RE: Windows 10 beta, sure it's free, but read up on the privacy statement.
Win 10 beta will log basically everything you do, including keystrokes, so it's fine for gaming, but do not use it for banking, or any other activity in which you value your privacy.
I know I recommended win 10 beta previously, but I had not seen the privacy statement, my bad.
RE: HDD vs SSD, on the OPs budget, just use the old HDD. You can UG the drive later, when you have more money. Sure, an SSD is faster, but a budget build needs all the help it can get, and using an older drive is a good way to save a few bucks. If it fails, you can always get a new one, and your important data should be backed up to a flash drive or optical disk anyway.
The old drive will do fine, it's the core build, CPU + mobo + GPU, and the case + PSU, that need the help.
Originally posted by syntax42Yes, the optical drive can be salvaged. Salvaging the hard drive and using it as a primary drive is a bad idea and will lead to problems. Mechanical drives have a life-span of about five years, depending on use. The system the drive was in was very small and probably caused the drive to get very warm, further reducing the life of the drive. I wouldn't trust it to last more than one more year. You don't want that kind of risk on a new system.Memory bandwidth is important for integrated GPUs and tasks outside of gaming. There is no good reason to use one DIMM when you have four slots and can get two DIMMs of half the capacity for the same price as one DIMM.It seems you need some education on hyperthreading, which is different from multithreading and parallel processing. Having two physical cores try to perform the load of four cores isn't the same as having four real cores. A core i3 is a decent CPU for the budget, but games are starting to take better advantage of four physical cores now.A SSD alleviates a major bottleneck in computers. The difference between loading for 2 minutes every 15 minutes and spending only 15 seconds of loading can save you eight days per yearof not staring at loading screens if you play just 4 hours per day. The 120 GB storage size chosen by Quizzical is enough to install the OS and a handful of games. A SSD is not a bulk storage device and should not be used to hoard downloaded files, movies, or music. Get a hard drive or use the one in the old system to store downloads and media. If the hard drive fails, you don't lose your OS.
Just...wow.
1) That Pavillion is nothing ancient. It is 2012 computer.
Yes, 5 years old HDD wouldn't be reliable...in server system running intensive read/write operations 24/7. Since this isn't server system, there is no issue.
2) Yep, there is like 10% performance increase so if you going to decompress 10GB files, you will save that 8s or so.
Completely irrelevant as I said.
3) You do not know what you talk about in that paragraph, do you? You just had to say "something", right?
I was pointing out to one very lenghty discussion where Quizzical was adamant about CPU not being able to process more than 1 instruction per cycle. Which is false and it is exactly what Hyperthreading does - on top of regular parallel instruction processing, it can work with instructions of 2 threads at the same time because of additional registers.
There is no point going for 4 slower AMD cores over 4 logical cores of i3. None.
4) Major bottleneck?
Yeah, in a gaming PC I want to spent less time on occasional loading screen and then have low resolution and details... That is what gaming is about, the loading screens...no brainer, eh?
Also, did your funny math of saved "eight days per year" counted in time you will spent managing that insufficient SSD space?
5) About 7% of SSD capacity will/should be reserved for garbage collection and alike(some tests even suggest to keep 25% of drive capacity as free space), 30 GB will be eaten by Windows, so after fresh install you are looking at about 80 GB of usable space. Modern games can take easily up to 50 GB of space. 120 GB SSD is insufficient. Period.
A SSD alleviates a major bottleneck in computers. The difference between loading for 2 minutes every 15 minutes and spending only 15 seconds of loading can save you eight days per yearof not staring at loading screens if you play just 4 hours per day.
In what universe does that happen.
A regular Western Digital black does 170MB/s. A good SSD does 500MB/s.
That's 3 times as fast. Your 2 minutes to 15 seconds is 8 times as fast.
SSD are about 3 times as fast in sequential reading as HHD, not 8 times.
Sequential read speeds basically don't matter. Everything is fast at sequential read speeds. Sequential writes, too. But saying that a hard drive is fine because of sequential access speeds is like saying that the original poster's current computer is fine because it can display the desktop pretty well. Yes, it matters if you can display the desktop (and some Atom chips struggled with it!), but the performance comparison that you should look at is common things that some of the competitors are bad at.
For storage, that means random reads and writes. Given an appropriate random access pattern, SSDs will still get in the ballpark of 100 MB/s, while hard drives chug along at 1 MB/s. That's actually how Windows tells if you have an SSD. Several years ago, when there were still some terrible SSDs on the market, Microsoft said that they couldn't find a single SSD with below 8 MB/s random reads, while the very fastest (15K RPM!) hard drives topped out around 2 MB/s. Now, 100 MB/s is blazing fast real-world performance for most things. But 1 MB/s sure isn't. Yes, that's a factor of 100, not a factor of 3, and it's not hard to find situations where the difference between an SSD and a hard drive will be larger than that, even.
Now, the choice between getting an SSD and a hard drive is partly a philosophical one. Would you rather have higher graphical settings on a computer that is generally slow and clunky, or would you prefer a quick computer that does what you ask almost immediately, but requires you to turn down graphical settings a little further? If you prefer the former and don't mind constantly having to sit there and wait anytime you ask it to do anything, then sure, skip the SSD. But I like for my computer to do what I want right away.
Yes, the optical drive can be salvaged. Salvaging the hard drive and using it as a primary drive is a bad idea and will lead to problems. Mechanical drives have a life-span of about five years, depending on use. The system the drive was in was very small and probably caused the drive to get very warm, further reducing the life of the drive. I wouldn't trust it to last more than one more year. You don't want that kind of risk on a new system.
