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When using this resource, please read FragKrag's opening post. The Tech Support forum regulars have helped create countless of desktop systems without any compensation. The least you can do is provide all of the information required for them to help you properly. |
What is your budget?
600. the budget is really unknown. its for my brothe, who hasnt even asked his mother yet but this is what he wants for christmas. if possible maybe take all the information ive given you and make as budget friendly as possible .
What is your resolution?
1920X1080
What are you using it for?
gaming. video recording games and streaming them. want to make montages of xbox 360/pc games.
What is your upgrade cycle?
5 years maybe
When do you plan on building it?
christmas time
Do you plan on overclocking?
no.
Do you need an Operating System?
no
Do you plan to add a second GPU for SLI or Crossfire?
whatever is necessary honestly
Where are you buying your parts from?
newegg/microcenter
my little brother wants to build a new computer well wants me to build him one but i need a list of parts in order to do so. im not sure entirely what he needs to accomplish this, the budget may evenbe higher than what he can get as he hasn't even asked mom yet so who knows how much she is willing to spend on the spoiled kid. but thanks for your help :D
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On December 04 2012 03:35 Izzo wrote:Hey guys. I'm planning on getting a new computer. I emailed one of my local retaillers for an offer. Basically I just told them to build a solid comp around a geforce 680 that falls between 1k-1.5k budget. Below is what they emailed me. So as a components 'newb' I don't know if their suggested setup is good or are they trying to cash out on me on some parts. Can I get opinions on this setup? What parts would you change and why? This is a gamer computer. It doesn't have a hard drive because I'm taking that from my old computer (it's only 3 months old). I also have windows 7 pro 64bit. + Show Spoiler +Intel Core i5-3570K, 4 x 3.40GHz, 77W, boxed 217,00€
Kingston ValueRAM DIMM 8GB PC3-10667U CL9 (DDR3-1333) 39,90€
Kingston ValueRAM DIMM 8GB PC3-10667U CL9 (DDR3-1333) 39,90€
Samsung SSD 840 Basic 120GB, 2.5", SATA 6Gb/s 104,90€
Super Flower Golden Green Pro 650W 89,80€
LG GH24NS DVD-RW 20,90€
Thermalright HR-02 Macho Rev.A (BW) 41,80€
BitFenix Shinobi Core Window, black, 62,90€
ASRock Z77 Extreme4, Z77 134,90€
Gigabyte GeForce GTX 680 OC, 2GB 499,00€
Scythe Slip Stream 120mm 1200rpm 7,50€
Scythe Slip Stream 120mm 1200rpm 7,50€
Scythe Slip Stream 120mm 1200rpm 7,50€
They did quite well by you. There's a few parts I'd quibble with here and there (I'd go for 2x4gb of ram rather than 2x8gb, get a 450w instead of 650w PSU and less case fans, and the DVD_burner is a bit expensive). But then I'd also go with a 670 or 79XX rather than a 680 just because the minor performance increase of the 680 doesn't really seem worth the large price increase.
But that's quibbling again. In general they're being pretty cost-efficient with the parts they picked out (while staying on the high end of performance). And they didn't try to max out your budget, which is a pretty good indicator of good faith business practice.
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On December 04 2012 05:27 aBstractx wrote:
What is your budget?
600. the budget is really unknown. its for my brothe, who hasnt even asked his mother yet but this is what he wants for christmas. if possible maybe take all the information ive given you and make as budget friendly as possible .
What is your resolution?
1920X1080
What are you using it for?
gaming. video recording games and streaming them. want to make montages of xbox 360/pc games.
What is your upgrade cycle?
5 years maybe
When do you plan on building it?
christmas time
Do you plan on overclocking?
no.
Do you need an Operating System?
no
Do you plan to add a second GPU for SLI or Crossfire?
whatever is necessary honestly
Where are you buying your parts from?
newegg/microcenter
my little brother wants to build a new computer well wants me to build him one but i need a list of parts in order to do so. im not sure entirely what he needs to accomplish this, the budget may evenbe higher than what he can get as he hasn't even asked mom yet so who knows how much she is willing to spend on the spoiled kid. but thanks for your help :D
It's pretty impossible to be specific about parts when you're not really close to the purchase date (specials change weekly) and the purpose the computer will be put to (what games, programs, possibility of streaming, etc.).
