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

[neiroatopelcc]

[citation][nom]Cleeve[/nom]I couldn't disagree more.

System Builder Marathon is about 'specing the best components for the money, then building it, testing it, and overclocking it to see if it lives up to our hopes.

As far as water cooling, the 'mainstream' is a functiion of pricing and affordability. With good water cooling available under $150, liquid has entered the mainstream, IMHO.

Remember, a big part of our System Builder Marathon is overclocking. I personally think that if we ignored watercooling options for an overclocking rig, you guys would be all over us - and rightly so.[/citation]
[citation][nom]Cleeve[/nom]I have to disagree on that point. If you can have a rig with a single 4850 for $1300 and a rig with two cards for $1460, I think the performance diffrence more than justifies the extra card.

Multiple cards are no longer toys for the elite, I think they're very mainstream friendly.[/citation]

I have to say that I've never really disagreed with cleeve, but I have to this time!
I'm really wondering about what midrange is. I would've thought it was the type of system that is in the middle between highend and lowend. But I must've been mistaken. I'm the local hardware nutter in my social area, and that means I know pretty much what everybody's running in their system. The best systems I'm aware of in my immidiate surrounding is an e8500 with a single hd4850, and an e6400 (oc'ed to 3,4) with an 8800gtx. That's what I'd call midrange really. I know nobody in my surrounding would find a highend system affordable or the sensible choice, so they ain't going for that. On the other hand. A low end system would be something like my aunts e6600 with a 8500gt. It was lower-midrange when I built it, but the budget was limited.

In my surroundings NOBODY is employing sli or cf systems, and only the guy with the e8500 mentioned above has been running watercooling. And he only did on his old rig sporting an opteron 170.

I don't know if people in other countries are more wealthy, but although we danes aren't exactly poor, most of us would consider anything with two graphics cards or watercooling highend. Perhaps those things have become user friendly and anyone can set it up, but no ordinary person knows that. And it's the ordinary person who'll buy a midrange or lowend rig.
Most of the systems I'm aware of running would have onboard graphics or a 200€ discrete card if they're using them for gaming.

imo a midrange computer is priced around 700-1000€ at most. Excluding software. And the only highend technology that is being used by midrange and lowend systems in my area is raid. People would rather buy two 320gb drives in raid 1 than 1 750gb drive, cause their data is more important than loadspeed.

 

[neiroatopelcc]

Oh how I'd like an edit button! so unfair only the employees have that option!

Anyhow. I forgot to answer cleeve on the last page here.
I'd definetly like to see an e8500 on air cooling rather than water. As I said above, I only know one rig that used watercooling. And proper air cooling is as efficient as reasonably priced water anyway. I don't care if it's a thermalright, a zalman, coolermaster, scythe or any other aircooler. So long it's performing in the tuniq class.

 

[WheelsOfConfusion]

I think the issue with "mid-range" and "mainstream" usage here is more significant than just semantics, and I don't appreciate it being treated as such. It's not just a question of labels, it's a question of mind-sets and approach. And apparently there are a lot of active, long-time Tom's readers who feel similarly.

It's a step in the right direction that those terms won't be applied to the next SBM, but I'd like to know that they won't be treated as if they were those things. I strongly dislike the apparent attitude that machines of this caliber and cost are "mainstream/mid-range."

 

[wirelessfender]

I'm at a loss here. How is it that the HD4850 Crossfire beat the 8800 GTS 512 SLI?? The GPU charts here at toms say otherwise. I'm a little frustrated because I just invested in a second 8800 GTS 512 and compatible motherboard for SLI to get playable frames in crysis on very high settings. Unfortunately I am not getting playable frames rates on very high and I'm very dissapointed and confused.

 

[cleeve]

[citation][nom]neiroatopelcc[/nom]I have to say that I've never really disagreed with cleeve, but I have to this time! [/citation]

Hey, nothing wrong with disagreeing with me, as long as we keep the respect.

I think part of your pricing argument is a bit diluted because the Article is based specifically on the US market, and on current US prices. It's hard to directly translate that value into another continent.