Memory bandwidth is important for integrated GPUs and tasks outside of gaming. There is no good reason to use one DIMM when you have four slots and can get two DIMMs of half the capacity for the same price as one DIMM.
The original poster's old computer probably didn't get very warm. I have a laptop with a higher clocked version of the same APU. Even with a dinky 4-cell battery, it has battery life over 2 1/2 hours while running a Prime95 stress test on all CPU cores. It really doesn't put out much heat, which is reason for the chip to exist, so you could literally make a computer with no fans at all based on it without any real risk of overheating. Not that HP would do so, as you'd need bigger heatsinks, and that would cost more than fans.
But hard drives aren't really that sensitive to heat, so long as it's within reason. Temperatures substantially above room temperature can improve lubrication and actually extend the drive's life, as what fails is usually the mechanical rotating parts, not some silicon chip. That, of course, is only so long as the temperatures stay within reason; too hot is still a problem. But the original poster's computer isn't likely to get too hot; the hard drive probably puts out more heat than the APU most of the time. So does the power supply.
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Memory bandwidth matters, but it's really a question of how much you need. Once you have more than you need, adding even more doesn't really benefit you. Now, with a dual channel setup in a typical desktop, the difference between 1600 MHz and 800 MHz will rarely matter. But if you're skipping a channel entirely, that cuts memory bandwidth in half, and yeah, that's going to matter in quite a few things. But you're right that if you only wanted 4 GB, the way to do it is to get two 2 GB modules, not one 4 GB module. The original poster's computer probably has one 4 GB module, but that's because the APU in it only has one memory channel, not two.
I was pointing out to one very lenghty discussion where Quizzical was adamant about CPU not being able to process more than 1 instruction per cycle. Which is false and it is exactly what Hyperthreading does - on top of regular parallel instruction processing, it can work with instructions of 2 threads at the same time because of additional registers.
There is no point going for 4 slower AMD cores over 4 logical cores of i3. None.
Yes, yes, a CPU core has multiple ALUs and FPUs and so forth. It can process multiple instructions in parallel when you've got some decent instruction level parallelism in your code. But all modern CPU cores do that. And hyperthreading doesn't add more of them; it only lets multiple threads share the same execution resources. And share the same caches and so forth. If you were to duplicate everything, you'd do it by adding more cores.
Intel doesn't even claim that hyperthreading doubles your CPU performance. They only claim that hyperthreading increases performance by up to 30%. That 30% figure isn't marketing lies or bizarre corner cases; it's a realistic approximation in a lot of workloads that will scale well to many CPU cores. But the "up to" is also very important, as if one thread can take advantage of, say, all of the ALUs that the core has, then hyperthreading gains you nothing.
Doubling your number of CPU cores, on the other hand, will double your performance in workloads that scale well to many cores. And that means that the quad core will win in a landslide over a Core i3 in workloads that can put at least four cores to good use. Hyperthreading mitigates that a little and makes it closer than it could otherwise be, but more threads aren't the same as more cores.
If more threads were just as good as more cores, then the 112640 threads that a Radeon R9 290X can have resident simultaneously would make it a massively faster card than the 32768 that the GeForce GTX 980 tops out at. That doesn't happen because once you've got enough to keep all of the shaders busy (or saturate whatever else your bottleneck is), having more threads available doesn't gain you anything.
Originally posted by QuizzicalAnd hyperthreading doesn't add more of them; it only lets multiple threads share the same execution resources.
Just like 2 AMD cores are sharing single, to intel compared weaker, FPU cluster...the reason of non-competitive performance in games.
You are just theorycrafting(as usual) and ignoring(or being oblivious to) how things actually work, in reality.
Originally posted by QuizzicalDoubling your number of CPU cores, on the other hand, will double your performance in workloads that scale well to many cores.
Except such "workloads" is something you won't really experience with ordinary usage of home computer...
How CPU works has very much to do with the application code because if you've got code like
a = a / b;
b = a * 5;
There's no way for computer to process the second instruction before the first one's finished. CPU can only process instructions paraller to each other when it doesn't need the result of first instruction to process the second one, or in some cases when it's able to make a guess of result of the first instruction.
Quizzical used terms multithreading and instruction level parallelism correctly. If you got the impression that they are the same thing from his post then you misunderstood something.
Originally posted by VrikaHow CPU works has very much to do with the application code because if you've got code likea = a / b;b = a * 5;There's no way for computer to process the second instruction before the first one's finished. Quizzical used terms multithreading and instruction level parallelism correctly. If you got the impression that they are the same thing from his post then you misunderstood something.
Those are 2 different steps in processing application code.
Thread scheduling is handled by OS - this is where multithreading takes place.
Once scheduled, the code passed by scheduler is decoded by CPU into microinstructions. Processing of microinstructions takes different order than the code is passed into CPU, that is because of performance utilization - that's what parallel instruction processing and hyperthreading does, utilizing CPU resources.
Simply put: Multithreading is how and what code is loaded into CPU cache - application level, parallel instruction processing(hyperthreading) is how decoded microinstructions are processed - hardware level.
No, Quizzical does not understand how things work past FSB. He see things from application level and assumes it works same way inside CPU, it doesn't.
In his mind, the threads are being "swapped" when they are processed and one has to wait for another. He will be telling you that CPU cannot compute 1 multiplicative and 1 additive operation within a single cycle
And hyperthreading doesn't add more of them; it only lets multiple threads share the same execution resources.
Just like 2 AMD cores are sharing single, to intel compared weaker, FPU cluster...the reason of non-competitive performance in games.
You are just theorycrafting(as usual) and ignoring(or being oblivious to) how things actually work, in reality.