Suffice it to say you should be able to do what you want, with how fancy/powerful the computer is depending on budget constraints. Depending on budget, you'll be looking at:
or an i5-3470 (or thereabouts) + cheap mobo (less capable processors could reduce the cost further, this suggestion is based on the desire to stream)
+ case, hard drive, ram, etc
+ a video card filling the rest of the budget
7770
7850
7950
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On December 04 2012 05:27 aBstractx wrote:
What is your budget?
600. the budget is really unknown. its for my brothe, who hasnt even asked his mother yet but this is what he wants for christmas. if possible maybe take all the information ive given you and make as budget friendly as possible .
What is your resolution?
1920X1080
What are you using it for?
gaming. video recording games and streaming them. want to make montages of xbox 360/pc games.
What is your upgrade cycle?
5 years maybe
When do you plan on building it?
christmas time
Do you plan on overclocking?
no.
Do you need an Operating System?
no
Do you plan to add a second GPU for SLI or Crossfire?
whatever is necessary honestly
Where are you buying your parts from?
newegg/microcenter
my little brother wants to build a new computer well wants me to build him one but i need a list of parts in order to do so. im not sure entirely what he needs to accomplish this, the budget may evenbe higher than what he can get as he hasn't even asked mom yet so who knows how much she is willing to spend on the spoiled kid. but thanks for your help :D
You could make an APU build that'd be perfectly capable for your brother and any modern game for easily under $300, if not around $200. Would you be interested in buying parts used to save more money? Many (most?) components' warranties go by serial number, so even if you buy them used, you can still RMA/return them if there's an issue. I think every component I've seen is like that, though not sure...
I'm just asking, some people don't know what they need. Would you rather spend your $600 and get the best performance per that price, or would you rather save as much money as possible for a build that'll work very well for your needs, or maybe even willing to sacrifice a few things (high graphics instead of ultra, play on low, etc).
Streaming requires quadcore, so your going to have to go with an APU (very cheap), AMD Phenom ii x4, or i5 (most expensive, way too powerful for today's games, but is appreciably better in streaming and its within your budget).
I mean your looking at almost half price used for a lot of things used, that will still be covered under warranty. Just asking because you sound a bit... hostile towards your brother.
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5930 Posts
i5 is really the golden grail but it's too much power per value to justify, or rather, the value per cost of the chip is much lower than i3/phenom ii/pentium/athlon ii. imo i5 only worthwhile if your streaming and/or overclocking and you really need the extra power, ie your an enthusiast overclocker with very expensive and high end cooling, your a partnered streamer, or you just need the absolute best. But the average gamer, even average streamer with no/few regular viewers, there's little reason to buy it over amd/i3. It's not like it costs over $600 to build an i5 system so whatever.
As I posted in another thread (or was it this one), this is utterly, utterly wrong. I mean I have enough issues with you going on about how you can stream at 720P with an Phenom II because you seem to forget that you're definitely not running the game at resolutions most people play at. This is Battlefield 3 multiplayer performance with a bunch of different CPUs:
![[image loading]](http://h6.abload.de/img/i70m.png)
Its still a game by game basis (like you can play CS:GO with an APU) but a lot of games do benefit from single threaded performance as well as core count. Keep in mind you've got a HD6990 running the game at medium, most people don't even have anything close to that amount of power and performance is going to take a further hit if they want to play it on high settings.
Unlike the majority of benchmarks by review sites, these guys actually played multiplayer instead of single player. This is where CPU performance does actually matter, I was wondering why those benchmarks you posted showed zero difference between CPUs considering we know for a fact that Frostbite is multicore aware.
Any simulation or any game has a robust AI/pathing/physics algorithm is going to need a beefy CPU...basically all big budget games have at least one of these things whether it be your third party sandbox game or your Total War game or your flight simulator game. And those very games are going to benefit greatly from core count, if not already, as well as single threaded performance.
