Is This Even Fair? Budget Ivy Bridge Takes On Core 2 Duo And Quad

[flong777]

Yes I see. However, the 3350P combined with a cheaper non-overclocking chipset of course can provide similar performance, if the buyer has low money. I reckon it's possible to squeeze a Z68 and a 2500K these days under $600...

I agree the 2500K is the best bang for the buck compared to the 2600K and it was when I bought mine. However the 2600K is a little faster and I really liked the reviews and so so I spent the extra $80. The 2600K is just a great all around CPU. I think that the 2500K has dropped in price but it is still close to the same cost as the 3570K.

The advantage of the 2600K over the non-overclocking CPUs is that I can increase its speed and speed / power by 35% with very little effort. I have a gold-rated 850W PSU and a Noctua NH-D14 and so if I need more power all I have to do is overclock and it doesn't cost me a dime. In the long-term view this saves me money. Right now I just don't need the extra speed, but it is there and it is free if I need it.

Right now the 3570K is the 2500K of 1-1/2 years ago. It overclocks well and is at the $200 price range. Add to this that it is actually faster than the 2600K and it is just an incredible CPU. The advantages over the 3350P are many and the cost difference is not that much.

The CPU is not the best place to cut costs because you have the motherboard to consider. Sockets change and so forth. I think that the best place to cut costs can be found in the CPU cooler and case and other areas.

The CM Evo 212 does a competent cooling job and costs about $25-$30. The Corsair 300R case has almost all the bells and whistles of much more expensive cases and yet costs only $70 (after rebate).

For budget builders, I think these are the best places to save money. Let me say also, my heart goes out to the budget builders. It is tough to build a powerful computer on a limited budget and for many budget builders, this is their first computer build.

 

[de5_Roy]

Spoiler

I probably didn't communicate very well. I have a 2600K with an single ATI 6950 and I am not a big gamer. I don't own the 3570K and I am not putting anyone down who has bought a budget build.

I get that many builders want to start off with a cheap build and work up and again, I am not putting this down. I am saying that for $40-$75 more, the 3570K blows away the lower cost CPUs and $40-$75 is not a lot of money when you are building a computer. The 3570K will maintain its speed competence much longer than the cheaper CPUs and thus will save the builder money.

For example, I paid extra for the 2600K CPU when I built my computer and today I feel no need to upgrade to Ivy Bridge and probably not even Haswell. The 2600K is so fast that it is only slightly slower than monsters like the I-7 3930 and 3960. So I am saving money now because I spent the extra $80 a 1-1/2 years ago. Plus I don't have to go to the hassle and expense of a new motherboard and a new build.

So having a long-term view can say the budget builder money - a lot of money - and isn't that what the budget builder needs most? I am saying this with kindness.

imo a lot of people confuse long term with futureproofing. futureproofing means the builder wants to be certain that his/her build is guaranteed not to be outperformed in the future.
long term means that the builder wants high mileage from his/her build instead of frequent upgrading and the slightly extra cost being paid over the longer usage duration. amusingly, l.t. adds longevity but it also gives the illusion of futureproofing.

Yes I see. However, the 3350P combined with a cheaper non-overclocking chipset of course can provide similar performance, if the buyer has low money. I reckon it's possible to squeeze a Z68 and a 2500K these days under $600...

if you're content with your build, then don't care about what others say. if you're aware of the advantages and limitations of your hardware, have done the research, etc. going into the build, you've made the right decision.
it's definitely easier to build a $600 gaming pc with i5 3350p. take last quarter's $600 gaming build, for example. a longer term version of this build might be with an asus p8z77v-lx or p8z77-v lk ($130) to use multicore enhancement (i.e. up to 3.6-3.7ghz o.c. on all 4 cores instead of 1), lk version also gets you cfx and sli support (in x8+x8 modes), all fan connectors are 4 pin etc. right now, asrock z77 pro3 is $95, so $45 to the budget adds features that wouldn't have been possible without a full motherboard upgrade (and lga1155 is dead end). mind you, an asus p8z77-v lk does not make the build futureproof, it just adds a little more longevity to the existing parts.

