Tom's SBM: The $1,500 Mainstream PC

[dirtmountain]

Sometimes when i post in comments i forget to add how much i enjoy the articles and the work that went into them. The work done by Mr. Woligroski and the other folks here at Toms is much appreciated. Yeah i like to criticize, mutter, grump and complain, but it doesn't stop me from reading all the great info and putting it to use. I sure wouldn't want to be doing this work and having my every choice be put under a microscope and slammed. Great work, great site and keep the articles coming.

 

[WheelsOfConfusion]

[citation][nom]dirtmountain[/nom]Sometimes when i post in comments i forget to add how much i enjoy the articles and the work that went into them.[/citation]
Yes. Don't get us wrong, most of us nit-pickers enjoy the articles.

I still contend that this price point is unrealistic as either "mid-range" or "mainstream." Same with the choice of cooling and graphics, unless the caveat is explicit that this is coming from the specialist's POV (which definitely isn't mainstream at all).
I just find this sort of disconnect off-putting. It seems like the method used here is to figure out where the cost/benefit for super special performance parts stops working, then divvy that segment up into arbitrary increments. It just doesn't seem to reflect real-world computer pricing or buying habits.
And for the record I've never been one to say "blah blah ur bilds dun ovreclok rite!"

 

[JonnyDough]

Apparently Tom's supports piracy, because a gaming system includes WINDOWS OS, which contrary to what some may think you should PAY FOR.

 

[FireYoshi]

It says 7200.10 drives in the article, but the picture is 7200.11

 

[luciiacob]

Choosing a PC configuration for 1500$ is pretty much like choosing a car for, lets say, 50000$. The choices are unlimited. Some would prefer a E-series Mercedes, others a BMW X5, others will go for a Civic and tune it...etc. 50000$ for a car gives you many choices and so does 1500$ for a computer.

Personally, I'd go for a Q9550-Q9650(no OC) on a X48 if I my dad would ask me to buy him a new PC which he could use for the next 5 years, but I would certainly go for an overclocked E8400-E8500(or that Q6600) on a P45 if I wanted a new PC, since I'll upgrade it in less than a year. X38 isn't exactly an option right now since X58 is here.

Choosing between a liquid cooling kit+2x4850s or an air cooler+1x4870X2 is actually an easy choice. In case of a 'loud' and annoying girlfriend/wife, choose the second option and add a couple of 12 mm fan's (5000 RPM minimum ) to the rig, just in case. Of course, you need some high-end headphones to go with that 'combo'. If your girlfriend/wife is 'quiet' (and you want to keep it that way around the house) or her soft voice is what calms you down when your get home from work then you're better off with that liquid cooling kit. Better yet, add some waterblocks for the videocards!

Please excuse my english. Obviously, it's not my first language.

Anyways, great job Tom's hardware!

 

[designerfx]

I find this article to be a bit interesting, but I think you missed the 800$ mark for systems. http://techreport.com/articles.x/15737 has the info on that, as an alternate viewpoint.

 

[jcknouse]

(I hope I get the quote thing right this time...lol)

[citation][nom]Cleeve[/nom]
If people's biggest problem with this article is arguing semantics over proper use of the word 'mainstream', than I'm happy.
[/citation]

Please don't think I'm unhappy with the article. Just that I've different views on how most would look to build a system. I think the watercooling is a different approach.

To be honest, I don't use Intel processors yet. I use AMD and have for years. Sure, Intel outperforms them but I'm not a righteous overclocker who tweaks my memory voltage and FSB clock speed to the last 0.125v or or MHz increment I can. I don't think a lot of people are either, and that's why I don't think water cooling is mainstream/norm/run-of-the-mill in PCs.

I just built a system, and it cost me (if i remember right) about $1480. This is basically it (i didn't put line breaks for each one to save space...brands included as i can remember them):

AMD Phenom x4 9850 BE, 8GB (4x2GB) OCZ SLi-Cert DDR2-800, ZeroTherm air cooler, ASRock K10N(lots of letters after it)-Wifi mobo, 3.5" floppy, 150GB WD Velociraptor, 500GB Seagate 7200.11, mid-tower case, 2x XFX 9800GTX+ cards in SLi, ABS (Tagan) 1100W supply, Evercool drive fan, 1 hiper 120mm fan, 1 hiper 80mm fan, slot fan, kb and mouse, arctic silver 5 paste.