An i5 is hardly overkill and its by far the sweet spot CPU for current and future. Yes future, we basically know DICE is going 64 bit only in 2013 and we can expect most developers to do so too since PCs are back in vogue again. Many games are also starting to use many cores and frankly the only reason the i3 is relevant is because of its single threaded performance.
Again, you buy parts depending on what you want to play but i5s are hardly "enthusiast" parts...I mean for crying out loud the Dell Optiplex desktops in Universities are packing i3/i5 processors.
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Yeah, BF3 in multiplayer is actually decent at handling 6, even 8 'cores', which is evident by 8150 and Phenom X6 being equal/superior to 2500k.
Reason why people don't test multiplayer is generally because of inaccuracy (even in that test - the exact same gameplay can't be used obviously) but mainly lack of time. From what I remember, going through BF3 in multiplayer took a couple of days even though they only played 10 minutes for each CPU. 4 cores will be standard to program for when the new consoles are out, since even lazy ports should be acceptable with x86 on all platforms.
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On December 04 2012 10:17 Womwomwom wrote:Show nested quote +i5 is really the golden grail but it's too much power per value to justify, or rather, the value per cost of the chip is much lower than i3/phenom ii/pentium/athlon ii. imo i5 only worthwhile if your streaming and/or overclocking and you really need the extra power, ie your an enthusiast overclocker with very expensive and high end cooling, your a partnered streamer, or you just need the absolute best. But the average gamer, even average streamer with no/few regular viewers, there's little reason to buy it over amd/i3. It's not like it costs over $600 to build an i5 system so whatever. As I posted in another thread (or was it this one), this is utterly, utterly wrong. I mean I have enough issues with you going on about how you can stream at 720P with an Phenom II because you seem to forget that you're definitely not running the game at resolutions most people play at. This is Battlefield 3 multiplayer performance with a bunch of different CPUs: Its still a game by game basis (like you can play CS:GO with an APU) but a lot of games do benefit from single threaded performance as well as core count. Keep in mind you've got a HD6990 running the game at medium, most people don't even have anything close to that amount of power and performance is going to take a further hit if they want to play it on high settings. Unlike the majority of benchmarks by review sites, these guys actually played multiplayer instead of single player. This is where CPU performance does actually matter, I was wondering why those benchmarks you posted showed zero difference between CPUs considering we know for a fact that Frostbite is multicore aware. Any simulation or any game has a robust AI/pathing/physics algorithm is going to need a beefy CPU...basically all big budget games have at least one of these things whether it be your third party sandbox game or your Total War game or your flight simulator game. And those very games are going to benefit greatly from core count, if not already, as well as single threaded performance. An i5 is hardly overkill and its by far the sweet spot CPU for current and future. Yes future, we basically know DICE is going 64 bit only in 2013 and we can expect most developers to do so too since PCs are back in vogue again. Many games are also starting to use many cores and frankly the only reason the i3 is relevant is because of its single threaded performance. Again, you buy parts depending on what you want to play but i5s are hardly "enthusiast" parts...I mean for crying out loud the Dell Optiplex desktops in Universities are packing i3/i5 processors.
I can stream fine if I play on a much larger resolution, I'm streaming at 720, which is what most people do. And I never talked about my Phenom's ability to stream, only my Athlon system (although obviously a phenom will stream much better if it's got an extra ghz of speed and an L3 cache). In H264 encoding performance, the Phenom and Athlon are more in-line with an i5 than a pentium or i3.
Intel is obviously better for gaming, but does 5-10 fps matter when a pentium/athlon is going to get 45+ fps.
I used a beta benchmark, since BF3's beta was multiplayer only (and if anything, would be less optimized due to programming, patches, and worse drivers).
Show me any game where the i5 has over a 100% performance increase over the Phenom x4 - after all it's over 200% more expensive. I'd hardly call that the sweet spot in terms of value. And I'm not arguing that the i5 is not a noticeable increase in performance, or isn't the best gaming/streaming CPU to buy. But the value is relatively terrible if your ONLY gaming, and for pure performance, it is more often not a significant increase in performance.