And to clarify, I don't think there's anything wrong with the good folks across the pond... hell, I'm not in the US either. But when you're doing a price/performance article you're kind of forced to focus on a particular country's pricing.

 

[cleeve]

[citation][nom]WheelsOfConfusion[/nom]I strongly dislike the apparent attitude that machines of this caliber and cost are "mainstream/mid-range." [/citation]

I'm not sure what you're saying here.

The goal of the marathons is to put together the best system we can at a given price point that can perform well stock as well as overclock.

Terms like 'best', or 'mid-range' are always subjective. How do you envision attitude affecting it?

For my part, I'm going to push the next marathion into the ~$600, ~$1200, and "Sky's the limit" price brackets because it seems that's what you folks want.

I might even pitch the idea of posting our specifications to the forums to get user feedback before we build the things, so you guys have more say in the process and everyone can be heard...

 

[cleeve]

[citation][nom]wirelessfender[/nom]How is it that the HD4850 Crossfire beat the 8800 GTS 512 SLI?? The GPU charts here at toms say otherwise. [/citation]

To be fair, our last system builder marathon using the GTS cards was months ago, the new Nvidia driver has increased performance a bunch so that probably accounts for a good chunk of the diffrence.

 

[wirelessfender]

I'm still confused. Just to clarify, as of now, which of the two offer best performance in crysis? It was this sentence that really blew me away, " the performance these cards provided in Crysis decimated the previous build that sported two 8800 GTS 512MB cards in SLI configuration" You say a new nvidia driver changed the performance for the better, wouldnt that mean the GTS cards would still come out on top? Or am I still not understanding something?

 

[neiroatopelcc]

[citation][nom]Cleeve[/nom]The goal of the marathons is to put together the best system we can at a given price point that can perform well stock as well as overclock.[/citation]

Let me help you with your confusion then.
While you may regard the goals of the article as what you described above, and it may well be, it isn't how it is/was sold to us readers.

It would seem you've set the plans for the next set of articles a bit more to our liking though. We'll see if that's still what we like when you publish them. Not only prices change, but expectations do too.

As for my last post about pricing - the actual prices in denmark are irrelevant to the point. The point should be rather simple - no matter what the actual prices are in the us, I doubt the terms used for the particular price brackets are anything close to the reallife meaning of them. I just used the most recent newsletter as an example. Perhaps the pricing is 10% higher or lower here than in the us, but there's still a huge leap in specs for mainstream in the article and reallife.

Anyway, you got the message. Your turn to act.

 

[cleeve]

[citation][nom]wirelessfender[/nom]I'm still confused. [/citation]

Well, here's what I can tell you for sure:

1. Comparing this marathon data to the 8800 GTS 512MB cards in the last marathon, the 4850's were the strong winners. These were the tests I personally ran.

2. As you pointed out, our graphics charts show a closer race with the two 8800 GTS cards winning.


Now you know what I know. I can hypothesize that it might be updated drivers that account for the disparity. I didn't personally perform those tests so I'm not an expert on the details. Perhaps it is another variable that is responsible. But 1 & 2 are what I know.

 

[GameSinewpcs]

[citation][nom]Crashman[/nom][/citation]

The main purpose of these system builds are to show readers what the markets like and configure specific systems in specific price ranges. Then to compare the systems using (for the most part) Windows based applications. Also, they show them (whether windows only applicatinos or not) in a Windows environment which affects benchmarks and therefor needs to be incorporated into cost. Now speculations can be made that their enterprise version will operate with negligible difference to say home-premium, so the cost could be entered at Home-Premiums current market price. Also, these systems are intended to be compared VS market vendors which incorporate Windows into their purchasing price (at least in most situations). So when comparing %s and overal prices vs performance, the lack of the $100 or so from a legal copy of Windows Vista affects viewers perception of value for vendor-based machines. Ex. $1500 build as listed here vs $1500 build from vendor. If they had identical perfomance, the first one would actually cost $1600 while the vendor based machine would still cost $1500 so it would be a price difference of about 6.25% unaccounted for. Lastly, even if most users had extra copies of Windows Vista just lying around, at some point or other they still had to pay for them (exceptions do exist).