That's what i can remember. With no overclocking or tuning or anything...just putting Windows XP Pro x64 on it (which i had 3 spare licenses laying around), it benchmarked at like 13000 on 3DMark06. I already had an Asus 20" 5ms monitor to spare too.

With the ZeroTherm cooler, the CPU temp was running around 39-40C after all of the OS loading and loading applications and what not. I didn't get to see what the temp went to when the benchmark was running, so i'm not sure if it hit 55C or not. I did notice that the Cool n Quiet threshold in their overclocking tool was set to 50C, so I'm sure that if it passed that point that fans would have been sped up by the mobo.

Anyways, I really enjoy the articles. In fact, Tom's is responsible for me finding NewEgg.com which is where I get 99% of my things. And, Tom's has become the place that I come to read up on most all of the product information and reviews I need.

So, thank you. I really do appreciate your pursuing these projects and putting your ideas and creativity to doing them. In many cases, it gives me insight I normally would not have on things and helps me learn.

 

[sjss]

Interesting concept of mainstream. Don't get me wrong, this is a NICE $1500 PC, but it is not mainstream (no, not even by american standards).

Mainstream is probably closer to $1k now.

You criticised your own CPU use, and stated why you were using it anyway. I accept that, however, mainstream would be dual core at most. There's not a lot of high-yield parallelism in mainstream apps. The most you are going to get is use of a TV Tuner for TiVO type stuff.

Watercooling? That's nuts, that is certainly not a "mainstream" thing. Overclocking really isn't either, but if you want to do mainstream overclocking, stick with air cooling.

The mobo is a good choice, either a mid-ranged current board, or a high end previous-gen board is reasonable for a mid-ranged build. The ?43 and ?45 boards would have been better for cost/performance though.
SLI/Crossfire for mainstream??? That's nuts. $150-$250 is probably a reasonable or slighly high 'mainstream' budget for a video card.
For the drives, I won't complain seriously, though I'm not sure I'd give raid0 to the mainstream - esp if the cost/volume is similar/better for a 1TB vs. 2x 500GB.
I want to complain about the case, but... Well, a mainstream user would reasonable go for a more expensive case if it looks nice. Still, there are some pretty decent looking, sub/approx-100 cases (I'd argue better looking than what is listed here, but that's personal aesthetics).

A 750W powersupply? A mainstream probably shouldn't need more than 500W.


So. It's a nice $1.5k machine, but it's not mainstream by any stretch of the imagination, not even here in America.

 

[cleeve]

[citation][nom]sjss[/nom]Interesting concept of mainstream. [/citation]

Yeah. Also interesting that, once again, we have more posts on the semantics of using the word 'mainstream'.

We'll just leave out the word 'mainstream' next time to satisfy you good folks.

It'll likely still be somewhere in the neighborhood of $1500, and probably still consider have watercooling for the overclocking aspect of the competition tho.

So weigh in fellas... what would you like to see?

An E8500 and an H20-120 watercooling kit?

Or E8500 and a CoolerMaster HyperTX2 air cooler?

 

[bounty]

High end = H20 or compressor
low end = stock or cheap air

midrange = quality air, maybe SLI/Crossfire. I think SLI/Crossfire is easy/quick enough to setup and there is no maintenence.

H20 is just a little much. You could spill-leak/fry your system, you could have air bubbles, mold, you have to check your H20 levels periodically and flush the system. I'm not sure exactly how you managed to get half of it hanging out of the back of the case. I'm guessing from the reviews http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductReview.aspx?Item=N82E16835108105
that you are supposed to run the tubes out from a PCI slot? Your tower looks like maybe there were some holes (drilled?) and it's just swiging from the back? Looking at the reviews on Newegg, it just seems like a demanding system. It's funny to read 5 egg reviews where they list cons that seem terrible... seems once you go over to H20 you're on the cool aid and things like ease of use and reliability don't matter any more.

 

[bounty]

"Great product, mine is leaking." here's an example. ????????????????

 

[DiabloG1]

I have to agree with many previous posters. For the price of the watercooling system, you could get a better CPU and a decent air cooler. Air might not be brilliant, but my QX9770 is running at 4.0GHz under air. Not only that, but the clocks were dissapointing. A better choice would be to use a faster, better clocking dual core, cooled with air. Despite the fact this is "mainstream" there are few enough enthusiast programs which utilise more than two cores.
I might also be tempted to go for a more conventional graphics chip arrangement (X fire/SLI is not very normal) such as an X2 or a 260.