Originally posted by Quizzical
Doubling your number of CPU cores, on the other hand, will double your performance in workloads that scale well to many cores.
Except such "workloads" is something you won't really experience with ordinary usage of home computer...
The way that the Bulldozer floating point units worked is that it was only shared if you had to do a 256-bit AVX instruction. Both cores running different threads could run other floating point instructions at the same time--including all SSE instructions, not just scalar instructions--but if either core needing a 256-bit AVX instruction, that used the whole FPU, and the other core couldn't issue any floating point instructions at all that cycle. That's only a disadvantage when using AVX.
So how much do games use AVX? I expect that most games don't use it at all, and those that do, don't use it very much. If a program can spam AVX all the time, a Core i7-2600K (Sandy Bridge) would be nearly three times as fast as a Core i7-920 (Bloomfield). If you can spam the related AVX2 all the time, a Core i5-4690K (Haswell) would be more than twice as fast as a Core i5-3570K (Ivy Bridge). There are workloads where that nearly happens, but that's wildly unrepresentative of games. Yes, a Core i7-4790K is faster than a Core i7-920. But it's not 6-7 times as fast, as it would be if you were just spamming the wide vector instructions. And Bulldozer's FPU design is only a disadvantage if you're using the wide vector instructions in AVX.
I haven't looked up how the FPUs changed from Bulldozer cores to Steamroller cores, but I'd be very, very surprised if Steamroller made the FPUs weaker. The general order of things has been that Steamroller would duplicate some things that were shared in Bulldozer, not the other way around.
Now, Haswell is still faster than Steamroller on a per clock cycle basis. But that has more to do with a Steamroller having a deeper pipeline and higher cache latencies, not wide vector instructions of AVX and AVX2.
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For most consumer workloads, just about everything on the market is plenty fast enough--including the original poster's current system. The proper comparison of CPUs is, which CPU is better at things that some CPUs you're looking at wouldn't be good enough. There are two basic problems:
1) CPU doesn't have enough cores to do the work that scales well to more cores than you have, and
2) Individual CPU cores are too slow in single-threaded work.
Among the CPUs that one might reasonably consider for gaming, an AMD quad core will beat an Intel dual core in (1), while the Intel dual core will beat the AMD quad core in (2).
So how would a game run into these problems? Problem (2) is basically a problem of the game being badly coded. Problem (1) can be caused by the programming being inefficient, but it can just as easily be caused by the game needing to do a lot of CPU work. Badly coded and inefficient tend to cause worse gameplay problems than merely low frame rates, but a great game might well find good uses for needing a ton of CPU work even when it's implemented efficiently.
And that's especially going to be the case in the near future. DirectX 12 and OpenGL 4.4 with extensions give you ways to eliminate most of the graphics API overhead. The latter is available today, and the former will be out with Windows 10 later this year. Once that's ready--which should happen well within the useful lifetime of the machine--single-threaded bottlenecks in games that cause trouble on decently capable gaming rigs will basically be a case of "programmer is an idiot", not just trying to push further than what the API could reasonably handle.
Not even sure why you still bother to respond to his posts Quiz.
You wont change his mind nor educate him. He will continue to recommend I3 PCs with one memory stick on a low end junk motherboard, which is what he has I am sure. But hey, at least you can always add another memory stick later!
Hopefully the OPs in the posts have enough sense to sort through his "advice".
Alright. After reading all that (Finally) I've decided I'm going to walk away from the my old PC. Only keeping the Optical drive. (Dont even think I've ever used it)
I've also been working on a build from everything. And of course I'll take your guys ideas on better price for performance ratio:)
I have decided on just a just a normal hard drive & not an SSD simply do I want room, & I dont care about how fast something comes up. It just doesnt bother me.
I've also thought this 6-core processor for $100 would be more then enough for my needs now & years 2 come.
The mother board was something shown to me & I dont see an issue with it?
The GPU isnt name brand, And probly isnt something any one would want. But its a $160 card that may lack dedicated ram but has enough power for me.
The Ram speaks for itself. Ripjaw, just the best brand name & I feel like 8GB is what I want.
Power supply is 500W. Should be enough
The case, I really enjoy the look. And $34? Plzz.
I would really enjoy your guys thoughts on this. The over all price of the stuff listed is $595. Alittle bit over my budget, But I can work with it. But I wouldnt mind if you guys where like, You dont need ripjaw save yourself $50 an just get non brand lol.
I have decided on just a just a normal hard drive & not an SSD simply do I want room, & I dont care about how fast something comes up. It just doesnt bother me.
I've also thought this 6-core processor for $100 would be more then enough for my needs now & years 2 come.
The mother board was something shown to me & I dont see an issue with it?
The GPU isnt name brand, And probly isnt something any one would want. But its a $160 card that may lack dedicated ram but has enough power for me.
The Ram speaks for itself. Ripjaw, just the best brand name & I feel like 8GB is what I want.
Power supply is 500W. Should be enough
The case, I really enjoy the look. And $34? Plzz.
I would really enjoy your guys thoughts on this. The over all price of the stuff listed is $595. Alittle bit over my budget, But I can work with it. But I wouldnt mind if you guys where like, You dont need ripjaw save yourself $50 an just get non brand lol.
Looks ok, except 17 USD shipping on that case? Why won't you use HDD from the old computer too?
And yes, you can save a little on that memory module.
Although, the build from newegg I posted above provides same performance for 200 USD less...not to say the build from pricepicker.
OK, here are some alternatives to reflect your budget and retailer changes:
Imo, you should just use your old HDD and save money. You can save further 30 USD by going with lower end chipset. So that would be 30-85 USD off if needed.
