X3 now will work, but it it means you'll have to upgrade the CPU and motherboard next time you'd want to upgrade your videocard (if you get a moderately powerful GPU).
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Re: Wish List Puter equipment purchases...

Post by AEmer »

where did you get them from? and well, the distinctions for those games are completely irrelevant if you game on a lcd.

and I'm not actually looking for anything for myself. My experience suggests that certain games would be limited by an atlon 3x - but I don't know. Dragon Age and DA2 in particular, those I could see being cpu limited, and several others - but I want to see if you can get a difference to show where an Atlon 3x with as high a clock speed as possible gets less than 60 or less than 30 fps when an i5 doesn't, on something like a 7970....because that's the really significant distinction. If you can make it happen, and under what circumstances.

I'm quite curious because it's a lot of money being thrown around on these things, and I don't particularly like the idea of possibly giving bad advice to people.
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gamer0004
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Re: Wish List Puter equipment purchases...

Post by gamer0004 »

Well, CPU intensive games such as GTAIV will probably be limited by an X3 already... Many bas ports are very CPU intensive. But I don't have any data on that unfortunately.
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Re: Wish List Puter equipment purchases...

Post by AEmer »

For the record, I fully support the 6870 recommendation. It looks like a fine card for gaming, and it's really very cheap.

If I had to put together a budget box, I would probably get that, get the AMD Athlon 2 X3 460 (3,4 ghz), and the Asrock 960GM-GS3 FX.
I'd slap in a pair of kingston value ram 2x4gb kit at 1333mhz.

The one place where I wouldn't skimp is the case, the cpu cooler and the PSU. It sounds counter intuitive, but there are massive savings to be had on the other parts; the internal components come out to 323 kr + 337 kr + 625kr + 1204 kr = 2459kr - which converts to 404 AU or 331 euro.

The case and PSU, on the other hand, are the most reuseable parts, and the CPU cooler as well is very reuseable. I'd spent my money on those, because they have much more permanent value.

It's just my personal preference, of course, but if you're going budget, you're implicitly going for 30 fps for singleplayer and 60 fps for multiplayer games - and then you take a hit on the settings for multiplayer, and fiddling with the singleplayer settings till you get a steady 30+.

At this price range, you can change everything inside in a single year if you wanted and _still_ save money year-over-year compared to a lot of alternative setups.

Which, I suppose, is why I wish I knew of a place where people ran benchmarks on budget hardware. Could you potentially, for example, go for broke and get a 7950 and enjoy amazing framerates? In which games could you do this? And which games would it have trouble with. Does the advanced cache and architecture of the phenom or i5 actually matter for games if you're playing with vsync anyway?
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Re: Wish List Puter equipment purchases...

Post by bobby 55 »

I was thinking budget to be up and running faster. Now though, I've almost decided on fore-going gaming until I have a decent rig.

Along with a decent case, PSU and CPU cooling, wouldn't a pretty good motherboard make upgrading easier? If I bought all that (currently that'd take a bit of time), I might as well wait until a good processor and card could be purchased.
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Re: Wish List Puter equipment purchases...

Post by AEmer »

well, yes. I'm a big believer in getting hassle-free equipment that runs well, but I see the value of money too.
What I figure is, I sit in front of my computer 8 hours a day every day, and it handles all my information and all my solo-entertainment. Therefore I figure it oughta be good.

I've found out that I don't want to worry about the PSU being able to run things decently; I don't want noisy fans, and I don't want to mess around inside the case too often.
I want to be able to quadruple the performance of my PC whenever I upgrade my videocard, and I only want my other components to perform so well that my videocard is still the limit throughout its lifetime, because anything else is patently unnecessary to me.

In a certain sense, this policy has been good to me. I've run a videocard for 3 years, easily, and it still provides a solid experience in all my games. And I had a motherboard for 5 years.

Those were, all things considered, valid and valuable investments.
If you get an intel i5 processor, it might actually last you 6 years, and if you get a great videocard, it'll absolutely last 3. But you cannot ever upgrade the processor without the mainboard if it's intel, and you can only upgrade the processor with AMD if you're fortunate.

On the flip side, if you pay half the price for the internals then you have that same money for new internals in 3 years, and usually, they should outperform the current top parts. You're also a lot less in trouble if something breaks.

I write usually, because hardware is hella difficult to figure out right now; video card advancement is distinctly slowing down. If that's the case, prices will drop slower.
Over all, I'd recommend getting a good rig rather than a budget one, assuming you make a decent living. I would actually recommend that i5, and if you can stick it out till nvidia releases their next series, and the prices will drop, I'd even get the 7950 or the equivalent nvidia card. I'd also recommend you get an intel SSD for the system drive.

