System Builder Marathon, Sept. 2011: System Value Compared

[geekapproved]

I would have liked to see last quarters $500 machine (i3-2100) in the charts to compare with this quarters $500 machine (X4-955)

 

[tfbww]

All these comments on adding an SSD. I'm struggling to understand where the value of that is. Maybe I'm just too much of a gamer, but even when you read the $1000 system review it's basically an apology for and then urging for SSD's:

"Despite very similar application benchmarks, you really see the benefit when it comes to launching software, and PCMark 7 does a fair job of demonstrating that."

Well, that's great and all, but if I'm not worried about start up times (which I'm not) and I can't get a big enough SSD to house my games (30GB is too small for even an OS partition), then what else am I buying exactly? At least you could evaluate the caching in a Z68. Otherwise, I think we are still ahead of the cost:benefit curve on SSD's (at least at

 

[Onus]

[citation][nom]chumly[/nom]Maybe the value of the $1000 PC would go up if you weren't wasting money on unnecessary or poorly chosen parts. You could add another 4 GB of ram, and swap out the twin stuttering 460's for 6870's (and still have enough money to add a better, modular PSU).Here:http://i.imgur.com/g22Bq.jpg[/citation]
In general I strongly disagree with your criticisms. The authors explain their parts choices (reasons different from yours doesn't mean they are poor choices), and we know the timing of purchases affects the prices as well, but I did want to say that your build was very nice.

 

[Onus]

I think the value assessment was predictable, but still mostly good. I think it struggled a little to find a rationale for the $2K build; it might have been easier if it focussed on professional, well-threaded apps where time is money rather than on games, where many people could not possibly justify the expense.
And, I was really not surprised to see that where it has enough bang (although sometimes it just doesn't), the $500 PC offers remarkable bang/buck to budget gamers. I understand there are times when I probably appear to be an AMD fanboy; really I'm not, I'm a VALUE fanboy, and where there's enough bang, AMD does very well there.
Anyway I'm entered. I'd be happy to win any of these.
The $2K PC I would build for my wife since it is overkill for my own needs. It's overkill for her too, but she is doing more and more stuff with video and would appreciate the huge jump from her 720BE. She's not a gamer, so I would not use the GPUs; I'd rebuild it in her Antec Sonata III.
The $1K PC I would build for her too, but without the SSD and with only one of the GPUs.
The $500 PC I would build for my brother's family, but I'd use a GTX460 and keep the HD6870 for some tests.

 

[tfbww]

[citation][nom]hyteck9[/nom]I would like to offer up an annual analysis on these results. Assumptions: your computer usage over an entire year averages out to 2 hours a day. If that $2,000 PC can perform work just 2 seconds faster each minute than the $500 pc, it saves you A DAY of your life each year. 24 hours and change in fact. Which is really more like 3 WORK days if you consider an 8 hour work day. There is no recourse on the lower value PC's for this, unless you buy 2 (or 4) and find some way to cluster them together or farm out your workloads. Of course, you still have to pay for the power twice (or four times) and the cost of time/administration for the cluster, farming, etc... which defeats the time savings. Based on this I say the $2000 is totally worth the price. I'd happily pay a one time premium to get a day (or 3 depending in your definition) of my life back each and every year. ...and that was just 2 seconds faster.. imagine if its 10.. or 20 seconds faster? How often do you get the chance to write a check for more free time?[/citation]
Are many people looking at that $2K build for work? I'd expect a very different (i.e. much cheaper) computer if it was work oriented -- I'm sure the number of people who need two 580's for work is relatively minimal. This seems like the "extreme gaming" pc and for that I doubt many people notice if they get 4 more minutes of gaming in a day (if that is even the case since the theory of constraints will show that you are only going to go as fast as your slowest part, such as your teammates/guildmates).

 

[gm0n3y]

Another great round of SBM, good work guys!

 

[Guest]

I appreciate the time and effort it took to make these computers and the articles. Very uesful info for someone who'd like to upgrade soon. Good job!

 

[chumly]

[citation][nom]jtt283[/nom]In general I strongly disagree with your criticisms. The authors explain their parts choices (reasons different from yours doesn't mean they are poor choices), and we know the timing of purchases affects the prices as well, but I did want to say that your build was very nice.[/citation]

Maybe poor was the wrong word to use, I'll secede to that. But there are better options, I believe. I just cannot condone spending money on a first gen, small SSD. Properly formatted, an HDD is going to function just fine. It is labeled as a gaming build, however, and SSD's don't really add to the gaming experience. I often see the argument that it lowers windows boot times (by seconds, if that, UEFI boot times are atrocious), but what does it do for the actual game itself? I opted for a solid state drive on my current build, and I am regretting it, I would rather have another couple 2TB drives to add to my array. For instance, in Starcraft 2, my boot time is limited by the speed of the others playing. An SSD does NOT make things happen instantly. The other aspects of my computer that I would like the speed on (video and photo editing) are gimped by the small size of the drive. The virus scanning that my computer does while I'm away is unnoticed by me. I'm still trying to see the benefit, as it has NOT changed the overall experience of my PC.

I believe that SSDs are just the new hype, and they are being marketed as essential, and people are paying lots of money needlessly for them. They are small and expensive, and the cost does not reflect the benefit. I would tell the others here, rather than buy an SSD, to build themselves an amazing system with with a 6 GB/s sata slot open for the eventuality of the drives becoming affordable, rather than force it into a modern build (and to look at tom's mobile site on their smartphone for 30 seconds while their computer boots).