You can go with FX CPU but those cores won't provide you any performance gain, all you get is more heat and power consumption... Overall, that i3 is faster when it comes to games.
I don't understand what you're complaining about the GPU not being "name brand", Asus is one of the largest Radeon card manufacturers and their Direct CU2 cooling system is really good. That's one of the best R9 270 cards you could buy.
I'd suggest selling your old computer instead of starting to strip it out of its DVD-drive. It's new enough that it's not worthless. Or if you aren't going to sell it (or keep using yourself for some purpose), then I'd suggest taking also its HD. It's still new enough hard disk that you can re-use it just fine. Your old computer is max. 2 years old, isn't it?
EDIT: The RAM suggested by Gdemami looks good enough and cheaper than the one you had picked. Another way to save 10$ if you just take it. Just don't go with his processor suggestion the one you've picked is better (6 cores vs 2 cores) /EDIT
There is no point getting FX. Those extra cores won't do jack, as pointed out above, FX is having shared FPU units anyway. What matters is how CPU performs, not how many cores is has and in that regard, FX-6300 need OC to get on par with i3.
There are some truly amazing comments on that reddedit thread - a guy switching 8120 for 4160
There is no point getting FX. Those extra cores won't do jack, as pointed out above, FX is having shared FPU units anyway. What matters is how CPU performs, not how many cores is has and in that regard, FX-6300 need OC to get on par with i3.
There are some truly amazing comments on that reddedit thread - a guy switching 8120 for 4160
Anyone having a clue won't recommend FX...
Actually alot of people recommend FX over the i3 on a budget gaming system, where its recommended you go with AMD unless you have the money to buy an i5+.
Needless to say, due to just my own research & thoughts I will stick with AMD on this. Having said that, with the parts you listed I made a few changes to my projected build. Taking on your case, PSU, & ram. They where much better & saved a nice penny.
Actually alot of people recommend FX over the i3 on a budget gaming system, where its recommended you go with AMD unless you have the money to buy an i5+.
Needless to say, due to just my own research & thoughts I will stick with AMD on this. Having said that, with the parts you listed I made a few changes to my projected build. Taking on your case, PSU, & ram. They where much better & saved a nice penny.
OP, I see you are on a tight budget, but I if you like playing MMO's or multiplayer games in general, I really can't recommend FX6300 in favor of i5.
I've had FX6300 and now I own i5 and the difference is significan't. AMD's are really weak single core perfomers and it really matters in MMORPG's. You could save some money by getting no-name RAM and maybe smaller PSU (you don't really need 500W and 400-450W should be enough).
Alright. After reading all that (Finally) I've decided I'm going to walk away from the my old PC. Only keeping the Optical drive. (Dont even think I've ever used it)
I've also been working on a build from everything. And of course I'll take your guys ideas on better price for performance ratio:)
I have decided on just a just a normal hard drive & not an SSD simply do I want room, & I dont care about how fast something comes up. It just doesnt bother me.
I've also thought this 6-core processor for $100 would be more then enough for my needs now & years 2 come.
The mother board was something shown to me & I dont see an issue with it?
The GPU isnt name brand, And probly isnt something any one would want. But its a $160 card that may lack dedicated ram but has enough power for me.
The Ram speaks for itself. Ripjaw, just the best brand name & I feel like 8GB is what I want.
Power supply is 500W. Should be enough
The case, I really enjoy the look. And $34? Plzz.
I would really enjoy your guys thoughts on this. The over all price of the stuff listed is $595. Alittle bit over my budget, But I can work with it. But I wouldnt mind if you guys where like, You dont need ripjaw save yourself $50 an just get non brand lol.
A lot of those parts are decent parts, but simply cost too much. You're going way over your stated budget, and you still don't have an operating system. Using Windows 10 preview for a while is something of a hack, and lets you get a functional gaming system for $400, but you don't need to do that on a $600 budget.
Gdemami found cheaper, suitable replacements for a few parts. You can also get a cheaper motherboard that will be perfectly good for your needs:
Those won't overclock as well, but they'll be fine.
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Don't just salvage the optical drive from the old computer. Selling the old computer intact will probably be worth more than the optical drive and hard drive from it on their own. You could use your old optical drive to install the OS on the new computer, then take it out, put it back in the old computer, and sell the old computer.
Actually alot of people recommend FX over the i3 on a budget gaming system, where its recommended you go with AMD unless you have the money to buy an i5+.
Needless to say, due to just my own research & thoughts I will stick with AMD on this. Having said that, with the parts you listed I made a few changes to my projected build. Taking on your case, PSU, & ram. They where much better & saved a nice penny.
OP, I see you are on a tight budget, but I if you like playing MMO's or multiplayer games in general, I really can't recommend FX6300 in favor of i5.
I've had FX6300 and now I own i5 and the difference is significan't. AMD's are really weak single core perfomers and it really matters in MMORPG's. You could save some money by getting no-name RAM and maybe smaller PSU (you don't really need 500W and 400-450W should be enough).
Yes, a Core i5 is faster than an FX-6300. But it's also a price difference of $150+ to do both properly. More money does get you something better, but doesn't fit the budget unless the original poster wants to expand the budget again. If you're going to spend $1000, then of course you get a Core i5-4690K. But not on a $600 budget.
Yes, a Core i5 is faster than an FX-6300. But it's also a price difference of $150+ to do both properly. More money does get you something better, but doesn't fit the budget unless the original poster wants to expand the budget again. If you're going to spend $1000, then of course you get a Core i5-4690K. But not on a $600 budget.
I agree.