![[image loading]](http://static.techspot.com/articles-info/448/bench/CPU_02.png)
The game obviously needs quadcore and is optimized for multi-core, but an AM3 phenom and i3 will handle multiplayer fine.
Most importantly, the i3 barely outperforms a stock phenom. Overclock it and for the sub $200 price point, Phenom is the way to go. The i5 is of course better, and it's got more than noticeable performance increase, but it's not significant, and it's almost 3 times the price. If you want the best, go for it, it's not a bad buy by any means.
I'm simply saying that sub$150 CPUs, and even $50-100 CPUs, will play modern games very well. They won't perform as well as a CPU 3-4 times the price, but that's pretty obvious.
A google search, anyways, will show plenty of people play BF3 on phenom x4 on high resolutions, high graphics, high fps.
http://battlelog.battlefield.com/bf3/forum/threadview/2832654489624211154/
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Yeah, BF3 in multiplayer is actually decent at handling 6, even 8 'cores', which is evident by 8150 and Phenom X6 being equal/superior to 2500k.
Reason why people don't test multiplayer is generally because of inaccuracy (even in that test - the exact same gameplay can't be used obviously) but mainly lack of time. From what I remember, going through BF3 in multiplayer took a couple of days even though they only played 10 minutes for each CPU. 4 cores will be standard to program for when the new consoles are out, since even lazy ports should be acceptable with x86 on all platforms.
A lot of benchmarks run single player which does not stress the CPU at all in a large, 64 player environment like BF3 multiplayer is. Most benchmarks out there are total shit, such as almost everything by frozencpu and tomshardware. I trust hardocp the most but they dont really have many CPU benchmarks for BF3.
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Yeah, Sweclockers is actually one of the best resources benchmark graphs, as they spend a lot of time weighing relevancy with amount of data. What is lacking in technical explanations (which Anand is a lot better at) is being made up by throughout testing (for example double checking results, redoing tests as firmware and drivers are released and keeping relevant hardware and titles to test with). A lot of time sites (ex Tomshardware) have a lot of data, but basically useless data, as it cover outdated games, very biased titles and frame caps, bottlenecks etc. Like for example, a while ago a lot of sites were using Crysis 2 for benchmarking seriously, which was extremely retarded due to the whole game being a showcase for Nvidia tessellation technique. Sites following the "guidelines" of for example Nvidia and AMD that is being sent with review samples are either just stupid or taking bribes.
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Haven't heard of them, that's interesting. Maybe i5 has more value than I'm letting on. But still, the Phenom x4 works smoothly, just like a pentium will, and has better performance per dollar than the i5. I'm sure the i5 can be an appreciable increase in performance (and if it's overclocked, it's a million times better, obviously), but not everyone can afford an i5, and quite frankly many people don't need it. I'd always recommend an i5 for streaming, but if you really don't have the money, the phenom is something that works and you won't be dissapointed by.
Basically, i5 for streaming and/or overclocking and/or the absolute best of the best irregardless of value, i3 generally, pentium or APU for budget, and phenom/athlon for budget streaming and overclocking.
xbit and vortez seem to be pretty good sites though, and anadtech. and hardocp.
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5930 Posts
Show me any game where the i5 has over a 100% performance increase over the Phenom x4 - after all it's over 200% more expensive. I'd hardly call that the sweet spot in terms of value. And I'm not arguing that the i5 is not a noticeable increase in performance, or isn't the best gaming/streaming CPU to buy. But the value is relatively terrible if your ONLY gaming, and for pure performance, it is more often not a significant increase in performance.
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/cpus/2012/05/01/intel-core-i5-3570k-cpu-review/6
Even though there can be just about a 100% performance difference in Shogun Total War, that's ignoring the point. If you don't care about huge FPS dips and stuttering, you're better off buying a console and a cheap computer to do whatever. At least developers are good enough to understand the limitations of the console and work around it with variable resolution tricks and whatever. A lot that care about what they're doing have gotten especially good at squeezing blood from a rock. Have you seen The Witcher 2 on the Xbox 360? I reckon it looks and performs better than what most entry level desktop systems could muster.