 

[spentshells]

Something is wrong with borderlands 2 results my C2Q6600 pounds my i3 3220 using a gtx 570 and or 7850 1GB I mean it is a no contest .... something is up there,

 

[Fulgurant]

[citation][nom]flong777[/nom]I have a gold-rated 850W PSU and a Noctua NH-D14 and so if I need more power all I have to do is overclock and it doesn't cost me a dime. In the long-term view this saves me money. [/citation]

It cost you however many dimes you spent on your aftermarket cooler.

[citation][nom]flong777[/nom]I am saying that for $40-$75 more, the 3570K blows away the lower cost CPUs and $40-$75 is not a lot of money when you are building a computer. The 3570K will maintain its speed competence much longer than the cheaper CPUs and thus will save the builder money. [/citation]

At similar clock rates, the 3570k buys you a little more than 50% more CPU performance in multi-threaded apps than the i3 3220. Off the top of my head, the 3220 costs about $120. The 3570k costs about $220. Almost double the cost for 1.5 times the performance isn't a slam dunk.

If you're talking about cheaper i5s like the 3350p, the issue is even murkier, because cheaper i5s don't perform appreciably worse than the 3570k at stock speeds. And even locked-multiplier i5s can be overclocked a little -- just enough to give you a small boost without requiring you to buy an aftermarket cooler.

I'm not saying you're wrong; clearly the i5 3570k (if you're comfortable with overclocking) is the enthusiast's price-performance choice for the current generation of CPU. You can take the results of this excellent review of older CPUs in two different directions: on the one hand, you can argue that because CPU performance is advancing so slowly, it makes more sense than ever to buy the best CPU you can afford now because if it has a decent number of cores, it'll last for a very, very long time. The old idea that you should buy cheap now because even low-end parts in two years will lap the current high-end parts is long dead.

On the other hand, that reasoning can go in the opposite direction too: if CPU performance has slowed to a crawl, then a lower-end CPU will likely hold its value longer. And although the older CPUs in Tom's article perform surprisingly well in comparison with the new stuff, it's also worth noting that ~$50 parts from today compete favorably with $200+ stuff from years ago.

Budgets exist for a reason. For most any person looking to buy a new computer, the budget probably isn't a hard-and-fast limit, but it's important to pick a limit of some sort -- whether that limit's at $500 or $3000 -- because otherwise you might lose the plot. And I think you'd be surprised if you really believe that only teenagers buy budget rigs; in fact, older adults are probably more budget-oriented than the younger crew on this site, both because older adults have lower standards of performance, and because older adults have mortgages, car payments, spouses, children, and so on. That stuff adds up fast, and unless you're unusually well-off or unless you relish the idea of being up to your ears in debt forever, you eventually reach a point after which you have a real hard time justifying an expenditure of more than $1,000 on what amounts to a personal toy.

On the contrary, my theory is that the people who are fastest to point out that costs are trivial are younger people just out of school, living on their own, making what seems (to them) like a lot of money at their first (or second) "real job," and yet somehow nonetheless still living paycheck to paycheck because their entertainment/social expenses are through the roof.

 

[InvalidError]

After helping numerous people on the forums with "budget" gaming rigs, for the life of me I cannot understand why they do not save their pennies a little longer and buy the 3570 instead of the myriad of cheaper choices. You can pick it up on sale for $180 and the cost difference to shift down just is insignificant compared the the performance jump you get for the extra $50.

Most people do not have a local Microcenter for those cheap i5-3570k and $50 discount on motherboards.

Looking at this article, I would say it demonstrates that i3-322x is a pretty decent option for gamers who aren't hell-bent on maxing out everything all the time. For people who have to buy their parts at normal market rates, the difference between i3+h77 and i5k+z77 is $100-150 for about 30% extra performance not counting overclocking.

