Another "Spec" Thread...

bJN · 29 Sep 2010 at 00:35

So after FINALLY starting my new build (after picking up my lovely TJ07 for £100 yesterday) it's time I start narrowing the items down to go in it.

I was always a man to go with AMD, but for this build I've decided to go with Intel to see how things are on that side.

So it all bottles down to what it's used for. Primarily, gaming. I'm also starting to do a bit more 3D work and I'm usually dabbing around in Photoshop on most days too, but we'll stick with the gaming in mind.

As I said, I've decided to go Intel for this one, so what path would be best to take, bearing in mind it is primarily for gaming?

The choices I really see in front of me are either X58 (so either i7 930 or 950) or P55 (either i5 750/760 or i7 860/870). The plan is to overclock (you'd be mad not to right?), starting off with air and progressing onto a watercooled setup when funds allow. The extra 2GB of RAM that comes from the X58 route could be handy, but I'm not sure whether the extra cost would justify it, especially when it can be used in other areas.

Obviously a motherboard and RAM combination to match the above, and also a new PSU (although I'll probably go for one of the Antec New TruePowers that everyone is raving about) alongside a "medium sized" SSD (i.e. large enough for W7 and a few games to go on there) and a Sammy F3 for the extra storage.

The GPU can wait a month to see how the ATI 6xxx series turns out, so no need to worry there, yet. Hopefully I'll be able to stick to a single-card solution that's powerful enough, so the X16 X16 advantage of the X58 chipset shouldn't be taken into account, especially as there difference is extremely minimal, I am led to believe

Thoughts? Just remember it is primarily for gaming - most benchmarks I've looked at pitting the 750 against the 920 often results in the 750 on top - but that's at stock settings so the TurboBoost is simply the winning factor here. Take it that all the CPU's would be clocked to a nice ballpark figure, say 4.0GHz, just to even it up, what real-world performance differences will there be?

Cheers

Roscoe1724 · 29 Sep 2010 at 00:49

How much you willing to pay?

bJN · 29 Sep 2010 at 18:10

Enough to cover up to either spec, but just for what I'm using it for, the P55 chip looks better against the X58 in terms of price against performance. Just curious as to the real-world differences between the P55 chips more than anything, as there is a large-ish price difference.

R088ieS86 · 29 Sep 2010 at 18:58

Gaming i doubt you would see much difference if any between an i5 and i7 build.

Possibley in newer games where they actually use multi-cores. Bad Company 2 definitely likes a Quad. The other gains from a Quad are in the area of graphics, like photoshop, which also like a fair size chunk of RAM to go with it. (Another area where the X58 works in your favour as it allows tripple channel RAM)
But if its only dabbling I doubt you'd complain at the difference between the 2. What other 3D programs do you use?
In favour of the i5 its cheaper and still performs very well in most games.

Of course theres the argument that the 1156 board will be superseeded in Q1 2011 by the 1155 range, taking the Sandy Bridge CPU architecture. If you aren't desperate then it might be worth wating for them, as the 6000 ATIs will be out with a good few driver releases behind them to.

Theres a few things to think about.

hybrid572 · 29 Sep 2010 at 19:08

This sums it all up- there's almost no difference in gaming, but there's a massive price difference. Spend the money on a better graphics card instead.

bJN · 29 Sep 2010 at 19:17

hybrid572 said:
This sums it all up- there's almost no difference in gaming, but there's a massive price difference. Spend the money on a better graphics card instead.

I've been trawling through a lot of anandtech's benches myself, but to be honest they're not all that useful. Also, when trying to add the game benchs to the summary, nothing gets added, even if I get rid of the ones already on there, which doesn't help...

And with regards to the i5 vs i7, remember that I'm talking about the P55 i7, the X58 i7 doesn't seem worth all the extra money - so basically the i5 750/760 against the i7 860/870 in terms of pure performance, which one's better? I'm certain that all the benchmarks I've seen pit them together at stock speeds, so the Turbo on the i5 brings it on top all the time.