Hey I can definitely say that I can get fairly smooth gameplay in BF3 multiplayer on my i5 750 but that's definitely not the case on larger maps. I know for a fact that you can't get stable 60 FPS in multi player/single player with the specs they have, Eurogamer did a benchmark of upper midrange GPUs showing that is utterly false so I have no idea what magic they're casting on their systems.
So Shogun Total War is one. I suspect Stalker Call of Pripyat with the Complete mod won't be all that smooth (i.e. no stutter, not talking about FPS) on a system with weak single threaded performance because I know it definitely isn't silky smooth with an overclocked i5 750. Same goes for Arma 2 with the Day Z mod. I imagine there is a decent gulf between older generation processors and current generation processors in something like Anno 1404. There are a lot of games that need a decent CPU to push good, stable FPS. Which games are they? They're games with heavy physics or AI components, which is becoming increasingly important.
Then we've got games with the Witcher 2 where there is quite a significant gulf between a stock i5 2500k and a stock Phenom II X4 980, which is good if you want to maintain a smooth experience. Skyrim within cities is also extremely CPU intensive and most benchmarks show a significant gulf between the i5s and the old Phenom II processors...and even more so if you go get a bunch of relevant mods. Dark Souls is another one that needs an extremely beefy CPU if you don't want to deal with stuttering and frame dropping.
Value isn't terrible if you are playing games that can harness that potential and you're not destitute. Its the sweet spot processor for gaming...if you don't know, sweet spot means best bang for your buck, I think just about everyone besides you agree that it is. Especially since the 45nm SOI AMD processors have all been EOLed this month and you quite literally can't find them in Australia anymore.
Edit:
I'm also ignoring emulators like Dolphin and because its an emulator, you want to keep FPS as stable as possible to prevent shit like slowdown.
The sweet spot CPU does not limit you in what you want to do, provided you even wanted to do these things in the first place. That's why its the sweet spot. It give you pretty much complete freedom now and in the near future and you get a relatively smooth experience you cannot get on a console.
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Womwomwom made several excellent points. Fantastic post.
I like to simplify it this way:
For games, sometimes a Phenom II x4 will do just as well as an i5-3570k. Othertimes the i5-3570k will provide superior real-world performance. In all situations the i5-3570k will be as good or better. So if the price difference is not a significant hurdle for the buyer, they'd be fools to go with a Phenom II x4.
(We'll leave for another day whether a gamer for whom price difference IS a significant problem would prefer a Phenom II x4 or the even cheaper Sandy Bridge Pentiums.)
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On December 04 2012 14:56 Belial88 wrote:Show nested quote +On December 04 2012 10:17 Womwomwom wrote:i5 is really the golden grail but it's too much power per value to justify, or rather, the value per cost of the chip is much lower than i3/phenom ii/pentium/athlon ii. imo i5 only worthwhile if your streaming and/or overclocking and you really need the extra power, ie your an enthusiast overclocker with very expensive and high end cooling, your a partnered streamer, or you just need the absolute best. But the average gamer, even average streamer with no/few regular viewers, there's little reason to buy it over amd/i3. It's not like it costs over $600 to build an i5 system so whatever. As I posted in another thread (or was it this one), this is utterly, utterly wrong. I mean I have enough issues with you going on about how you can stream at 720P with an Phenom II because you seem to forget that you're definitely not running the game at resolutions most people play at. This is Battlefield 3 multiplayer performance with a bunch of different CPUs: Its still a game by game basis (like you can play CS:GO with an APU) but a lot of games do benefit from single threaded performance as well as core count. Keep in mind you've got a HD6990 running the game at medium, most people don't even have anything close to that amount of power and performance is going to take a further hit if they want to play it on high settings. Unlike the majority of benchmarks by review sites, these guys actually played multiplayer instead of single player. This is where CPU performance does actually matter, I was wondering why those benchmarks you posted showed zero difference between CPUs considering we know for a fact that Frostbite is multicore aware. Any simulation or any game has a robust AI/pathing/physics algorithm is going to need a beefy CPU...basically all big budget games have at least one of these things whether it