Personally, I do not consider the i5-3570k any more futureproof than an i5-3470 or even i3-3220 since a 20% overclock over stock or 30-50% better performance than the lower-end parts is unlikely to make or break most games and applications. Sure, you won't be maxing out details on a "budget" system but then again, people who shop in the "value segment" for PC parts usually do not mind tuning things down a few notches until they get playable performance.

This article shows that the C2D-E8400 is still a somewhat workable gaming chip six years later but someone who holds on their PC for 5+ years is going to have a dozen other reasons to want to upgrade the motherboard too: faster PCIe, faster USB, faster SATA, new RAM standard, new CPU socket, simpler/cleaner layout due to more stuff integrated in the CPU/chipset, more power-efficient, etc. I ended up ditching my E8400 mainly because I needed 16GB RAM but 16GB DDR2 cost as much as i3+h77+16GB DDR3 so getting 16GB DDR2 made no sense.

Personally, I prefer buying only what I expect to need for the foreseeable future and put the $100-150 I save doing that (vs going high-end+OC) towards my next system 4-5 years down the road. As much as my inner-geek would like an i7-3770k or i7-3960X, I know I won't really need more than an i5-3330 any time soon so I compromised with an i5-3470 which had the best stock bang-per-buck at the time. Even if I went high-end+OC, I would likely still end up wanting to replace my PC ~5 years down the road due to everything else that changed anyway, thereby rendering any further "future-proofing investments" moot.

Not everyone is a hardcore/twitch/competitive gamer who needs/wants to max out everything all the time regardless of price tag.

 

[Dkz]

I would love to see this comparison with graphic cards, such as for example how much better performs a 7870 vs 4870, 260 vs 660, and so on. I mean, it would be nice to actually see the numbers in performance gain we get when upgrading our hardware.

 

[JAYDEEJOHN]

This article led me to the conclusion that my i3-2100 is golden for another year. And the conclusion that MAN does Crytek still have some CPU optimizing to do.

I think its more, we will see more improvements with better chips in this case

 

[Traciatim]

It's probably been stated before, but this review would have been awesome with an Athlon II, Phenom II, an FX-8350. It would have been a pretty complete list of all budget friendly choices and how they sit at different tasks.

 

[hixbot]

I'm still using a Northwood Pentium 4 at 3ghz. 3GB of Cas2 DDR Ram and Radeon 3850 on AGP bus.
It runs Windows 7 32bit just fine after stripping down background processes. CSgo runs at 40fps with some tweaking. Web surfing, word processing, HD video playback (thanks to DXVA), I need nothing else.

 

[smeezekitty]

After helping numerous people on the forums with "budget" gaming rigs, for the life of me I cannot understand why they do not save their pennies a little longer and buy the 3570 instead of the myriad of cheaper choices. You can pick it up on sale for $180 and the cost difference to shift down just is insignificant compared the the performance jump you get for the extra $50.

This comparison demonstrated the huge difference between the 3570 and cheaper CPU choices - it really doesn't make any sense to consider the cheaper CPUs if you are going to game. Add to this that if you overclock the 3570 it keeps up with 3770 which is a rocket ship fast CPU.

Yeah I know that these budget gamers are mowing lawns for their computer, but geez, wait a little longer and mow a couple of extra lawns and get a real CPU that real smokes of gaming and anything else for that matter. This comparison just confirms this.

That may be easy for you to say. But for many people an extra $50 is too much. They budget a strict amount of money and really cannot spend more because of other expenses.

Also not everyone demands enthusiast performance. I am running an old core 2 duo in an incrementally upgraded OEM machine because a lack of money.

 

[tdenton1138]

Tremendous article! I've often wondered how my q9450 @3.4 stacks up against 'modern' processors in raw performance. Now I know the answer is 'quite well actually'. I wonder when it will truly be time to upgrade?

 

[The Q6660 Inside]

Funny all the gamer boys on toms will flame on FX like its a horrible excuse for a cpu even tho it has a better IPC than core2 and toms just proved core2 quad is still relevant and can hang with the ivy stuff so what's that say about FX ? lol just makes me chuckle a bit. Glad I hung on to my old Q6600 all these years, shes still a trusty gaming rig to this day.