 

[WheelsOfConfusion]

[citation][nom]Cleeve[/nom]I'm not sure what you're saying here.[/citation]
What I'm saying is that some readers might actually take offense to the idea that this system is either mainstream or mid-range, the way somebody driving a Honda Accord might feel snubbed if he overheard a gal in the elevator griping to her friends about how "average" her Lexus LS is.

 

[neiroatopelcc]

[citation][nom]WheelsOfConfusion[/nom]What I'm saying is that some readers might actually take offense to the idea that this system is either mainstream or mid-range, the way somebody driving a Honda Accord might feel snubbed if he overheard a gal in the elevator griping to her friends about how "average" her Lexus LS is. [/citation]

That's a good point really. I didn't think of that, but it might actually be quite a big deal of the reason.

ps. I'd love to own a honda accord (or a crx), but I can't afford anything that fancy. If I could pick a lexus ls or an integra I'd not hesitate to take the latter. So your example might be a bit off in my world, but the point is valid.

 

[WheelsOfConfusion]

[cite][nom]neiroatopielcc[/nom]ps. I'd love to own a honda accord (or a crx), but I can't afford anything that fancy. If I could pick a lexus ls or an integra I'd not hesitate to take the latter. So your example might be a bit off in my world, but the point is valid.[/cite]
Actually, I can't either. I did manage to get the Fit, though. It does everything I want to and has space to spare for my needs. It's also easy on the gas. I plan to keep it around for a while.
I just chose the Accord analogy as it's reasonably priced for its class, and one of the best-selling full size cars in my country.

And my computer runs an e4500 on an $50 Asrock motherboard, I also plan to keep THAT around for a while (as the family computer) so... yeah. Both my car and my computer are more budget-oriented and I'll be living with them for years, hopefully.

 

[kvikramg]

Question ? Why did you guys pick a ATA100 instead of SATA 3gb

 

[orangedrink]

how bout this for mainstream. Buy a dell/gateway/etc. how much more would you put into it to make it gamey.

 

[Bullet Oracle]

Seeing as the Swiftech H20-220 WC is out of stock what would be a preferable cooler (Water or fans) for a quad core CPU?

 

[neiroatopelcc]

The aircooler used in the low-end system would suffice I'd think. Or any good tower cooler really. Sure water's better, but imo it's too expensive.

 

[tj_the_first]

Thanks for the article Cleeve. Interesting choices and I thought you did a reasonable job at explaining your rationales.

People have to realise Toms is an enthusiast site so mainstream = enthusiast mainstream. I've never overclocked and watercooling scares me - I don't pretend to be an enthusiast. A lot of the respondents on here don't share my lack of delusion.

 

[neiroatopelcc]

Try overclocking! it's not hard, and even with the stock cooler you can get at least 10-15% out of almost any computer, even old athlons or a pentium 3
All you have to do is raise your fsb by the increase in speed you want, and if you can, you want to lock the pci, agp or pcie speed at stock, and you're likely to oc at least a bit without problems. If you oc more than 10-15% lower your memory speed by one notch, else they'll likely stop working properly (temporarily).

When you're done, go into windows and run prime95 for 30 minutes or so. if it stops you've overdone it. can be downloaded on mersenne.org
on a dual or quadcore you want to run wprime instead (google it)

it's really easy to overclock these days, and if you have a core 2 something processor you can get away with at least a 30% speed increase on stock cooling.

ps. gigabyte, and probably others, have implemented an 'auto' feature for voltage control, that increases the voltages it thinks it needs, so you don't even have to think about those things if you don't want to.

 

[kaigypsy]

All I know is I appreciate the articles because it gives me information to work online and in my head. My last computer was built by my gamer bro who dropped $2500 bucks into this system so I wouldn't have to bother but with minimal upgrades. Nearly 6 years later, its time for a new system and with bro 3,000 miles away with new baby, I'm on my own. I'll probably do the same since I'm not much on upgrading every year just keeping the drivers up so both very old and new games can be played but for the system to last long enough until even better stuff to come out in five years. So thanks for the info both on minimal and midrange-some of us noobs. I appreciate the difference, the arguements and the alternatives. Cheers.