be your third party sandbox game or your Total War game or your flight simulator game. And those very games are going to benefit greatly from core count, if not already, as well as single threaded performance. An i5 is hardly overkill and its by far the sweet spot CPU for current and future. Yes future, we basically know DICE is going 64 bit only in 2013 and we can expect most developers to do so too since PCs are back in vogue again. Many games are also starting to use many cores and frankly the only reason the i3 is relevant is because of its single threaded performance. Again, you buy parts depending on what you want to play but i5s are hardly "enthusiast" parts...I mean for crying out loud the Dell Optiplex desktops in Universities are packing i3/i5 processors. I can stream fine if I play on a much larger resolution, I'm streaming at 720, which is what most people do. And I never talked about my Phenom's ability to stream, only my Athlon system (although obviously a phenom will stream much better if it's got an extra ghz of speed and an L3 cache). In H264 encoding performance, the Phenom and Athlon are more in-line with an i5 than a pentium or i3. Intel is obviously better for gaming, but does 5-10 fps matter when a pentium/athlon is going to get 45+ fps. I used a beta benchmark, since BF3's beta was multiplayer only (and if anything, would be less optimized due to programming, patches, and worse drivers). Show me any game where the i5 has over a 100% performance increase over the Phenom x4 - after all it's over 200% more expensive. I'd hardly call that the sweet spot in terms of value. And I'm not arguing that the i5 is not a noticeable increase in performance, or isn't the best gaming/streaming CPU to buy. But the value is relatively terrible if your ONLY gaming, and for pure performance, it is more often not a significant increase in performance. The game obviously needs quadcore and is optimized for multi-core, but an AM3 phenom and i3 will handle multiplayer fine. Most importantly, the i3 barely outperforms a stock phenom. Overclock it and for the sub $200 price point, Phenom is the way to go. The i5 is of course better, and it's got more than noticeable performance increase, but it's not significant, and it's almost 3 times the price. If you want the best, go for it, it's not a bad buy by any means. I'm simply saying that sub$150 CPUs, and even $50-100 CPUs, will play modern games very well. They won't perform as well as a CPU 3-4 times the price, but that's pretty obvious. A google search, anyways, will show plenty of people play BF3 on phenom x4 on high resolutions, high graphics, high fps. http://battlelog.battlefield.com/bf3/forum/threadview/2832654489624211154/
Technically, the i5 is 100% more expensive, not 200% more expensive. That would be 3x the price. 100% more expensive is price + that price again, i.e. two times more expensive. The i5 3470 is 199.99 and an x4 955 is 94.99. So I guess more than 100% but it's like 104% or something. And an i5-3570k would be like ~115-120% more expensive I guess.
You also aren't taking into account power draw etc. Phenom II draws like almost twice as much power as IVB. Sure it might not matter eventually (I'm not sure how much 40-60W costs money wise, and obv it depends on electricity in your area) but it would add up.
Thought I'd just point that out. I can't really make any arguments better than what's already been said.
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Need an opinion. My friend is looking to get 2 sapphire radeon hd 7770 cards for his rig. What would be better, getting those 2 cards, or say, getting a 600 series card, like the gtx 660 ti for example
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Hmmm. Well, electricity is really frickin' cheap in the States (at least in some places) but I'm going to go off my own prices. Let's say 2 hours' use a day for 2 years @ 20 cent (euro) per kilowatt hour. That's 0.05 x 0.2 x 2 in euro per day x 365 x 2 for 2 years. Just under 15 euro. Didn't think it'd be that cheap :D
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I don't even know why people are comparing Phenom II X4's to i5's. Just because they're both quad cores doesn't mean they should be compared - everyone but hardware newbies should know not to compare specs of completely different architectures. The direct competition to Phenom II X4's are the i3's, primarily the i3 2100 (though right now the slightly superior i3 2120 and even more superior i3 3220 are all basically the same price). Yeah it costs $30 more but it's also slightly superior (the 3220 even more so) in the vast majority of games (the Phenom x4 might be slightly better in BF3 multiplayer), draws about 1/3rd of the power, and is on a superior platform where you can upgrade to an i5 3570 (the next-gen AM3+ CPU's are still going to be behind the i5 3570 in gaming performance and probably power consumption too, so the argument can't even be made for upgrading on AM3+).