I myself am using a Q6600 @ 3GHz with 2x2GB DDR3 RAM.

"775 4 Life! Sorry just had to throw that in there, my Q6600 G0@3.2 is still folding in another rig to this day, coupled with an 8800GTS, I bet it can still play all DX10 games on medium settings @720/900P. I should thank myself for not getting the E6850 as that wonder-cpu lasted forever or should I say still hauling proteins, even my hand-me-down QX9770 is not that much better than the G0 Q6600."

No the Q6600 was actually really cool because clocked at 333X9 puts it at 3Ghz/1333Mhz FSB which basically made it a QX6850 Extreme. Paired with a 560Ti my girl still games on it @1080P with mostly high settings in pretty much every game to this very day.

Neat, I used an ASUS GTX 570 with the Q6600, 4GB of DDR2-800 and an ASUS P5E (not the P5K-E but the PCI-E 2.0 with the aluminum heatsinks one). This was my main rig until I was handed an EVGA 780i with a QX9770@3.6, and 2X4GB of DDR2-800 and the improvement was about 2-4 FPS, so I would assume @3.8+GHz the 6600 could even handle a GTX 670 or 580 with ~5-9 less FPS than a 2500K@3.5. The Q6600 was @3.5 but now downclocked to 3.2 or 2.8GHz to save power while folding. Heck, I even (with a typo) named my account after it. Simply put, the Q6600 (in 2007 since in 2006 it was way overpriced) was the Celeron 300A of Quad Cores, ate 1.5 VCore for breakfast, OCd like a madman with a Tuniq 120, AKA the go-to CPU cooler, and beat the overpriced QX6850 and QX6700 when OCd.

PS: When I said medium settings, I meant the 8800GTS.

 

[eric hebert]

Man that E8400 chip is still amazing hardware so glad I still have one and running to this day. They just don't make them like they used to!

 

[bildo123]

[citation][nom]assasin32[/nom]I been wanting to see one of these for a long time but never thought I get to see it. I just wish they had the good ol e2160, and q6600 thrown into the mix. I have the e2180 OC to 3ghz. It's still chugging along surprisingly enough, I just realized how old the thing was last night after thinking about how long I've had this build and looking up when the main components were produced. Safe to say I got my use out of that $70 cpu, did a 50% OC to it and it still had room to go but I wanted to keep the voltage very low.[/citation]

Funny you mention that build as it was the same exact one I had, well an E2180 @ 2.8Ghz. I went to an i5 2500k (kept the same video card for awhile) and man what a difference the CPU upgrade alone did. Hopefully should be good for another four years or more.

 

[Soma42]

[citation][nom]pauldh[/nom]My pleasure! And many thanks for the feedback and encouragement too! We're thrilled so many of you enjoyed the piece and data.Me too! And that is the plan. Because I want to test each both @ stock and overclocked, 3-4 Processors will likely be the limit. Personally I lean towards the gaming bang of Athlon II X4 640, Phenom II X4 965BE, FX-4300 and FX6300.[/citation]

Great article again, thanks. I would love to see AMD Processors thrown in there like others have said.

My 2 cents would be to ditch the FX-4300 and go with the FX-6300 and FX-8350/8320. The updated price difference is only $4 between the 4300 and the 6300 (MSRP $112 vs $108) and who wouldn't get the 6300 for that price difference?

 

[catchphrase]

I recently upgraded from the E8400 to an i5-3350P. I knew what scale of performance improvement to expect just based on the output alone. This article stands to prove my real-life findings. I'm glad this finally got written, though not merited very often, the cross-generational comparison can be very informative.

 

[icerider]

Still rocking a Q6600 G0 @ 3.6 with a 1.33 vcore paired up with 8 gigs of DDR3 1600 on an 1600 fsb.
I have been drooling for a 3570K but after this article I really don't see how it would be worth the $300.00+ investment in cpu and motherboard.
Doesn't seem to be that much of a performance gain or am I wrong?

