Which of these two is the better gaming system?

[sprez]

Which of these is a better gaming system?

System 1:

CPU: athlon II x4 760k 3.8Ghz
CPU COOLER: Scythe Katana 4
GPU: Radeon HD6850
PSU: Corsair 430cx
MOBO: AsRock fm2a88x Extreme 4+
RAM: 4 Gb crucial ballistic lp (1x4) ddr3 1600Mhz CL8
HDD: 1 TB WD Blue Drive
OS: Win 7 64-bit

System 2:

CPU: i3-2100 3.1Ghz
CPU COOLER: Stock
GPU: GTX460 (oc)
PSU: Antec 500w
MOBO: MSI h61m-p21 b3
RAM: 4 Gb kingston ValueRam (2x2GB) ddr3 1333Mhz CL9
HDD: 60gb Kingston SSD & 500gb WD Blue Drive
OS: Win 7 64-bit

Your opinions please.

 

[rolli59]

The second one but neither is really good.

 

[sprez]

The second one but neither is really good.

Can you explain why? I know they both kinda suck but just given these specs

 

[Whammy]

Yes the second one, but neither build will be that good..

 

[rolli59]

The second one but neither is really good.

Can you explain why? I know they both kinda suck but just given these specs

Low on ram for 64bit OS (8GB recommended) and GPU's are old but at the same performance level, the second one wins because better CPU.

 

[Ravi Gagan]

Surely System 1

 

[phillipnolan]

Actually, according to passmark the first CPU is marginally better. Although i suspect you would not be able to perceive the differences without testing software. See this site for test results: http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_lookup.php?cpu=AMD+Athlon+X4+750K+Quad+Core&id=1801

If you are looking to build a system, save for a few more weeks or months and get a more robust solution. No less than 8gb and preferably 16gb of ram. Get a 6 or 8 core processor and be certain your HDD is 6gbs.

The first board is better on specs because it has both SATA 6gb and usb 3. Generally, your entire system will be more responsive if you build with only the fastest subsystems. The most import being a fast HDD and adequate RAM.

good luck

 

[Whammy]

No no no, no game will ever take advantage of more than 8Gb of RAM, and anywhere around 1600 frequency will be fine.

 

[phillipnolan]

"no game will ever take advantage of more than 8gb of RAM" may or may not be true, but don't ignore system resources and background processes like windows update etc that can chew up your ram. YMMV, but headroom is nice to avoid the inevitable resource conflicts. . .

 

[Whammy]

I doubt any background processes would take up entire Gigabytes of RAM.

 

[phillipnolan]

I doubt any background processes would take up entire Gigabytes of RAM.

as i write this my system (7Pro) is using 4.32 GB. I am running firefox and outlook.
if my system has only 8Gb of ram, that is more than half of the available physical ram.

If i then load a game that takes 6 or 8 gb of ram, something must be swapped to "virtual ram" or the system cannot run. That virtual ram is much slower because it resides on the hard drive. the process also involves the cpu.

my point is that ram is relatively cheap at this point. from a performance standpoint it would be preferable to live entirely in ram than to be swapping processes out to virtual while trying to play a game that is using most of your resources.

just my 2¢ -- do with it as you choose.

 

[Whammy]

How can Firefox and outlook use 4+ Gb? A quick Google search on how much RAM Firefox and Outlook should be using will prove otherwise, unless you have dozens of Firefox plugins with a huge amount of tabs open. You could also have other non-Microsoft programs that are running in the background when you don't know.

 

[phillipnolan]

How can Firefox and outlook use 4+ Gb? A quick Google search on how much RAM Firefox and Outlook should be using will prove otherwise, unless you have dozens of Firefox plugins with a huge amount of tabs open. You could also have other non-Microsoft programs that are running in the background when you don't know.

If you care, i learned about memory management on this computer. Because it had a whopping 64k of ram, i learned very quickly to be aware of what was running. I am still very cognizant of what is running on my system.

If you carefully read my post, i never said Firefox and outlook were using 4+ Gb. I assumed you were capable of parsing the sentence and drawing the conclusion that the memory usage was a total; firefox and outlook were the major apps running in addition to the OS. My base system, OS, antivirus, etc runs 3.8 Gb. Adding outlook and firefox (20+ tabs and an few plugins) brings it up another 500Mb.

This is my main general use system. I have a second, stripped down system that uses only 1.3 - 2.0 Gb -- that is the system i use for video processing etc, but not for other uses. if i had time for gaming right now, it would be the one running the games.

My example was based on the assumption that sprez was building a general use computer that would also be used for gaming. Hence it would require anti-virus/anti-malware solutions as well as running email, audio/video players etc.


Make sense now?

 

[Whammy]

Yes I understand exactly what you mean, but this is a stalemate because I was basing my info on every computer I've had never using over 1.5 Gb of RAM when I was simply browsing the internet while Skyping and Word Editing, when you were basing it on your computers. I do keep my computers very clean and process free though. However, I still recommend 8Gb to the OP, as his budget isn't the highest and if you don't have that many background processes, 8Gb will be fine.

 

[jubih]

Personally i'd go with system 1 because im an amd guy, but that's just me.