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On December 05 2012 01:36 Wabbit wrote:
I don't even know why people are comparing Phenom II X4's to i5's. Just because they're both quad cores doesn't mean they should be compared - everyone but hardware newbies should know not to compare specs of completely different architectures. The direct competition to Phenom II X4's are the i3's, primarily the i3 2100 (though right now the slightly superior i3 2120 and even more superior i3 3220 are all basically the same price). Yeah it costs $30 more but it's also slightly superior (the 3220 even more so) in the vast majority of games (the Phenom x4 might be slightly better in BF3 multiplayer), draws about 1/3rd of the power, and is on a superior platform where you can upgrade to an i5 3570 (the next-gen AM3+ CPU's are still going to be behind the i5 3570 in gaming performance and probably power consumption too, so the argument can't even be made for upgrading on AM3+).
The next next generation of AMD CPUs will probably be behind on power consumption 
Not that that's very important or anything.
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On December 05 2012 01:21 Kiromaki wrote:
Need an opinion. My friend is looking to get 2 sapphire radeon hd 7770 cards for his rig. What would be better, getting those 2 cards, or say, getting a 600 series card, like the gtx 660 ti for example
General rule of thumb is to avoid Crossfire and SLI whenever possible. A lot of times it just doesn't work well. As an upgrade (you already own one card, getting another), it's kind of a kludge. If you're considering buying two graphics cards and you're the type that is asking these kinds of questions, don't, unless you need the kind of performance levels that one GPU cannot provide.
Even when working properly, Crossfire HD 7770s shouldn't be much faster than a GTX 660 Ti. The choice here should be easy.
edit: people compare Phenom II X4 with Core i5s because they're both x86 processors you can buy.*** Thus desired performance and cost are factors when figuring out what to get. Objective function depends on the person.
***though really, Phenom II are becoming hard to find.
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On December 05 2012 01:21 Kiromaki wrote:
Need an opinion. My friend is looking to get 2 sapphire radeon hd 7770 cards for his rig. What would be better, getting those 2 cards, or say, getting a 600 series card, like the gtx 660 ti for example
For a variety of reasons it's generally best to get a single more powerful graphics card. Including but not limited to: not having to deal with the technical hassle of crossfire, new games not having full crossfire compatability.
Let alone the fact crossfired 7770s just aren't cost-effective. You can expect to pay about $120 for a 7770. For significantly less than that you can get a 7850, which would probably be a better option. (The 7850 won't quite have twice the power of a 7770, but you won't have to deal with the issues above, nor will you have to get a more expensive motherboard that is cross-fire compatible.)
But even sticking with the same budget, you can get a 7870 for the same price as two 7770s, and a 7870 WILL provide more than double the power of a 7770. See this set of generic benchmarks:
http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/536?vs=548
Now I haven't mentioned Nvidia cards, mostly because I haven't been keeping up with what all their models do. The main point is, go with a single card. Crossfiring low or mid-range cards is pretty much always a bad idea.