 

[The Q6660 Inside]

Still rocking a Q6600 G0 @ 3.6 with a 1.33 vcore paired up with 8 gigs of DDR3 1600 on an 1600 fsb.
I have been drooling for a 3570K but after this article I really don't see how it would be worth the $300.00+ investment in cpu and motherboard.
Doesn't seem to be that much of a performance gain or am I wrong?

1.33 Vcore hmm, to get to 3.5 I had undervolt to 1.3Vcore since the stock voltage is overkill, but every chip is different.

 

[icerider]

[citation][nom]icerider[/nom]Still rocking a Q6600 G0 @ 3.6 with a 1.33 vcore paired up with 8 gigs of DDR3 1600 on an 1600 fsb.I have been drooling for a 3570K but after this article I really don't see how it would be worth the $300.00+ investment in cpu and motherboard. Doesn't seem to be that much of a performance gain or am I wrong?[/citation]

BTW I'm running 2X GTX 260 216s in SLI on an evga 790i Ultra MB.
Think it would be worth it to upgrade the graphics on this old warhorse?
If so what would be the max card to go with for a balanced rig?

 

[The Q6660 Inside]

[citation][nom]icerider[/nom]Still rocking a Q6600 G0 @ 3.6 with a 1.33 vcore paired up with 8 gigs of DDR3 1600 on an 1600 fsb.I have been drooling for a 3570K but after this article I really don't see how it would be worth the $300.00+ investment in cpu and motherboard. Doesn't seem to be that much of a performance gain or am I wrong?[/citation]

BTW I'm running 2X GTX 260 216s in SLI on an evga 790i Ultra MB.
Think it would be worth it to upgrade the graphics on this old warhorse?
If so what would be the max card to go with for a balanced rig?

660Ti or a 580 and if you can pump just a bit more clocks a 670 will be fine, but as seen in the 7970 benchmarks, you may have a small bottleneck. I would find a 480 or 580 and call it a day. Just please turn of MSAA (I would recomend something like SweetFX SMAA), stay at 1680x1050 or above, and you will be a bit behind a 2500K.

 

[10tacle]

[citation][nom]hixbot[/nom]I'm still using a Northwood Pentium 4 at 3ghz. 3GB of Cas2 DDR Ram and Radeon 3850 on AGP bus.It runs Windows 7 32bit just fine after stripping down background processes. CSgo runs at 40fps with some tweaking. Web surfing, word processing, HD video playback (thanks to DXVA), I need nothing else.[/citation]

Wow. I have that 3.06GHz P4 CPU, an ASUS P4T533-C mobo, 2GB (4x512MB) RDRAM "RAMBUS" memory, and an AGP GeForce 7800GS that have been sitting in a PC parts bin for years, ever since upgrading to an E8400 C2D build. After reading your comment, I feel like I'm wasting that hardware that served many good years as gaming rig and is still useable... unlike much older hardware I still have like a 6600GT, a 4200Ti, a Riva TNT, and two Voodoo3 SLI video cards, a PIII 1GHz and 750MHz CPU, and a PII 450MHz CPU. Just can't bring myself to discard the memory and good gaming times with that equipment.

 

[bloosteak]

great article. i'm still running a e7400 @ 3.4ghz, waiting until Haswell to upgrade.

 

[Matsushima]

This review shows how much old hardware is still reasonably fast and has got better, which is very unlike the Dark Ages when Windows XP could not run on a 133MHz Pentium MMX, which was released in 1996, just five years prior to Windows XP's release. And now we have Pentium 4's running Windows 7! I could hold on to my dualcore build just a little longer if not for the fact that apps are getting multithreaded and then we would have to make frequent upgrades again.

 

[flong777]

[citation][nom]flong777[/nom]I have a gold-rated 850W PSU and a Noctua NH-D14 and so if I need more power all I have to do is overclock and it doesn't cost me a dime. In the long-term view this saves me money. [/citation]

It cost you however many dimes you spent on your aftermarket cooler.