If he just can't go for i5, I would take Pentium G3258 as an alternative.
I'ts 30$ cheaper than FX6300 and it will blow it out of the water gaming wise. He can even upgrade it later to i5 or i7.
Yes, a Core i5 is faster than an FX-6300. But it's also a price difference of $150+ to do both properly. More money does get you something better, but doesn't fit the budget unless the original poster wants to expand the budget again. If you're going to spend $1000, then of course you get a Core i5-4690K. But not on a $600 budget.
I agree.
If he just can't go for i5, I would take Pentium G3258 as an alternative.
I'ts 30$ cheaper than FX6300 and it will blow it out of the water gaming wise. He can even upgrade it later to i5 or i7.
A Haswell core at 3.2 GHz is faster than a Piledriver core at 4.1 GHz, but not massively so. But this means you're looking at two cores versus six again, and this time without the benefit of hyperthreading to mitigate that somewhat. A game that launches in the next five years and can't run reasonably well on an FX-6300 constitutes a serious screw-up on the part of the company that made it. A game that doesn't run well on a Pentium dual-core simply because it needs a lot of CPU power and can take advantage of a lot of cores to get it would be a game company doing something perfectly sensible--but it still won't run well on the Pentium G3258.
If the goal is for overclocking it, then you're looking at paying more for a motherboard and a CPU cooler, so you end up paying more for it than for the AMD rig. And you still only get two cores rather than six.
If the goal is for overclocking it, then you're looking at paying more for a motherboard and a CPU cooler, so you end up paying more for it than for the AMD rig. And you still only get two cores rather than six.
You don't need aftermarket cooler for G3258. It's unlocked anniversary edition which can be OC'ed at least to 4.0 GHz on stock cooler, even up to 4.4 GHz if lucky.
Couple it with 45$ MSI H81 MBO and it's a killer combo for only 115$. And, it's future proof if he upgrades CPU later down the road.
Comments
God no. Use windows if you want to keep your sanity, either 7 or 8 with classic shell.
RE: Windows 10 beta, sure it's free, but read up on the privacy statement.
Win 10 beta will log basically everything you do, including keystrokes, so it's fine for gaming, but do not use it for banking, or any other activity in which you value your privacy.
I know I recommended win 10 beta previously, but I had not seen the privacy statement, my bad.
RE: HDD vs SSD, on the OPs budget, just use the old HDD. You can UG the drive later, when you have more money. Sure, an SSD is faster, but a budget build needs all the help it can get, and using an older drive is a good way to save a few bucks. If it fails, you can always get a new one, and your important data should be backed up to a flash drive or optical disk anyway.
The old drive will do fine, it's the core build, CPU + mobo + GPU, and the case + PSU, that need the help.
No it won't.
Windows 10 beta has a way to check what you use cortana for, but that will not be in the commercial release, it's for beta purposes.
I doubt most people will even use cortana.
I still would not use it for banking. For anything else, f* it.
Just...wow.
1) That Pavillion is nothing ancient. It is 2012 computer.
Yes, 5 years old HDD wouldn't be reliable...in server system running intensive read/write operations 24/7. Since this isn't server system, there is no issue.
2) Yep, there is like 10% performance increase so if you going to decompress 10GB files, you will save that 8s or so.
Completely irrelevant as I said.
3) You do not know what you talk about in that paragraph, do you? You just had to say "something", right?
I was pointing out to one very lenghty discussion where Quizzical was adamant about CPU not being able to process more than 1 instruction per cycle. Which is false and it is exactly what Hyperthreading does - on top of regular parallel instruction processing, it can work with instructions of 2 threads at the same time because of additional registers.
There is no point going for 4 slower AMD cores over 4 logical cores of i3. None.
4) Major bottleneck?
Yeah, in a gaming PC I want to spent less time on occasional loading screen and then have low resolution and details... That is what gaming is about, the loading screens...no brainer, eh?
Also, did your funny math of saved "eight days per year" counted in time you will spent managing that insufficient SSD space?
5) About 7% of SSD capacity will/should be reserved for garbage collection and alike(some tests even suggest to keep 25% of drive capacity as free space), 30 GB will be eaten by Windows, so after fresh install you are looking at about 80 GB of usable space. Modern games can take easily up to 50 GB of space. 120 GB SSD is insufficient. Period.
I just looked up the PC3-8500 memory chip... HP put a 204 pin laptop chip in a desktop rig.
Lulz
Sequential read speeds basically don't matter. Everything is fast at sequential read speeds. Sequential writes, too. But saying that a hard drive is fine because of sequential access speeds is like saying that the original poster's current computer is fine because it can display the desktop pretty well. Yes, it matters if you can display the desktop (and some Atom chips struggled with it!), but the performance comparison that you should look at is common things that some of the competitors are bad at.
For storage, that means random reads and writes. Given an appropriate random access pattern, SSDs will still get in the ballpark of 100 MB/s, while hard drives chug along at 1 MB/s. That's actually how Windows tells if you have an SSD. Several years ago, when there were still some terrible SSDs on the market, Microsoft said that they couldn't find a single SSD with below 8 MB/s random reads, while the very fastest (15K RPM!) hard drives topped out around 2 MB/s. Now, 100 MB/s is blazing fast real-world performance for most things. But 1 MB/s sure isn't. Yes, that's a factor of 100, not a factor of 3, and it's not hard to find situations where the difference between an SSD and a hard drive will be larger than that, even.
Now, the choice between getting an SSD and a hard drive is partly a philosophical one. Would you rather have higher graphical settings on a computer that is generally slow and clunky, or would you prefer a quick computer that does what you ask almost immediately, but requires you to turn down graphical settings a little further? If you prefer the former and don't mind constantly having to sit there and wait anytime you ask it to do anything, then sure, skip the SSD. But I like for my computer to do what I want right away.