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On December 04 2012 18:46 Womwomwom wrote:Show nested quote +Show me any game where the i5 has over a 100% performance increase over the Phenom x4 - after all it's over 200% more expensive. I'd hardly call that the sweet spot in terms of value. And I'm not arguing that the i5 is not a noticeable increase in performance, or isn't the best gaming/streaming CPU to buy. But the value is relatively terrible if your ONLY gaming, and for pure performance, it is more often not a significant increase in performance. http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/cpus/2012/05/01/intel-core-i5-3570k-cpu-review/6Even though there can be just about a 100% performance difference in Shogun Total War, that's ignoring the point. If you don't care about huge FPS dips and stuttering, you're better off buying a console and a cheap computer to do whatever. At least developers are good enough to understand the limitations of the console and work around it with variable resolution tricks and whatever. A lot that care about what they're doing have gotten especially good at squeezing blood from a rock. Have you seen The Witcher 2 on the Xbox 360? I reckon it looks and performs better than what most entry level desktop systems could muster. Hey I can definitely say that I can get fairly smooth gameplay in BF3 multiplayer on my i5 750 but that's definitely not the case on larger maps. I know for a fact that you can't get stable 60 FPS in multi player/single player with the specs they have, Eurogamer did a benchmark of upper midrange GPUs showing that is utterly false so I have no idea what magic they're casting on their systems. So Shogun Total War is one. I suspect Stalker Call of Pripyat with the Complete mod won't be all that smooth (i.e. no stutter, not talking about FPS) on a system with weak single threaded performance because I know it definitely isn't silky smooth with an overclocked i5 750. Same goes for Arma 2 with the Day Z mod. I imagine there is a decent gulf between older generation processors and current generation processors in something like Anno 1404. There are a lot of games that need a decent CPU to push good, stable FPS. Which games are they? They're games with heavy physics or AI components, which is becoming increasingly important. Then we've got games with the Witcher 2 where there is quite a significant gulf between a stock i5 2500k and a stock Phenom II X4 980, which is good if you want to maintain a smooth experience. Skyrim within cities is also extremely CPU intensive and most benchmarks show a significant gulf between the i5s and the old Phenom II processors...and even more so if you go get a bunch of relevant mods. Dark Souls is another one that needs an extremely beefy CPU if you don't want to deal with stuttering and frame dropping. Value isn't terrible if you are playing games that can harness that potential and you're not destitute. Its the sweet spot processor for gaming...if you don't know, sweet spot means best bang for your buck, I think just about everyone besides you agree that it is. Especially since the 45nm SOI AMD processors have all been EOLed this month and you quite literally can't find them in Australia anymore. Edit: I'm also ignoring emulators like Dolphin and because its an emulator, you want to keep FPS as stable as possible to prevent shit like slowdown. The sweet spot CPU does not limit you in what you want to do, provided you even wanted to do these things in the first place. That's why its the sweet spot. It give you pretty much complete freedom now and in the near future and you get a relatively smooth experience you cannot get on a console.
Of course I care about fps dips and quality.
I stand corrected on a game where the i5 can be a significant increase in fps though (total war). Perhaps in most cases the Phenom does not appear too far behind because of optimization.
It still is rather extreme areas that would cause a phenom x4 not to work, total war benches, and in the arma bench listed, while the i5 is getting 2x the performance, the phenom is still getting a decent fps. 50-60+ fps is best obviously but 30+ fps is playable. I think if your going to go with a $80 CPU then you have to accept that your gonna get 30+ in certain areas, and that's not too bad for the price.
I don't even know why people are comparing Phenom II X4's to i5's. Just because they're both quad cores doesn't mean they should be compared - everyone but hardware newbies should know not to compare specs of completely different architectures. The direct competition to Phenom II X4's are the i3's, primarily the i3 2100 (though right now the slightly superior i3 2120 and even more superior i3 3220 are all basically the same price). Yeah it costs $30 more but it's also slightly superior (the 3220 even more so) in the vast majority of games (the Phenom x4 might be slightly better in BF3 multiplayer), draws about 1/3rd of the power, and is on a superior platform where you can upgrade to an i5 3570 (the next-gen AM3+ CPU's are still going to be behind the i5 3570 in gaming performance and probably power consumption too, so the argument can't even be made for upgrading on AM3+).
Not even, and the price difference is generally much larger. I'd say the direct competitior to the Phenom x4 is the Pentium G850 (860, etc, depending on exact model). Below the G2120 and i3-2100, unless you include overclocking, in which the Phenom x4 will outperform both the g2120 and i3-2100 at a lower price. And the major difference is that Phenom x4 is generally slightly behind in everything to Pentium/i3 at stock, but the Phenom is almost twice as good at streaming performance. A much larger difference than that between the i5 and phenom in 264 performance.
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