System Builder Marathon, June 2010: System Value Compared

[falchard]

Once again I am left wondering if you could not have done better with the systems and money. I think its very questionable to use 2 GTX470 since SLI and dual graphics is more the exception then the rule. I am also wondering why they opted for the Core i7 instead of the 6-core AMD that should have good numbers in productivity and has the PCI-e lanes for 4 graphics cards.

 

[oldscotch]

The perf/dollar and perf/power comparisons, while accurate, don't quite tell the whole story.
By including synthetic results in these comparisons, you'd be far better to spend extra cash on a 6-core amd cpu and go with a couple of 5770s or a single 5870 or something.
Or saying it another way: these machines are clearly being built as gaming machines, while synthetics are nice to have, gamers don't worry much about them. Maybe it'd be good to see an additional perf/dollar perf/watt comparsion with just the games factored in. I think we'd see things change for the $1000 build.

 

[oldscotch]

[citation][nom]Rob Robideau[/nom]Is there any cost savings in buying a complete off the shelf system and upgrading certain components. I think this would make and interesting read: System modifier marathon![/citation]

I did that for my wife's machine, originally purchased as a HP slimline for $300. New video card, case and power supply bumped it up almost $300 more and at the time it probably would have been compared to a $550 budget build.
Free copy of Vista though, so there's that.

 

[youssef 2010]

personally, I think that classifying the builds should only be based on their cost.It's not important whether the case contains 2 or 4 cards in Xfire as long as its cost remains within budget limits.Based on that, I think the previous $750 build is much better for longevity,upgradability,...etc.

 

[youssef 2010]

"Our $2,000 PC looks a little light at the other end of the pricing scale, simply because the elaborate storage solutions familiar to the high-end market have a negligible impact on the benchmarks we use to determine value."

then you should think of a way to measure these benefits

 

[openi3]

Very interesting tests. What surprised me was the encoding benchmarks with not much difference between the athlon and phenom cpus.
Looking at the results though, it seems that Intel is the way to go for encoding.
What also concerns me is the AM3 platform's memory bandwidth. As this is on-die, I can easily see a Phenom II derivative dropping DDR2 support and getting a DDR3 memory boost. Just head into quad channel territory why not?
cb

 

[Guest]

I think that they should have added a second HDD for a RAID 0. It would be fully justified in a high-end system, and would not have caused them to go over-budget.

 

[youssef 2010]

"while the $1,000 and $2,000 systems are butter-smooth at the target 1920x1080 and 2560x1600 resolutions."

I wouldn't call 29.5 FPS on the $1000 system "Butter-Smooth" Unless if the min FPS are in teh range of 25FPS but I think the min FPS are lower here

"Who could possibly interpret these AVG results? The $2,000 PC continues its win, but we’ve no consistent observations to determine how or why."

It's possibly the Ram speed change

"WinRAR and 7-Zip both love clock speed. Both compression applications also appear to prefer Core i7 architecture, which is present only in our $2,000 build."

but they are also well-threaded

 

[rana_kirti]

So guys what would be a Better path....???

1. Get Athlon X3 440+5850 and then when it cant play games at 1980x1020 then upgrade Cpu+Gpu+Mobo....??

or.

2. Get i7 930+5850 and then add another 5850...??

 

[Wingy]

This is a great series for folks on a budget looking for the highest frame rate for the buck. This is probably super for your target audience, but you leave out one group. Folks that have a budget for high end components and want to build a fast, dependable, and oh yeah, impressive system. Folks that want to tell their friends "I built that". So I want a fast booting, rock solid, quiet and, you bet, impressive system that I can brag to my 25 year old son, that I built.
X-58 motherboard: check but which one? Not just the most expensive, but the best.
Processor: 975 or 980?
Hard drive: SSD for boot, plus 2TB for games and video storage. Which ones?
Power supply: Minimum 750 watts. Here you do go for the gold in your articles so I've got that one.
Graphics card: Like wise, you regularly give us a round up of the best and newest, so I've got that.
Case: Not the most expensive, but the most impressive to the eye, and able to house a liquid cooling system (Quiet, remember?)

Now that might be an article.

 

[spartanii]

$500 computer every year or $2000 every 4 years which is a better choice?

 

[catchercradle]

I would really like to see some testing under linux for these builds. I know incompatibilities happen much less often now than they used to but there it would be nice to know how things work, both with default and with manufacturers' drivers.

Dave Jackson

 

[Guest]

I think the EVGA X58 LE and a single 5970 should've been used instead on the $2000 build.

 

[Guest]

Guys, why the preference for AMD? Is Intel currently not superior in almost all respects?

 

[Crashman]

[citation][nom]rcc[/nom]Guys, why the preference for AMD? Is Intel currently not superior in almost all respects?[/citation]It's in the $2000 machine! There are budgets on these machines, when you say "almost" are you intentionally leaving price out of the equation?

 

[Spryguy87]

I build on budgets and I nearly always go with AMD unless on special request for Intel because of the price disparity.

 

[Guest]

Testing Win7 64bit system with 2GB of RAM ? That computer is no good for work.
It had to be 4GB and price tag $600 other option - include HD5670 (or similar nVidia solution) instead of HD5770.

 

[Guest]

Every time I visit the system builder,I get upset.Why should throw away my P35-DQ6 motherboard with its Q9550 and 4GB of RAM in it, and buy a weaker phenom II X3 based motherboard?(Plus I have a 850W power supply and I only want to upgrade my GPU if possible.)

 

[L0tus]

OC $1000 = $2000 (in some games).

The power of overclocking!!!

 

[rwmunchkin12788]

Judging by the gaming benchmarks (as well as some of the others... but not so much), this data tells me that the 1000 dollar computer is not significantly better than the 500 dollar one.

Just my two cents, but this goes back to what very many people were saying in the $1000 dollar computer build comments: I think the AMD processors showed an incapability in many cases to provide good increases in performance despite the massive graphics spending increase from the $500 to the $1000 computer.

Compounded with the some of the CPU/GPU bottleneck results in the Building a Balanced Gaming PC articles, I think a i5-750 with a single 5850 (or 470) would've been significantly better than the X3/ xfire 5830's combo in the $1000 computer, and been a good middlepoint between the 500 and 2000 dollar computers.