The original poster's old computer probably didn't get very warm. I have a laptop with a higher clocked version of the same APU. Even with a dinky 4-cell battery, it has battery life over 2 1/2 hours while running a Prime95 stress test on all CPU cores. It really doesn't put out much heat, which is reason for the chip to exist, so you could literally make a computer with no fans at all based on it without any real risk of overheating. Not that HP would do so, as you'd need bigger heatsinks, and that would cost more than fans.
But hard drives aren't really that sensitive to heat, so long as it's within reason. Temperatures substantially above room temperature can improve lubrication and actually extend the drive's life, as what fails is usually the mechanical rotating parts, not some silicon chip. That, of course, is only so long as the temperatures stay within reason; too hot is still a problem. But the original poster's computer isn't likely to get too hot; the hard drive probably puts out more heat than the APU most of the time. So does the power supply.
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Memory bandwidth matters, but it's really a question of how much you need. Once you have more than you need, adding even more doesn't really benefit you. Now, with a dual channel setup in a typical desktop, the difference between 1600 MHz and 800 MHz will rarely matter. But if you're skipping a channel entirely, that cuts memory bandwidth in half, and yeah, that's going to matter in quite a few things. But you're right that if you only wanted 4 GB, the way to do it is to get two 2 GB modules, not one 4 GB module. The original poster's computer probably has one 4 GB module, but that's because the APU in it only has one memory channel, not two.
Yes, yes, a CPU core has multiple ALUs and FPUs and so forth. It can process multiple instructions in parallel when you've got some decent instruction level parallelism in your code. But all modern CPU cores do that. And hyperthreading doesn't add more of them; it only lets multiple threads share the same execution resources. And share the same caches and so forth. If you were to duplicate everything, you'd do it by adding more cores.
Intel doesn't even claim that hyperthreading doubles your CPU performance. They only claim that hyperthreading increases performance by up to 30%. That 30% figure isn't marketing lies or bizarre corner cases; it's a realistic approximation in a lot of workloads that will scale well to many CPU cores. But the "up to" is also very important, as if one thread can take advantage of, say, all of the ALUs that the core has, then hyperthreading gains you nothing.
Doubling your number of CPU cores, on the other hand, will double your performance in workloads that scale well to many cores. And that means that the quad core will win in a landslide over a Core i3 in workloads that can put at least four cores to good use. Hyperthreading mitigates that a little and makes it closer than it could otherwise be, but more threads aren't the same as more cores.
If more threads were just as good as more cores, then the 112640 threads that a Radeon R9 290X can have resident simultaneously would make it a massively faster card than the 32768 that the GeForce GTX 980 tops out at. That doesn't happen because once you've got enough to keep all of the shaders busy (or saturate whatever else your bottleneck is), having more threads available doesn't gain you anything.
You are still completely oblivious to how CPU works... It has nothing to do with application code.
Multithreading and parallel instruction processing are 2 entirely different things.
Just like 2 AMD cores are sharing single, to intel compared weaker, FPU cluster...the reason of non-competitive performance in games.
You are just theorycrafting(as usual) and ignoring(or being oblivious to) how things actually work, in reality.
Except such "workloads" is something you won't really experience with ordinary usage of home computer...
How CPU works has very much to do with the application code because if you've got code like
a = a / b;
b = a * 5;
There's no way for computer to process the second instruction before the first one's finished. CPU can only process instructions paraller to each other when it doesn't need the result of first instruction to process the second one, or in some cases when it's able to make a guess of result of the first instruction.
Quizzical used terms multithreading and instruction level parallelism correctly. If you got the impression that they are the same thing from his post then you misunderstood something.
Those are 2 different steps in processing application code.
Thread scheduling is handled by OS - this is where multithreading takes place.
Once scheduled, the code passed by scheduler is decoded by CPU into microinstructions. Processing of microinstructions takes different order than the code is passed into CPU, that is because of performance utilization - that's what parallel instruction processing and hyperthreading does, utilizing CPU resources.
Simply put:
Multithreading is how and what code is loaded into CPU cache - application level, parallel instruction processing(hyperthreading) is how decoded microinstructions are processed - hardware level.
No, Quizzical does not understand how things work past FSB. He see things from application level and assumes it works same way inside CPU, it doesn't.
In his mind, the threads are being "swapped" when they are processed and one has to wait for another. He will be telling you that CPU cannot compute 1 multiplicative and 1 additive operation within a single cycle
The way that the Bulldozer floating point units worked is that it was only shared if you had to do a 256-bit AVX instruction. Both cores running different threads could run other floating point instructions at the same time--including all SSE instructions, not just scalar instructions--but if either core needing a 256-bit AVX instruction, that used the whole FPU, and the other core couldn't issue any floating point instructions at all that cycle. That's only a disadvantage when using AVX.
So how much do games use AVX? I expect that most games don't use it at all, and those that do, don't use it very much. If a program can spam AVX all the time, a Core i7-2600K (Sandy Bridge) would be nearly three times as fast as a Core i7-920 (Bloomfield). If you can spam the related AVX2 all the time, a Core i5-4690K (Haswell) would be more than twice as fast as a Core i5-3570K (Ivy Bridge). There are workloads where that nearly happens, but that's wildly unrepresentative of games. Yes, a Core i7-4790K is faster than a Core i7-920. But it's not 6-7 times as fast, as it would be if you were just spamming the wide vector instructions. And Bulldozer's FPU design is only a disadvantage if you're using the wide vector instructions in AVX.
