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processors and vid cards
Processors
Do games actually take advantage of 6 core processors? If not now, is it likely they will in the next 5 years?
In addition, what's the best gaming 'value' if the options were between:
4 core processors:
2nd Generation Intel® Core™ i7-3820 (10M Cache, Overclocked up to 4.1 GHz)
6 core:
2nd Generation Intel® Core™ i7-3930K (12M Cache, Overclocked up to 3.9 GHz)
Vid Cards
The debate for me is between dual vid cards of a lower end or a single higher end vid card.
Would you choose:
single
1.25GB GDDR5 NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 560 Ti
dual
Dual 1GB GDDR5 NVIDIA® GeForce® GT 545
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My situation:
Need to replace gaming comp.
Budget is 2k - going to use a dell account (i know, i know I should go newegg or tiger direct and build it myself; suffice it to say there are reasons this can't happen
Want to add a 27" led monitor and still keep it in my price range
Comments
i7-3930K, and gtx 560 ti is not considered high end. If u want high end graphics get gtx 680.
E: get gtx 560 ti anyways.
Sic semper tyrannis "Democracy broke down, not when the Union
ceased to be agreeable to all its constituent States, but when it was upheld, like any other Empire, by force of arms."
So you'd rather get 1 of the 560 ti's rather than 2 of the other?
I wouldn't get a 560ti. It's a last gen card drivers won't get updated.
I would look at a AMD 7850 or an nvidia 660 gtx (660ti is over priced imo) for a fairly high end card (e.g. will play everything current on high setting at 1080p)
Good info so far.
To continue:
it seems going a single vid card is a.o.k.
Therefore, I'm wondering about the deals I've seen for the 'slimline' (for lack of a better term) gaming comps which have much more reasonable prices, yet seem to have all the gaming power.
Seems like it may be worth the price difference to have 1 good vid card, a 4 or 6 core processor and smaller power supply; with the disadvantage being that you can't ever upgrade to 2 cards.
Any thoughts?
Drivers get updated all the time, regardless of the card's generation.
You make me like charity
Probably best bang for your buck is, i5-3570k, 660(Ti), 600w psu, 8g ram.
I dont support ati so i dont suggest them.
Some games will use six cores if you have them, but games typically don't offer any real benefit to using six cores. If you get 200 frames per second with six cores and only 150 frames per second with four, is that a real benefit to someone whose monitor can only show 60?
If four cores struggle with a game so that six would be substantially better, then two cores would probably leave the game basically unplayable. That will leave your game with a rather small market for quite some time.
Never get two low end cards in SLI or CrossFire. Well, maybe not quite never, but the uses for it are a very small niche, such as if your only purpose is to experiment with SLI and test how well a program scales with it. For gaming use, two low end cards is a waste of money. And yes, the GT 545 is low end: in the current generation of desktop hardware, there are 0 AMD cards (out of 9) and 1 Nvidia card (out of 8) that fail to be dramatically faster than a GeForce GT 545.
Speaking of which, the GeForce GTX 560 isn't exactly high end, either. It's roughly competitive with a Radeon HD 7850, like this:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814202004
If that were high end, then what would $200 cards be, let alone $300 and $400 cards?
On another note, the GeForce GT 545 was never released to the general public. It's OEM-only, and I've never seen it offered by any OEMs that offer decent gaming desktops, so if you're looking at buying it, you're probably looking at severely overpaying for inferior hardware.
Any desktop with the word "slim" in it isn't likely to be a gaming desktop or a gaming anything else. Standard video cards won't fit in the extra slim cases. A lot of other standard hardware won't fit in slim cases, either, so you end up paying extra to get custom parts that give you inferior performance.
You can get some ultra small form factor cases from Silverstone or Lian Li that are meant to handle gaming rigs, but those are roughly cubical in shape: short, not slim.
You shouldn't worry about upgrading to two video cards later. The only situation I'm aware of where it makes sense to add a second card for SLI or CrossFire later but not to set it up that way initially is if you're buying two computers at once, and plan to eventually move both video cards to the same computer while buying a higher end video card (that didn't exist at the time of the original purchase) for the other computer.
What you should, however, worry about is upgrading to one faster single card a few years down the line. And a slim case will probably make that impossible.
*NOTE: Can upgrade to 2 vid cards
-or -
Dell U2410 Ultrasharp Monitor 27"
HARD DRIVE256GB SATA 6Gb/s Samsung Solid State Drive
1.25GB GDDR5 NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 560 Ti
Dell U2410 Ultrasharp Monitor 27"
A large computer case costs around 100$, and small cases cost nearly the same. If the 'slimline' computer seems to be a lot cheaper, then that's because it lacks something that the large computer has, not because of case size.
remember your CPU is not "K" so u are not able to overclock it really.
E: What type of mobo u are going to get?
Understood on the slim stuff - but this is actually an alienware 'budget' gaming system; so in my post above you'll see the options I'm looking at.
The alienware case actually accomodates all 'current' vid cards - so I spose I'd be taking a bit of a gamble for the future.
And before anyone rolls their eyes at the dell/alienware choice;
with a 10% coupon
10% gov't employee discount
cyber monday deals
+ other account advantages;
I won't get a better value for the price; trust me, this is all I've done this weekend
Out of those alternatives, 2 because it seems to be cheapest and while gaming the graphic card would more likely become bottleneck than any of those processors.
I'd suggest trying to look at something with better graphic card if your budged is enough. Also, are you sure that you're okay with just 256GB of hard disk space? Maybe just 128GB SSD + a large traditional hard drive would be better so that you won't run out of storage space.
EDIT: Graphic card speed comparison can be found here: http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/2012-vga-gpgpu/19-Tom-s-Hardware-Index-B-Performance,2976.html /EDIT
overclockersuk will build this for £1300
Specification
I would change that bulldozer to intel processor.
Out of the three you listed I would get
Dell U2410 Ultrasharp Monitor 27"
*NOTE: Cannot upgrade to dual vid cards, but I get the monitor"
It seems you have to go with Dell for your own reasons. If you want something thats decent and will game the above will do it and hopefully not rape your wallet too badly with Dell.
There are other options, but if you must go with Dell and the choice is between the 3 you listed, then that would be my choice.
If you have other options than those I would explore them tho.
This is a correction to an earlier post;
the last 2 options have a gtx 660, NOT the 560ti
just as a note. I have been looking into video cards for myself recently and I have yet to find anything that is better price/performance ratio than the radeon 6870.
Well yeah 6850 / 6870 were amazing pixel for buck, trouble is its hard to get hold of one now.
7850 is equivelent to 6870