But that's a rig that's 3 times as expensive as the budget box when looking at the price of the internals, and you need a decent case and psu on top. It'll cost ya.
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Re: Wish List Puter equipment purchases...

Post by bobby 55 »

AEmer wrote:

But that's a rig that's 3 times as expensive as the budget box when looking at the price of the internals, and you need a decent case and psu on top. It'll cost ya.
http://www.harveynorman.com.au/thermalt ... tower.html :lol:

Seriously, you make sense. If I gather up the courage to build it myself at least I'll have a couple of months to watch instructional "how to" videos. I think installing and correctly connecting the power will cause me the most angst. Oh, and if the last few weeks have taught me anything, the least number of times you have to open up the case the better. Quoting Jack from One flew over the Cuckoos Nest: I'm with ya a hunrid percent.
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Hashi
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Re: Wish List Puter equipment purchases...

Post by Hashi »

I have a p4 puter. Am I considered retro?
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Re: Wish List Puter equipment purchases...

Post by bobby 55 »

Fantastic news just in, although it does seem a bit strange. The brother-inlaw has the computer he loaned me running. He claims the graphics card was a little loose and that the power and fans are working. He's going to run it for a couple of days and if all is well then it's mine for the price of a monitor he purchased. I don't know if he's being kind but shouldn't it at least have booted to post even if the card was loose?

Anyhoo, with a decent card it'll be a pretty sweet rig.
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Re: Wish List Puter equipment purchases...

Post by EER »

If the card is loose and the motherboard does not detect a video card, I wouldn't expect anything to fly except perhaps a couple beeps from the bios.
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bobby 55
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Re: Wish List Puter equipment purchases...

Post by bobby 55 »

Cheers, I probably knocked it loose after moving cables when checking to see if there were loose pins/connections. I've since read that if your PC doesn't boot, try reseating things first...d'oh. :)
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Re: Wish List Puter equipment purchases...

Post by AEmer »

uh...yeah. Sorry for not bringing that one up, it's actually something I've experienced myself.

My PC debugging support really needs a checklists.
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Re: Wish List Puter equipment purchases...

Post by bobby 55 »

AEmer wrote:uh...yeah. Sorry for not bringing that one up, it's actually something I've experienced myself.

My PC debugging support really needs a checklists.
No worries. I have done a lot of investigating since the computer went belly up and there are numerous kerfuffles with very similar symptons. I'm still not convinced it's that simple but the brother inlaw will be running it over the next few days as I mentioned, whether he stress tests it or not I'm unsure about.
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bobby 55
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Re: Wish List Puter equipment purchases...

Post by bobby 55 »

The brother inlaw just emailed me about the PC. He's sent it to the shop as it finally only *booted halfway. He's going to let me know how it turns out.

* His words.

In the meantime I have this in mind when I get enough cash together, and if the brother inlaw decides to sell the PC. It may not be future proof but it's not too expensive, while being solid enough for what I want.

Chassis: CoolerMaster Storm Enforcer
Processor: AMD Phenom II X4 965 3.4GHZ Black Edition
CPU Cooling: CoolerMaster Hyper 212
Motherboard: Asus M4A88TD-M AM3 880G
Graphics: AMD Radeon HD 6970
Memory: Skill RipjawsX (2x 4GB) DDR3-1333MHz
Hard Disk: Western Digital 1TB SATA3
Power Supply: OCZ ModXstream Pro 600W Modular
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AEmer
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Re: Wish List Puter equipment purchases...

Post by AEmer »

- Get as many GHZ on the phenom processor as you can afford.
- You can probably make do with a 6950
- I'd recommend buying kingston valueram because they always bloody work.
- Make sure that the Western Digital disk is a WD Caviar Black
- I would recommend the cheapest PSU that'll fit in your case from the 650w+ (or just one of the psu's with exactly 650 watt) category on this list:
http://www.silentpcreview.com/Recommended_PSUs

Gold or silver, it doesn't really matter. The list doesn't include the Corsair TX650 which I have personal experience with, and which is a good PSU also.

And this is the list of cases I would recommend:
http://www.silentpcreview.com/article75-page5.html

Again, pay special attention to the fractal design R3 and the Antec Solo.

The R3 is my current favorite, but another one that looks really good is the P280. Of course, the Silverstone Fortress is the best case there is within any kind of reasonable budget, but it's still very expensive.
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