I haven't looked up how the FPUs changed from Bulldozer cores to Steamroller cores, but I'd be very, very surprised if Steamroller made the FPUs weaker. The general order of things has been that Steamroller would duplicate some things that were shared in Bulldozer, not the other way around.
Now, Haswell is still faster than Steamroller on a per clock cycle basis. But that has more to do with a Steamroller having a deeper pipeline and higher cache latencies, not wide vector instructions of AVX and AVX2.
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For most consumer workloads, just about everything on the market is plenty fast enough--including the original poster's current system. The proper comparison of CPUs is, which CPU is better at things that some CPUs you're looking at wouldn't be good enough. There are two basic problems:
1) CPU doesn't have enough cores to do the work that scales well to more cores than you have, and
2) Individual CPU cores are too slow in single-threaded work.
Among the CPUs that one might reasonably consider for gaming, an AMD quad core will beat an Intel dual core in (1), while the Intel dual core will beat the AMD quad core in (2).
So how would a game run into these problems? Problem (2) is basically a problem of the game being badly coded. Problem (1) can be caused by the programming being inefficient, but it can just as easily be caused by the game needing to do a lot of CPU work. Badly coded and inefficient tend to cause worse gameplay problems than merely low frame rates, but a great game might well find good uses for needing a ton of CPU work even when it's implemented efficiently.
And that's especially going to be the case in the near future. DirectX 12 and OpenGL 4.4 with extensions give you ways to eliminate most of the graphics API overhead. The latter is available today, and the former will be out with Windows 10 later this year. Once that's ready--which should happen well within the useful lifetime of the machine--single-threaded bottlenecks in games that cause trouble on decently capable gaming rigs will basically be a case of "programmer is an idiot", not just trying to push further than what the API could reasonably handle.
Not even sure why you still bother to respond to his posts Quiz.
You wont change his mind nor educate him. He will continue to recommend I3 PCs with one memory stick on a low end junk motherboard, which is what he has I am sure. But hey, at least you can always add another memory stick later!
Hopefully the OPs in the posts have enough sense to sort through his "advice".
Alright. After reading all that (Finally) I've decided I'm going to walk away from the my old PC. Only keeping the Optical drive. (Dont even think I've ever used it)
I've also been working on a build from everything. And of course I'll take your guys ideas on better price for performance ratio:)
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B009O7YORK/ref=ox_sc_act_title_1?ie=UTF8&psc=1&smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B008V9959O/ref=ox_sc_act_title_6?ie=UTF8&psc=1&smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00GWV0ZD8/ref=ox_sc_act_title_7?ie=UTF8&psc=1&smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004I763AW/ref=ox_sc_act_title_2?ie=UTF8&psc=1&smid=A89QP6D3VDW1W
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0088PUEPK/ref=ox_sc_act_title_3?ie=UTF8&psc=1&smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00ALK3HF4/ref=ox_sc_act_title_4?ie=UTF8&psc=1&smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B005869A16/ref=ox_sc_act_title_5?ie=UTF8&psc=1&smid=AFM094RC3JY7S
I have decided on just a just a normal hard drive & not an SSD simply do I want room, & I dont care about how fast something comes up. It just doesnt bother me.
I've also thought this 6-core processor for $100 would be more then enough for my needs now & years 2 come.
The mother board was something shown to me & I dont see an issue with it?
The GPU isnt name brand, And probly isnt something any one would want. But its a $160 card that may lack dedicated ram but has enough power for me.
The Ram speaks for itself. Ripjaw, just the best brand name & I feel like 8GB is what I want.
Power supply is 500W. Should be enough
The case, I really enjoy the look. And $34? Plzz.
I would really enjoy your guys thoughts on this. The over all price of the stuff listed is $595. Alittle bit over my budget, But I can work with it. But I wouldnt mind if you guys where like, You dont need ripjaw save yourself $50 an just get non brand lol.
Looks ok, except 17 USD shipping on that case? Why won't you use HDD from the old computer too?
And yes, you can save a little on that memory module.
Although, the build from newegg I posted above provides same performance for 200 USD less...not to say the build from pricepicker.
OK, here are some alternatives to reflect your budget and retailer changes:
i3-4160 - 124 USD
http://www.amazon.com/Intel-I3-4160-Processor-Hyper-Threading-BX80646I34160/dp/B00LV8U0VE/ref=sr_1_3?s=pc&ie=UTF8&qid=1423415561&sr=1-3
ASRock H97 - 80 USD
http://www.amazon.com/ASRock-ANNIVERSARY-MicroATX-Motherboard-ASRockH97M/dp/B00P59XQ0W/ref=sr_1_5?s=pc&ie=UTF8&qid=1423422433&sr=1-5&keywords=asrock+H97
Crucial 2x4GB - 61 USD
http://www.amazon.com/Crucial-Ballistix-PC3-12800-240-Pin-BLS2KIT4G3D1609DS1S00/dp/B006WAGGUK/ref=sr_1_38?s=pc&ie=UTF8&qid=1423416831&sr=1-38
EVGA 500W - 40 USD
http://www.amazon.com/EVGA-80PLUS-Bronze-Certified-100-B1-0500-KR/dp/B00DGHKK7M/ref=sr_1_27?s=pc&ie=UTF8&qid=1423417212&sr=1-27
Antec case - 43 USD with shipping
http://www.amazon.com/ANTEC-VSK4000E-BLACK-MICROATX-MINI-ITX/dp/B00E2U3NO4/ref=sr_1_12?s=pc&ie=UTF8&qid=1423418314&sr=1-12
348 USD for core components.
R9 270 - 170 USD
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00GWV0ZD8/ref=ox_sc_act_title_7?ie=UTF8&psc=1&smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER
WD 1TB - 55 USD
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0088PUEPK/ref=ox_sc_act_title_3?ie=UTF8&psc=1&smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER
573 total
Imo, you should just use your old HDD and save money. You can save further 30 USD by going with lower end chipset. So that would be 30-85 USD off if needed.
