Build A vs Build B

Greed378 · 1 Jun 2013 at 18:37

Build A

Build B

Asking a lot of basic questions I know but I'm completely new to this, and not sure what is most important in my pc for gaming. They are basically the same price, Haswell seems incremental and from what I've seen, prices will stay pretty stable, so I think I'll order one of these builds.
Thanks.

Greed378 · 1 Jun 2013 at 18:47

stulid said:
I was going to say the second one, but the HD3 motherboard only does crossfire at 16X/4X so the two cards won't get equal bandwidth.

Is there an option to replace the two 7850's with a 7970 or something?

A little over budget, guess I could save another few weeks, if it would improve performance significantly.
Edit: could drop to 8gb ram and up the board/card

Greed378 · 1 Jun 2013 at 19:09

Orcvader said:
Drop the RAM to 8gb 1600MHz, no reason for 16gb if it's for gaming.

Up the motherboard to one that can do x8/x8. Alternatively pick a single 7950/670 instead.

Even with the drop, can't afford it :mad:

, around £70 more than build A. How much better would performance be?

Greed378 · 1 Jun 2013 at 19:22

Orcvader said:
How about the Z77-HD3 + single 7950 instead? Surely that should be cheaper than the two 7850s?

I could but then I'm trading an i7 for an i5 and more ram. Which would be better?

Greed378 · 1 Jun 2013 at 19:32

mickyflinn said:
How much is this build costing you ?

Build A £895
Build B £930
Edit: Should mention that's prebuilt and shipping included.

Greed378 · 1 Jun 2013 at 21:12

Orcvader said:
So there's no option to go for an i5 + 7950? Well that seems silly...

There is but I am using the 7950 in my i7 build. Is the I7 no better for gaming?

Greed378 · 1 Jun 2013 at 21:18

Orcvader said:
Most of the older games only use 2 cores, with only a few of the recent games being able to take advantage of 4 efficiently. Due to this, in most cases, the extra threads on the i7 will be doing nothing, which would mean the same performance as trhe i5, as the i5 is an i7 but with no hyperthreading. The only reason you want an i7 is for video encoding and other things that can use multiple threads.

Indeed but presumably more and more games will take advantage of the i7 hyper threading? Still if the i5 is the same for gaming I can spend the extra upping to 7970?

Greed378 · 1 Jun 2013 at 21:37

Orcvader said:
Personally I would pick an i5 + better GPU than an i7 + slightly lower GPU to be honest, that should last longer in terms of gaming performance.

Funny thing is the 7950 can easily be overclocked to 7970 levels, so I would pick a 7950 and overclock it yourself. No point spending more than you need.

Thank you so much for your help. Now the leftover money can go towards new games, a better keyboard and mouse, a wired controller etc. but is there anything that should be upgraded in that list? Is the cooling sufficient? The power supply? And finally would a GTX 670 be better than a 7950?