 

[lunyone]

I really enjoyed the $500 BUDGET machine this time around (minus a few personal preferences). It made the most economical sense (which it should) with what they built it with. I don't see an SSD in the $500 build anytime soon (unless a 128 gb one comes down to 70-80 pricerange). The $1k build should always be the sweet spot for best performance for the $, but the $500 build this time is pretty good too.

 

[jnanster]

nd22 :

I would have stick to 1 gpu in the 1000 S build. Instead of 2 gf 460/radeon 6850 I would have used 1 radeon 6970/ geforce gtx570 - from persoanl experience 1 gpu = less problems!

I game at 19x12,with a single card and SSD, the $1000 rig rocks.

 

[torque79]

I'm surprised the $1k build is not going with a Z68 mobo. They don't seem to add that much of a premium, and then you can use the increased speed of video transcoding. I think people downplay that feature too much. I'm primarily a gamer, but my wife owns an android phone and I own a Blackberry Playbook. To put tv/movies on either of these the majority of my video files must be converted before transferring to the device, which is very time consuming. I would love to have that sped up for a minor increase in motherboard cost even if i never use the SSD caching.
It seems to me the MSI Z68A-G43 (G3) motherboard would be an affordable ATX mobo with pcie3 support (future video card upgrade), usb3, sata 6gb and z68 for under $150.

 

[eddieroolz]

It seems this quarter's builds and its tests showed that hardcore enthusiasts should build $2000 machines and moderate users should go with a $1000.

To me the $1000 machine didn't have much of a presence, hence my conclusion.

 

[technewstoday]

Top High End PC Hardware Video Reviews are here on http://youtube.com/PCwizKid

 

[Crashman]

[citation][nom]technewstoday[/nom]Top High End PC Hardware Video Reviews are here on Hello]http://youtube.com/PCwizKid[/citation]Hello PCwizKid, I think we call that spam.

 

[fb39ca4]

[citation][nom]hyteck9[/nom]I would like to offer up an annual analysis on these results. Assumptions: your computer usage over an entire year averages out to 2 hours a day. If that $2,000 PC can perform work just 2 seconds faster each minute than the $500 pc, it saves you A DAY of your life each year. 24 hours and change in fact. Which is really more like 3 WORK days if you consider an 8 hour work day. There is no recourse on the lower value PC's for this, unless you buy 2 (or 4) and find some way to cluster them together or farm out your workloads. Of course, you still have to pay for the power twice (or four times) and the cost of time/administration for the cluster, farming, etc... which defeats the time savings. Based on this I say the $2000 is totally worth the price. I'd happily pay a one time premium to get a day (or 3 depending in your definition) of my life back each and every year. ...and that was just 2 seconds faster.. imagine if its 10.. or 20 seconds faster? How often do you get the chance to write a check for more free time?[/citation]
Not necessarily true. When playing games, the higher performance PC will do work better than the lower performance one, but you will still presumably play games for the same amount of time. If you are doing something like CPU rendering or video editing where the amount of work is fixed, but the time varies, a more expensive PC is a good investment to make, like you said. When playing games, the amount of work varies (FPS, detail settings), but the time remains the same. A higher performance PC could theoretically have time savings, but it is impossible to measure. Example: You will die more and spend more time trying to beat Crysis on a computer with integrated graphics (if at all possible), due to low frame rate, but how are you supposed to measure the time difference.

I rest my case.

 

[Crashman]

[citation][nom]den1[/nom]The other were too much money spend for the performance gains. Most of the $1000 and $2000 builds could have had part replaced by cheaper and just as good parts.[/citation]You mean almost as good. But then it wouldn't be "as good", hence the fixed budgets.

 

[t0r012]

Toms when are you going to actually adjust the weighting of SSD score to be more in line with their real performance gains?
you tweaked them once but you still haven't gone far enough. sure it spikes a couple of synthetic benchmarks and that skews the "performance" numbers way , way too much compared to their "real" world benefits. sure faster boot and load times are awesome and all but it doesn't really add any FPS and only the slimmest tick up in the non synthetic.

 

[Crashman]

[citation][nom]t0r012[/nom]Toms when are you going to actually adjust the weighting of SSD score to be more in line with their real performance gains?you tweaked them once but you still haven't gone far enough. sure it spikes a couple of synthetic benchmarks and that skews the "performance" numbers way , way too much compared to their "real" world benefits. sure faster boot and load times are awesome and all but it doesn't really add any FPS and only the slimmest tick up in the non synthetic.[/citation]It only counts towards 1/10th the total score and is primarily a measure of how long it takes you to open and close applications. I know some people like to get themselves a coffee while waiting for Photoshop to launch...but most don't.

 

[Guest]

I think many of the people commenting are forgetting, this isn't a Gaming build with three price ranges. It is a PC build and only he $500 was tagged specifically for gaming. People do other things besides play games, for FPS isn't the only aspect people are looking for.

I would like to see a gaming build though, such as $500 vs $800 just to see what how the experts would use the bump to increase the gaming performance.

 

[Guest]

It said winners would be announced by Oct 25th... have they? And where is it announced?

 

[Goldengoose]

When's the next build coming out?

 

[wolfej26]

[citation][nom]chumly[/nom]You can also get a pair of 560's (minus the ti) for $310 after rebate. Seeing as Dual screen gaming is not supported by any Nvidia cards, I find that it's overkill.[/citation]

Assuming you meant multi-monitor gaming and not "dual" monitor gaming. Nvidia has their own version of eyefinity called Nvidia Surround. They may not support them in reference cards but there are some versions with an extra displayport connection that allow Nvidia surround gaming on one card.