[citation][nom]flong777[/nom]I am saying that for $40-$75 more, the 3570K blows away the lower cost CPUs and $40-$75 is not a lot of money when you are building a computer. The 3570K will maintain its speed competence much longer than the cheaper CPUs and thus will save the builder money. [/citation]

At similar clock rates, the 3570k buys you a little more than 50% more CPU performance in multi-threaded apps than the i3 3220. Off the top of my head, the 3220 costs about $120. The 3570k costs about $220. Almost double the cost for 1.5 times the performance isn't a slam dunk.

If you're talking about cheaper i5s like the 3350p, the issue is even murkier, because cheaper i5s don't perform appreciably worse than the 3570k at stock speeds. And even locked-multiplier i5s can be overclocked a little -- just enough to give you a small boost without requiring you to buy an aftermarket cooler.

I'm not saying you're wrong; clearly the i5 3570k (if you're comfortable with overclocking) is the enthusiast's price-performance choice for the current generation of CPU. You can take the results of this excellent review of older CPUs in two different directions: on the one hand, you can argue that because CPU performance is advancing so slowly, it makes more sense than ever to buy the best CPU you can afford now because if it has a decent number of cores, it'll last for a very, very long time. The old idea that you should buy cheap now because even low-end parts in two years will lap the current high-end parts is long dead.

On the other hand, that reasoning can go in the opposite direction too: if CPU performance has slowed to a crawl, then a lower-end CPU will likely hold its value longer. And although the older CPUs in Tom's article perform surprisingly well in comparison with the new stuff, it's also worth noting that ~$50 parts from today compete favorably with $200+ stuff from years ago.

Budgets exist for a reason. For most any person looking to buy a new computer, the budget probably isn't a hard-and-fast limit, but it's important to pick a limit of some sort -- whether that limit's at $500 or $3000 -- because otherwise you might lose the plot. And I think you'd be surprised if you really believe that only teenagers buy budget rigs; in fact, older adults are probably more budget-oriented than the younger crew on this site, both because older adults have lower standards of performance, and because older adults have mortgages, car payments, spouses, children, and so on. That stuff adds up fast, and unless you're unusually well-off or unless you relish the idea of being up to your ears in debt forever, you eventually reach a point after which you have a real hard time justifying an expenditure of more than $1,000 on what amounts to a personal toy.

On the contrary, my theory is that the people who are fastest to point out that costs are trivial are younger people just out of school, living on their own, making what seems (to them) like a lot of money at their first (or second) "real job," and yet somehow nonetheless still living paycheck to paycheck because their entertainment/social expenses are through the roof.

That's a lot of points and you made some really good points. You're right, adults are also building budget rigs. Also you are right that the 3350P is much closer to the 3570K in performance. It does cost $180 though and you can't overclock it.

As I have said many times I don't criticize anyone who is on a budget. I think my main point is that when you have so much bang for the buck with the 3570K, to me cutting the CPU to get to your budget number is not the best way to go. I know other people who disagree for very thoughtful reasons.

I felt the same way about the 2500K. To me it was easily the best CPU for any budget build because it was wicked fast in its day (still is) and it was cheap < $200.

I think that some budget builders make a compromise that they really don't have to make when they cut back their CPU. I feel strongly about SSDs too but unless you can get a sreaming deal, they don't belong in a budget build. The CPU though is the heart of the computer and affects EVERYTHING you will do.

Again, you made a lot of great points.

 

[flong777]

This review shows how much old hardware is still reasonably fast and has got better, which is very unlike the Dark Ages when Windows XP could not run on a 133MHz Pentium MMX, which was released in 1996, just five years prior to Windows XP's release. And now we have Pentium 4's running Windows 7! I could hold on to my dualcore build just a little longer if not for the fact that apps are getting multithreaded and then we would have to make frequent upgrades again.

Maybe when Haswell comes out it will be a good time to upgrade. I saw a TH article saying they overclocked a Haswell CPU to 8.0 GHZ - that would be unbelievably fast.