Setup for friend

Leezor

Leezor

Leezor

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Setup for friend (£400)

My mate has £400 to spend, im gonna give him my i3-530 so he needs everything else, unless you can do a build for £400 with a better processor. He wants it for gaming.

Thanks.
 
Last edited:
Ahh nvm, think his gonna get a decent prebuilt one now. Hybrid i just bought an 760 for £120 and im waiting to upgrade my gfx card, its why i was giving him my old processor.
 
Fair enough. Jesus, are 760s still going for £120 used? I thought they'd dropped to £100.

Don't let him go prebuilt though, you can get an H55 motherboard, 4GB of RAM, a cheap case, a proper PSU and a 5850 for £320 odd.
 
Don't link to competitors.

Also, although quad cores are nice, your i3 530 when overclocked will perform considerably better for gaming than that Athlon II X4. Most games are still based on just two cores, and even for the ones that aren't, the higher clock and better IPCs still rule in favour of your i3.
 
I would agree with hybrid in as much as he should let you build one not buy a prebuilt system.

The 5850 is on offer at £100 and should be snapped up at this price. I usually recommend AMD phenom 955s (made into 965 through bios changes) on low budget gaming builds. The phenom has L3 cache over the athlons and is on par with the i3 2100 (does actually beat the i3 on games that want quad cores) and the AMD build will work out cheaper allowing more money into the GPU funds.

However seeing as you are donating him a £70 i3 CPU it would be a bit silly to turn the offer down. That 5850 wont stay at that price, seeing as it's such a low budget he really needs to make a decision quickly. We can argue over mobos and cpus all day long but truth is when it comes to gaming it's the GPU that really makes the difference.

I can't see a prebuilt £400 rig being as good as your CPU coupled with a 5850 and the necessary extras.
 
They may be unplayable on an X2 250 or an E8xxx dual core, but none of the games you linked to would be unplayable on an i3 530 at 4.0GHz. If he couldn't get a free i3, I would likely recommend a quad core over a dual, but the dude's getting a free and very powerful processor, that could easily play anything you linked, even according to the benchmarks in the articles you linked.
 
Did you bother to see the Crysis link? the PhenomIIX2 560 is described as unplayable!!

LOL

Infact did you bother to read any of the articles? LOL
 
Actually, I read all of them. Thanks for the condescending manner, though.

You may want to read them yourself, actually. The Phenom II X2 560 is described as unplayable because it averages 24FPS at stock. The i3 540 at stock, which is nearly 25% slower than a 4GHz i3 530, does a massive 56FPS- on that very same chart.

When you laugh at other people for not reading articles, try to make sure you've actually read them yourself.
 
To be honest your friend really does need atleast £500 to get a decent budget gaming rig.

He has three options really. Either buy a cheap and cheerful mobo to use your donated CPU and buy the 5850 and the necessary extra components. Then upgrade the CPU and or mobo later when needed.

Or build a quadcore system (AMD would be most cost effective) with onboard gfx on the mobo then add a GPU later.

Stulids links are helpful but thats comparing the CPUs with the same GPU. On your friends budget he can't do that. If he goes quad he cant afford a decent GPU so games will be unplayable, if he goes dual core there will come a time when the CPU is a serious bottleneck.

(Third option) Try and convince your friend to spend £500, come back and we can spec you a good quad core budget gaming rig.......decent GPU included.
 
stulid said:
Nope, all the articles clearly state how poorly dual cores do.
Click to expand...

Your reading comprehension is terrible. They do say how terrible dual cores are, but the i3s all give great performance, and we are talking about the i3, not dual cores in general. Thanks to hyperthreading on the i3, we get a pretend quad core, hence it closes the performance gap.

Just because you've decided you're right doesn't mean you actually are.
 
honosuseri said:
(Third option) Try and convince your friend to spend £500, come back and we can spec you a good quad core budget gaming rig.......decent GPU included.
Click to expand...

Wise words indeed.:) get a good quad core rig and play the latest and future games how they are meant to be played.
 
CPU_01.png


The i3 530 will EASILY outperform an AMD quadcore. This is from the article you accused me of not reading, by the way.
 
http://www.legionhardware.com/articles_pages/battlefield_bad_company_2_tuning_guide,7.html

The Core i3 540 is also left behind by the Core i5 750 despite featuring Hyper-Threading.
Click to expand...

http://www.techspot.com/review/405-the-witcher-2-performance/page8.html

During testing, we noticed that the game isn't particularly dual-core-friendly. We saw roughly a 25% decrease in performance when going from four to two cores.
Click to expand...

http://www.techspot.com/review/403-dirt-3-performance/page7.html

It was also interesting to see that Dirt 3 really dislikes dual-core processors
Click to expand...
 
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