 

[iamregan]

For Q6600s that don't make it to 3.6Ghz, I typically go with 8 x 400mhz @ 1.365V-1.4V for 3.2Ghz. Despite only being 3.2Ghz, the performance is pretty much on par to the your overclock since the FSB is a little higher, but you typically can get away with a much lower Vcore by lowering the multiplyer from 9 to 8. This might be usefull to for some running on air cooling.

 

[Crashman]

[citation][nom]JeanLuc[/nom]the X38 is an enthusiast’s motherboard, something like the Biostar T Power i45 would have been more appropriate and according to CustomPC UK is just as good at overclocking as any other motherboard. [/citation]

X38 is fine, it's the same as the X48 and he wouldn't get an ADVANTAGE with the P45. And the T-Power i45 is NOT a top overclocking motherboard anyway, read Tom's Hardware's P45 comparison. BIOSTAR put a lot of effort into promoting its P45 motherboards, but don't believe the hype.

 

[Crashman]

I thought

P45 in crossfire offers 8x ver2.0
X38 offers 16x ver1.

8x ver 2.0 = 16x ver 1.0
So both are the same.

Please correct me if I am wrong

No, X38 is PCIe 2.0

 

[kittle]

I'll add one more here too.

IMO
Water cooling = very high end.
SLI/xFire = high end.

what can you do with a regular air cooled SINGLE CARD solution for $1500?
Also keep in mind that todays games are getting bigger and bigger so acres of disk space are going to be needed. 750gb is fine now, but whatabout next year? What about multiple drives for easier backups?

If I have $1500 to spend on a PC, im not going to "waste" 150 on a cpu cooler. theres lots of air cooling solutions that are OC friendly and much cheaper.
If you have a 64-bit CPU, get a 64-bit OS and 4gb of memory -- spend some of the savings from WC in that department.

And while im personally a fan of a good quality case and willing to pay for it, not everyone feels that way. (my last case cost me $300) $180 is overkill for a case when you can pick them up for MUCH cheaper. Spend the extra $80-100 you saved on larger/faster/more HDDs.

A $1500 system should also last a while unless your one of the privleged few who can dump $1500 on a new PC every year.

 

[cleeve]

Well, like I said, we won't be using the term "midrange" because of bad user feedback.

We will however be putting together the best system we can for the $$, and that probbaly means crossfire/SLI, and possibly water cooling...

 

[zodiacfml]

what's with this people.
i'm too familiar with building pc's.being emotional and seeing a word such as "mainstream/midrange" on the title is like judging a book by its cover. its just a title, like those you see on those advertisements,tells almost nothing and misleading if you believed it.

anyone thinking the watercooling and nice case is too expensive is smart enough to create his system that is cheaper or performs better than presented here.
people's critics are right about watercooling yet in wrong/inaccurate reasons. you could have said watercooling is not mainstream because it is good for 100 or greater watt CPUs and cooling GPUs.
i think, the overclocked quadcore used here barely reaches that power consumption so a highend aircooling sink performs close.

also, i think, there is only around 400-600Mhz difference in speed advantage of any overclocked dual core over an overclocked quad which is not so big for a person often multitasks on his computer like encoding a DVD to H264 while surfing on java and flash websites.
and to think, CRYSIS is the only game can benefit from that additional speed. (30 to 60 fps is enough)

one more, i think there is a limit on frequency of each core which is around 4Ghz on every process and architecture which also nehalem's speed limit. so, adding memory controller, hyperthreading,three memory channels, and smaller improvements is intel's way to get around that frequency limit to make nehalem look better than previous architecture.

