Some Help Please?

[MattyJ]

Hi guys (and girls),

I'm looking at getting a whole new system, which will be used mainly for playing games, and just general web surfing, word processing etc.

I have budgeted around £150 to spend on a CPU and £100 to spend on a mobo, and I was orginally going to get the AMD Phenom II Quad Core 965 Black Edition, at 3.40GHz with a board like the Asus M4A79XTD Evo or Asus M4A78T-E AMD 790GX.

But, it seems from reading about that perhaps this isn't the best way forward for the money? Am I better off getting an i5/i7? I've read that even though the clock speed is lower, the chip still performs as well or better, at least where gaming is concerned.

So, can you guys help? Sorry if it seems a stupid question and so on, but it is all rather confusing. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Cheers!

 

[gbradders123]

whats your complete budget?

 

[95thrifles]

As can be seen in this chart (produced by techreport) at low resolutions (cpu dependant) then yeah i5/i7 is marginally better than AM3, however at higher resolutions (gpu dependant) AM3 is better, seen as how most people on here probably use a resolution circa 1920*1200 then that would make AM3 the better choice. Techreport speculate these results are down to the optimisation of the platform.

 

[MattyJ]

whats your complete budget?

Probably around £700, well at least that's what it looks like it'll come too.

I was looking at getting the Radeon 5850 graphics card, new case, power supply and some DDR3 too.

 

[MattyJ]

As can be seen in this chart (produced by techreport) at low resolutions (cpu dependant) then yeah i5/i7 is marginally better than AM3, however at higher resolutions (gpu dependant) AM3 is better, seen as how most people on here probably use a resolution circa 1920*1200 then that would make AM3 the better choice. Techreport speculate these results are down to the optimisation of the platform.

That's interesting, thank you.

 

[Sindri]

As can be seen in this chart (produced by techreport) at low resolutions (cpu dependant) then yeah i5/i7 is marginally better than AM3, however at higher resolutions (gpu dependant) AM3 is better, seen as how most people on here probably use a resolution circa 1920*1200 then that would make AM3 the better choice. Techreport speculate these results are down to the optimisation of the platform.

Is this really valid? as most people wouldn't buy their i7 to keep at stock. Surely a chart which had the i7 at the phenom clocks would be more useful.

 

[95thrifles]

Yes but the point is that at higher resolutions your cpu doesnt matter as the game becomes gpu deppendant, so yeah you could have them all clocked and there'd be a higher disparity at the lower resolutions but the point is that at the higher resolutions they all converge and intels new i7s/i5s tend to nose dive a bit. With OCd i7s youd just have a stepper decline as it would have a higher starting place but still finish in the same position