bhcompy wrote on Jul 19, 2011, 03:08:
Or you can do the equivalent AMD.. spend 100 less on the proc, 20 more on the mobo for the same features and have another 4 or 8x pcie card for crossfirex
AMD has lost the price/performance ratio war for a while now. Back in the days when they beat intel to the 1ghz CPU, AMD was king, especially with the whole silly intel P4 netburst line (with its motherboard melting temps and recalls since intel couldn't overclock it to 4ghz and still sell reliable CPUs) when intel was insisting that all that mattered was the GHZ speed. But once intel brought back the "Core" line from laptops and re-engineered it for desktops (and announced they were dropping the pentium name) and started trying to educate people on what AMD had been trying to educate about all along, that it was PERFORMANCE that mattered most, not the raw GHZ... That was when AMD lost the crown and its been that way for a long while now. That $100 less CPU is inferior. However, if one is looking for the absolute minimum cost entry system to do gaming decently, yeah I'd recommend those cases to save $100 on the CPU since even that $100 less CPU is adequate for most modern tasks (CPUs nowadays have outpaced average needs, heck most stuff STILL doesn't take proper advantage of multi-core CPUs)
As for crossfire or SLI, its almost never a good deal price/performance wise to get two cards instead of one card for a similar price (such as getting two $100 cards instead of one $200 card) in large part because of imperfect scaling.
And that $100 I was quoting for a mobo, included mobos that had one 16x and one 4x pci express slots that could be used for crossfire. I wasn't doing minimum mobo prices.
$50 is the price range for dropping to a minimum mobo price for 1155 pin CPUs that just have one 16x slot.
link$75 if you drop to a dual core (instead of quad core) sandy bridge CPU saves over $100 on the CPU.
$20 for dropping to 2gb to save another, saves another $30 on memory.
$35 for a drop to 250gb hdd to save another $25 (seems kinda silly to me to get a 250gb drive for $35 instead of a 2TB drive for $60 on a sale, but if one is trying to build a absolute minimum cost but still gaming capable system, its an option)
$75-$100 to keep graphics card at an ati 5770, that's still a good deal price/performance ratio. Dropping to a $50 graphics card gives up a huge amount of game capability and doesn't save much money.
Bottom line: entry level intel gaming system is going to be more like $300 than $500Edit:
Its instructive to examine some of the toms CPU charts. Such as this one, where its benches of a single CPU core normalized to 3ghz of several architectures. This link is to all time based scores of all benches added.
linkThe AMD propus architecture (one could get a triple core propus for that $100 less that you mentioned) has to work a total of 7745 seconds to get through all those timed benchmarks. Now look at the sandy bridge architecture. Its 5332 total seconds. Conclusion? The AMD architecture performance on average is nearly 50% slower per core on a clock for clock basis than the Intel.
This comment was edited on Jul 19, 2011, 04:08.