Part 1: Building A Balanced Gaming PC

[beehew]

[citation][nom]beehew[/nom]Great, super, excellent article. I am very pleased to see that my E8400, HD4890, 22" resolution performed well on almost all the tests. I find it very interesting that the HD4890 performed only okay on the STALKER benchmarks, because that game came bundled with my GPU. (On a side note, I have not played it yet because the overzealous copy protection doesn't believe that I have the disk in the drive.)[/citation]

So, I had to go back and check the STALKER benchmarks for the HD4890 and it only passes the 40FPS mark in the lowest resolution. Kind of odd that the GPU was sold with that game when it only performs well on 1280x1024 resolution at best (with any GPU). Did someone in marketing screw up?

 

[superpowter77]

after reading this article carefully, decided to purchase the athlon X II 550($102) and radeon 4890($169 on sale from bestbuy) (total of a ridiculous $271 for a solid gaming machine) crysis and farcry2 as main targets. I already have an gigabyte GA-MA770T AM3 mobo($69.99), 750 PSU($79.99) and 4 Gb(2x2)DDr3-1066($92.00). I only spent $512.98 for everything mentioned above.

 

[dirtdiver]

So, I had to go back and check the STALKER benchmarks for the HD4890 and it only passes the 40FPS mark in the lowest resolution. Kind of odd that the GPU was sold with that game when it only performs well on 1280x1024 resolution at best (with any GPU). Did someone in marketing screw up?

Do you have the same version of STALKER that was benchmarked? There is more than one version, and the newer one is much more demanding than the older...

 

[beehew]

Do you have the same version of STALKER that was benchmarked? There is more than one version, and the newer one is much more demanding than the older...

Yeah, it's STALKER: Clear Sky.

 

[brockh]

Yeah, it's STALKER: Clear Sky.

Well as you can clearly see only the 4870X2 and GTX 295 really provide playable performance at those maximum amount of settings. The ATi cards tend to do better with AMD processors (see part 2) and the Nvidia ones tend to do better with Intel processors, so really it's a moot point as none of them are performing well enough aside from the top-tier. When it was released I'm sure it was one of the few cards that could play it at any reasonable amount of settings.

 

[whisp]

if you are gonna bother doing this article, you should test more games then just those.

also dont equate dual gpu single pcb 4870x2 to a sli or crossfire setup, they are not the same and will perform differently in games..

 

[enzo matrix]

after reading this article carefully, decided to purchase the athlon X II 550($102) and radeon 4890($169 on sale from bestbuy) (total of a ridiculous $271 for a solid gaming machine) crysis and farcry2 as main targets. I already have an gigabyte GA-MA770T AM3 mobo($69.99), 750 PSU($79.99) and 4 Gb(2x2)DDr3-1066($92.00). I only spent $512.98 for everything mentioned above.

Do you mean an Athlon IIx2 250 or a Phenom IIx2 550?

 

[superpowter77]

Phenom II 550

 

[Guest]

The one thing all this testing proves is what all of us with a brain have known for a good while now:

Big widescreen LCDs and their mandatory native resolutons SUCK for gamers.

A knowledgeable, informed and ponderate gamer will still in 2010 prefer a good old CRT monitor so he can choose whatever resolution he needs for each gme, depending on how heavy it is.

Screw widescreen LCD.

 

[brockh]

The one thing all this testing proves is what all of us with a brain have known for a good while now:

Big widescreen LCDs and their mandatory native resolutons SUCK for gamers.

A knowledgeable, informed and ponderate gamer will still in 2010 prefer a good old CRT monitor so he can choose whatever resolution he needs for each gme, depending on how heavy it is.

Screw widescreen LCD.

You do realize the larger the resolution the better it looks? The better it looks, the more stress goes on the graphics card (presumably in most cases), so if you want it to look better it's gonna be more demanding. It's pretty simple; it's not some magical widescreen LCD voodoo that just sucks up resources. Also, why couldn't someone on an LCD just choose a different resolution as he/she chooses either? Enjoy your eye cancer.

 

[neiroatopelcc]

If he used a sufficiently low grade and old lcd he can't successfully change from native res to something else. Many of the older ones screw up the image if changing to a not native aspect ratio.
But gaming on crt is so stone age!

 

[Guest]

Thanks for providing such essential information.

 

[Avro Arrow]

An article done in November of 2009 and no ATi 5-series cards in it?

FAIL

 

[pauldh]

An article done in November of 2009 and no ATi 5-series cards in it?

FAIL

Um, did you even read the article? It explains exactly why 5000 series cards were not included in parts 1 & 2.

Check out the most recent one (Part 3), as it has the 5750, 5870, and 5970:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/balanced-gaming-pc-overclock,2625.html

 

[pixar1942]

i made a rash decision buying a 5670 i thought it will be worth it for my 19inch monitor but its not.. so i replace my 5670 into 250gts and finally some of my heavy games become playable although its dx10 but im not impress to the dx11 they just improve the HDR .... (the light looks LED) that's all