 

[GAZZOO]

Well if I had the coice of 4850 graphics cards I would have put
2 x HIS HD 4850 IceQ 4 1GB GDDR3
http://www.hisdigital.com/html/product_sp.php?id=397
being a duel slot card the hot air goes out the back and I am sure you can over clock them more then the standed Engine CLK (MHz)625 and Memory CLK (MHz)1986
But then I want to run 4 X HIS 4850 1gb mem in 4x8x configuration
So I am bios
the article is good though and you will never get an article that has no disagrements lol
Gazza

 

[Guest]

How the heck did you wind up with that? Am I crazy, I just built
Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550 Yorkfield 2.83GHz
ZALMAN 9500A 92mm 2 Ball CPU Cooler
EVGA 123-YW-E175-A1 LGA 775 NVIDIA nForce 750i FTW SLI ATX Intel Motherboard
CORSAIR Dominator 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 1066 (PC2 8500)
CORSAIR CMPSU-750TX 750W ATX12V / EPS12V SLI Ready CrossFire Ready 80 PLUS Certified
EVGA 01G-P3-1280-AR GeForce GTX 280 1GB 512-bit GDDR3 PCI Express 2.0 x16
Western Digital Caviar SE WD2500AAJS 250GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive
COOLER MASTER RC-690-KKN1-GP Black SECC/ ABS ATX Mid Tower Computer Case
LITE-ON 20X DVD±R DVD Burner Black SATA
... for $1300 with shipping, not including $110 of Mail in Rebates in my newegg cart

 

[Luscious]

I've been thinking about putting together a mid-priced gaming rig that can overclock nicely. Here's my list also from Newegg:

-Sony NEC Optiarc DVD±R Burner Black IDE Model AD-7200A-0B $23.99
-Antec Nine Hundred Computer Case $99.99
-Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 ST3400620AS 400GB Hard Drive $49.99
-DIAMOND 4870X2PE52GXOC Radeon HD 4870X2 Video Card $514.99
-CORSAIR CMPSU-550VX 550W Power Supply $77.99
-CORSAIR XMS2 4GB TWIN2X4096-6400C4DHX DDR2800 RAM $50
-GIGABYTE GA-EP43-DS3L Motherboard $86.99
-Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 Wolfdale Processor $169.99
-Tuniq Tower 120 CPU Cooler $45.99

Taking rebates into account, that comes out to $1130. Is this a crazy build or a smart investment?

 

[Crashman]

[citation][nom]Luscious[/nom]I've been thinking about putting together a mid-priced gaming rig that can overclock nicely. Here's my list also from Newegg:-Sony NEC Optiarc DVD±R Burner Black IDE Model AD-7200A-0B $23.99-Antec Nine Hundred Computer Case $99.99-Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 ST3400620AS 400GB Hard Drive $49.99-DIAMOND 4870X2PE52GXOC Radeon HD 4870X2 Video Card $514.99-CORSAIR CMPSU-550VX 550W Power Supply $77.99-CORSAIR XMS2 4GB TWIN2X4096-6400C4DHX DDR2800 RAM $50-GIGABYTE GA-EP43-DS3L Motherboard $86.99-Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 Wolfdale Processor $169.99-Tuniq Tower 120 CPU Cooler $45.99Taking rebates into account, that comes out to $1130. Is this a crazy build or a smart investment?[/citation]

That power supply doesn't leave much extra capacity, I'd probably play it safe for future upgrades by getting a slightly larger one.

 

[GameSinewpcs]

Why don't you incorporate the cost of Windows into these system builds? As for the average user, windows is usually a cost associated with building their own machine. This would provide more accurate comparisons versus system vendor machines that have the cost of Windows incorporated into their price tag. Many people have the tendency to overlook the need to pay for Windows and configure a machine to their budget, but then unnecessarily justify spending the additional $XXX over-budget on windows instead of reconfiguring/better optimizing their build.

 

[Crashman]

[citation][nom]GameSinewPcs[/nom]Why don't you incorporate the cost of Windows into these system builds? As for the average user, windows is usually a cost associated with building their own machine. This would provide more accurate comparisons versus system vendor machines that have the cost of Windows incorporated into their price tag. Many people have the tendency to overlook the need to pay for Windows and configure a machine to their budget, but then unnecessarily justify spending the additional $XXX over-budget on windows instead of reconfiguring/better optimizing their build.[/citation]

Use Linux. The only reason the site uses Vista is so that all the benchmarks from different systems/articles can be compared to each other.

Personally, I use Windows XP. Enthusiasts should already own one or more licenses.

 

[Luscious]

[citation][nom]Crashman[/nom][/citation]
I'm not worried about upgrades - just need something for gaming-only that can chew through all of next years titles for cheap. It's actually the same build uberclock does on their ion, only $$$$ less. If I do upgrade, it'll probably be just a GPU swap 2 years down or a hard drive swap.

I wouldn't mind seeing a head-to-head with my build vs. the $1500 Tom's build. Maybe cheaper is faster? Good feedback though.