You can go with FX CPU but those cores won't provide you any performance gain, all you get is more heat and power consumption... Overall, that i3 is faster when it comes to games.
Loothorder: That looks like a good build.
You might be able to save something like 20$ picking up a cheaper motherboard with same AMD 970 chipset. Something like this, it was the first one that came up when I searched with Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Gigabyte-SATA-6Gbps-Motherboards-GA-970A-DS3P/dp/B00CX4MUCC
I don't understand what you're complaining about the GPU not being "name brand", Asus is one of the largest Radeon card manufacturers and their Direct CU2 cooling system is really good. That's one of the best R9 270 cards you could buy.
I'd suggest selling your old computer instead of starting to strip it out of its DVD-drive. It's new enough that it's not worthless. Or if you aren't going to sell it (or keep using yourself for some purpose), then I'd suggest taking also its HD. It's still new enough hard disk that you can re-use it just fine. Your old computer is max. 2 years old, isn't it?
EDIT: The RAM suggested by Gdemami looks good enough and cheaper than the one you had picked. Another way to save 10$ if you just take it. Just don't go with his processor suggestion the one you've picked is better (6 cores vs 2 cores) /EDIT
Hahah, first hit on google:
Red_Tin_Shroom 33 points 3 months ago
As an owner of an fx6300 get the i3, especially for gaming.
scarthearmada 26 points 3 months ago*
As an owner of an fx6300 get the i3
http://www.reddit.com/r/buildapc/comments/2lak25/i3_4160_vs_fx_6300/
There is no point getting FX. Those extra cores won't do jack, as pointed out above, FX is having shared FPU units anyway. What matters is how CPU performs, not how many cores is has and in that regard, FX-6300 need OC to get on par with i3.
There are some truly amazing comments on that reddedit thread - a guy switching 8120 for 4160
Anyone having a clue won't recommend FX...
Actually alot of people recommend FX over the i3 on a budget gaming system, where its recommended you go with AMD unless you have the money to buy an i5+.
Needless to say, due to just my own research & thoughts I will stick with AMD on this. Having said that, with the parts you listed I made a few changes to my projected build. Taking on your case, PSU, & ram. They where much better & saved a nice penny.
OP, I see you are on a tight budget, but I if you like playing MMO's or multiplayer games in general, I really can't recommend FX6300 in favor of i5.
I've had FX6300 and now I own i5 and the difference is significan't. AMD's are really weak single core perfomers and it really matters in MMORPG's. You could save some money by getting no-name RAM and maybe smaller PSU (you don't really need 500W and 400-450W should be enough).
A lot of those parts are decent parts, but simply cost too much. You're going way over your stated budget, and you still don't have an operating system. Using Windows 10 preview for a while is something of a hack, and lets you get a functional gaming system for $400, but you don't need to do that on a $600 budget.
Gdemami found cheaper, suitable replacements for a few parts. You can also get a cheaper motherboard that will be perfectly good for your needs:
http://www.amazon.com/Gigabyte-SATA-6Gbps-Motherboards-GA-970A-DS3P/dp/B00CX4MUCC/ref=sr_1_2?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1423428128&sr=1-2&keywords=970+motherboard
http://www.amazon.com/MSI-Computer-Socket-Motherboard-970A-G43/dp/B00AQ9CF8K/ref=sr_1_5?s=pc&ie=UTF8&qid=1423428153&sr=1-5&keywords=970+motherboard
Those won't overclock as well, but they'll be fine.
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Don't just salvage the optical drive from the old computer. Selling the old computer intact will probably be worth more than the optical drive and hard drive from it on their own. You could use your old optical drive to install the OS on the new computer, then take it out, put it back in the old computer, and sell the old computer.
Yes, a Core i5 is faster than an FX-6300. But it's also a price difference of $150+ to do both properly. More money does get you something better, but doesn't fit the budget unless the original poster wants to expand the budget again. If you're going to spend $1000, then of course you get a Core i5-4690K. But not on a $600 budget.
I agree.
If he just can't go for i5, I would take Pentium G3258 as an alternative.
I'ts 30$ cheaper than FX6300 and it will blow it out of the water gaming wise. He can even upgrade it later to i5 or i7.
A Haswell core at 3.2 GHz is faster than a Piledriver core at 4.1 GHz, but not massively so. But this means you're looking at two cores versus six again, and this time without the benefit of hyperthreading to mitigate that somewhat. A game that launches in the next five years and can't run reasonably well on an FX-6300 constitutes a serious screw-up on the part of the company that made it. A game that doesn't run well on a Pentium dual-core simply because it needs a lot of CPU power and can take advantage of a lot of cores to get it would be a game company doing something perfectly sensible--but it still won't run well on the Pentium G3258.
If the goal is for overclocking it, then you're looking at paying more for a motherboard and a CPU cooler, so you end up paying more for it than for the AMD rig. And you still only get two cores rather than six.
You don't need aftermarket cooler for G3258. It's unlocked anniversary edition which can be OC'ed at least to 4.0 GHz on stock cooler, even up to 4.4 GHz if lucky.
Couple it with 45$ MSI H81 MBO and it's a killer combo for only 115$. And, it's future proof if he upgrades CPU later down the road.