System Builder Marathon Q1 2014: System Value Compared

[geoffrey4283]

Survey link is busted?

FYI, it would appear that SurveyGizmo has finished their switchover to CloudFlare and/or the DDoS has subsided; the Sweepstakes Survey is accessible again.

 

[somidiot]

I love how Tom's article was all "Because you gamer nerds are a bunch of whiny little girls I'm doing this because ...."

 

[Crashman]

I love how Tom's article was all "Because you gamer nerds are a bunch of whiny little girls I'm doing this because ...."

Whining again?

😛

Regarding hardware selection, I get two types of responses: 1.) Can you try making the $2400 PC more work friendly and 2.)PLEASE get rid of that stupidly big CPU because gaming is the only thing that matters to anyone. The second group is wrong, but they're also more persistent

 

[airborn824]

the top build should have a i7 hexa core and the 750 should for sure be AMD since the 8350 is far superirior to all intell under the i7 and should include a Radeon card. these build are build on pure social bias and not reality. who would build a system for under 1k and not use AMD? the whole point of AMD is to be powerful and a god price. intel is only worth it at i7 and above unless you are only playing single player games all the time.

 

[Phillip Wager]

Intel really needs a low cost core i5 and to trim the prices of the core i3 line. $150 for a core i3 is getting ridiculous. considering i got my core i5 4670k for $200 last month there is no value in a core i3 whatsoever! I hope AMD comes back this year because without competition intel is starting to rip people off

 

[TheRohBoat]

Is the BF4 fps capped at 200fps?

 

[Crashman]

Is the BF4 fps capped at 200fps?

Yes

 

[RedJaron]

the top build should have a i7 hexa core and the 750 should for sure be AMD since the 8350 is far superirior to all intell under the i7 and should include a Radeon card. these build are build on pure social bias and not reality. who would build a system for under 1k and not use AMD? the whole point of AMD is to be powerful and a god price. intel is only worth it at i7 and above unless you are only playing single player games all the time.

Um, you're sure it's not you who is being biased?

There's a dang good reason AMD GPUs aren't being used in the SBM right now: street price. Each build has a hard price limit and cryptominers have driven the price of Radeons much higher than their MSRPs. Since hard GPU compute benchmarks are not part of the SBM, there's no reason to spend extra on a Radeon right now when you can get similar performance from nVidia's products. Look back over last year's SBM and you'll see quite a few Radeons used when they had a more sensible price.

And your statement that Intel has no worthwhile chips below the i7 except for single-player games is just laughable. The 8350 runs $200 right now. I can get an i5-4570 for that same price. Anything that uses four threads or less ( which is nearly anything outside professional content creation software, ) will run faster on the i5 at stock speeds. If you want to OC the 8350, that runs you extra money for a cooler and OC friendly mboard. In some ways it's kind of sad that you have to heavily OC an FX to even approach Intel's stock performance ( and have to deal with the extra money, heat, and power consumption that comes with it. )

Intel really needs a low cost core i5 and to trim the prices of the core i3 line. $150 for a core i3 is getting ridiculous. considering i got my core i5 4670k for $200 last month there is no value in a core i3 whatsoever!

No value for an i3? Did you even bother noticing how well the $750 machine did in comparison to the others?

 

[Onus]

If you're wanting to build a Litecoin miner, you'll get a 4xPCIe-slot mobo (like a 990FX Sabertooth) and the cheapest CPU you can find; it's an entirely different build, and would be very hard to address in a SBM.

 

[RedJaron]

If you're wanting to build a Litecoin miner, you'll get a 4xPCIe-slot mobo (like a 990FX Sabertooth) and the cheapest CPU you can find; it's an entirely different build, and would be very hard to address in a SBM.

Someone brought up the point of using an APU in this kind of build and put further mining threads on the IGP. I wonder how much return you'd get from that as opposed to a 750K.

 

[Onus]

That might work, but then I think you'd be limited to only 2xPCIe slots. For a miner, I'd rather be able to throw one or two more graphics cards.

 

[RedJaron]

No FM2 boards support more than 2 slots?

 

[Onus]

Hmmm, I see a few with three...

 

[jaquith]

Someday I'll figure out 'why' you guys use some of these oddball resolutions.Please try: 1920x1080, 2560x1440, 2560x1600, 3840×2160, 5760x1080 and maybe a lower or common sub-HD e.g. 1366×768 or 1600×900Thanks!

 

[Isaiah4110]

Someday I'll figure out 'why' you guys use some of these oddball resolutions.Please try: 1920x1080, 2560x1440, 2560x1600, 3840×2160, 5760x1080 and maybe a lower or common sub-HD e.g. 1366×768 or 1600×900Thanks!

Not sure what you are seeing as an "oddball" resolution. They do have your requested 1600x900 in there, and also already use 1920x1080 and 5760x1080. So the only resolution they use in these benchmarks that isn't in your list is 4800x900... which just so happens to be what you get when you run a configuration of three 1600x900 monitors.

So are you just saying you want to see them expand their benchmark graphs to include more resolutions?

 

[iammykyl]

"the rest of our charts are just numbers, at the end of the day. That’s because each of us uses different games, applications, and monitor configurations in our own systems."Then why not have a more evenly matched comparison? That way you would not have to qualify your results.

 

[Crashman]

"the rest of our charts are just numbers, at the end of the day. That’s because each of us uses different games, applications, and monitor configurations in our own systems."Then why not have a more evenly matched comparison? That way you would not have to qualify your results.

Because if this were a gaming system shootout we'd need to say "At the end of the day these charts are just numbers, nobody really cares about the difference between 150 and 200 FPS".

 

[Aegean BM]

I'm still voting to ditch the optical drive.

 

[Aegean BM]

I loved the summary statements in the form of "[X] cents of performance for every dollar spent beyond the [lower system]".Don't worry too much about pricing out the 3 tiers at 1x, 2x, and 3x. I'm glad that you've been loosening that requirement. I'd like to see it even more loose still. I'd prefer that each tier try to hit the sweet spot in their range/in their description, something like $500-900, $1100-1900, $2100-$3300. Or maybe the rule is each tier can go over or under by 20%.People's spending is far more elastic than they'll admit. If an extra $120 brings in a good bang for the buck, they'll do it. As the contest currently is, I fear that sometimes they might spend money they normally wouldn't. That doesn't teach me where the sweet spots are. That's why I applaud dropping $50 from $800 in this round. Who knows? Maybe next round it'll be $50 over.

 

[Lee Yong Quan]

a typo in *benchmark and overclocking configuration* in the processor overclock, it should be *i3-4130* instead *i7-4130*

 

[Crashman]

a typo in *benchmark and overclocking configuration* in the processor overclock, it should be *i3-4130* instead *i7-4130*

Fixed, thanks!