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Total price £350 spec me a gaming machine!

jorzeh said:
http://www.youtube.com/user/TimeToLiveCustoms#p/search/11/6EUTnvtmWNI goto 8 min mark you'll see a massive differance between the frame rate same GPU - CPU Does matter and futher more this is a modem game CPU is just as important as a GPU in gaming.
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The video you show has someone going from 60 FPS with one CPU to 115 with the best CPU.
However, it's a driving game, and the difference between running at 60FPS and 115 FPS is non-existent (especially if you run with VSync on).
When you're at the budget level, like the OP here, GPU is massively more important than CPU.
Any £50 CPU will provide playable game rates in any modern game, as long as the GPU is powerful enough. Whereas spending £50 on a GPU and spending more on a CPU will provide worse performance.
If you need the CPU for specific non-gaming apps you know you need, it is be worthwhile buying more, but on such a strict budget, the money is better spend on a GPU I think.
 
crackerbear said:
Second hand 6850 for £40? I'd snap that up :p
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lol was meant to type 4850 rofl...must have been typing 6850 too much lately and typed it by mistaken without even noticing lol

opethdisciple said:
Is the AMD quad cpu better than an i3?
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It depends. In heavy-threaded applications such as Video Encoding H.264 and Cinebench, the Athlon II X4 at 3.7GHz is only on par with i3 530 at around 4.0GHz+, despite having two extra physical cores vs the i3 with HT.

As for gaming, it would depending entirely how each games is coded...some games sucks at using extra cores and deliver higher frame rate with faster dual-core (i.e. Assasin Creed 2), and some games sucks at using dual-core, and works better with more than two cores (i.e. Call of Duty: Black OPs). But for any older games that pre-date Windows 7, or any games that run in no more than 2 threads, it is pretty much guaranteed that the i3 530 would deliver higher frame rate than Athlon II X4.
 
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Hey Marine :)

Marine-RX179 said:
In heavy-threaded applications such as Video Encoding H.264 and Cinebench, the Athlon II X4 at 3.7GHz is only on par with i3 530 at around 4.0GHz+, despite having two extra physical cores vs the i3 with HT
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As lovely as each of the "two" cores are on an Intel® Core™ i3 it just can't compete with an AMD® Athlon™ II X4 in any MultiCore application that requires "serious" processing power! :D



Now the thing some people either don't realise or seem to forget is that when you overclock the Intel® Core™ i3 you are only overclocking two physical cores and not the Hyper-Threading . . . when you overclock the AMD® Athlon™ II X4 you get the speed gains from each of the four cores! . . .

At an easy 3.5GHz the X4 is nearly 14% ahead of the i3 @ 4GHz in MultiCore-Fritz . . . I fail to see then how an X4 running at 3.7GHz is only "on par with i3 530 at around 4.0GHz+" in "heavy-threaded applications"? :cool:

i3630fritz.jpg
 
That is helpful Big Wayne.

But I think the choice now is between:

A Intel Core i3 540 3.06GHz

Intel Core 2 Quad Q8300 2.5GHz

AMD Phenom II X4 Quad Core 965 3.4GHz (or a six core if the performance is worth the extra £6)


In terms of price: the Amd is the most expensive then the core2quad then the i3......

Obviously this is whole system upgrade, so motherboard ram and a gpu probably a 460 is going to be added to the equation!


Looking at the benchmark results on the anadtech website it seems overall the Phenom 2 cpu iws the best of the 3.

However looking at the results for ht Phenom vs the Core i3... its very mixed results: http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/102?vs=143
 
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>Big.Wayne

i3530vsathloniix4.jpg

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Even in applications such as Video Encoding and Cinebench, the Athlon II X4 is barely any faster than the i3 530. And in the Cinebench results, while the AthlonII X4 seem to be slightly faster than the overclocked i3 530, we have to bare in mind that the Athlon II X4 has reach its max overclock at 3.7GHz, while the i3 530 at 4.07GHz has not. Overclocking the i3 530 to 4.2~4.4GHz will match, if not exceed overclocked AthlonII X4's results.

So in the most ideal enironment of cores usage being maximised, the Athlon II X4 and the i3 530 are pretty much "on par" with each other. However when it comes to gaming, i3 530 would be better because its full 100% performance will always be there (in games old or new), where as the performance of the Athlon II X4 is too subjected to influence by too many factors (you can't seriously expect every game that support Quad-cores would using the extra cores as effectively as Video Encoding and Cinebench now can you?). In older games that run in two threads, the Athlon II X4 is limited to only 50% of its max capability, and as for games that "support" Quad-core, the performance can be anything from 100% down to 60% scaling, depending how well the game is "optimised" to using the extra cores. I hate to say this again...but not every game that "support" Quad-core is as well-optimised as BFBC2 and Arma II.

While you might argue that bit-tech is biased toward Intel, you are hardly neutral yourself...:p
 
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