Late to the party

[wmunn]

up until last month, I was still running an athlon II X4 640 propus rig I built back in 2010......

Given that, I got the upgrade bug recently, and built the new rig noted below, after putting this all together, I am getting some tinge of regret, thinking a faster intel rig could have been done, however the other part of me says not to sweat it, as I still have a great foundation in this new rig, and switching to intel on the next upgrade cycle will be a lot cheaper, thanks to the better foundation I am sitting on.

This rig was rather pricey, as a lot of the components came from the local tiger direct retail store.....

my running cost was around $1400 for this build

corsair R300 case
corsair RM650 power supply
2 x 8gb kingston hyper x beast 2400 ram
amd fx 8350 cpu @ 4.7 ghz
phanteks heatsink fan 14 version
geforce gtx 750 ti video card 2 gb
samsung 840 evo 500gb ssd
seagate 1tb hybrid 3.5 hard drive
older western digital 1 tb hard drive
asus crosshair V formula-z motherboard


so I am very happy with how it turned out, it runs great, but I keep seeing the non stop bias towards intel, talking about how the AMD rigs are getting destroyed in real world results.....

[Myk_SilentShado]

Yep they pretty much are getting destroyed in real world results. If you wanna do any kind of serious video editing, image editing, CAD work etc you're better off getting an Intel setup. Gaming on the other hand, the CPU's are either close, on par or not very far behind.

[wmunn]

I guess what matters is that I am happy with what I put together. Not front of the pack, but definitely not back either.
It runs great, real world performance trumps any benchmark, and I did choose quality parts that run well together.

The single best choice I made was the SSD of a decent size, and backed it up with a hybrid drive for storage duties. This combination has proven extremely fast.

[Dr__Zchivago]

I put together a similar (albeit a little weaker) build 7 months ago, and I don't think you did anything wrong. My computer (and, presumably yours) has been solid handling everything I've thrown at it, although I don't do video editing or anything over-the-top.

The only thing I plan to change now is to add a decent SSD when the budget allows.

Z

[Tokens210]

Looks like you just did your research and did a smart build, nothing wrong there

The enthusiast or ppl who want bragging rights, or ppl that bench and test are the ones who normally go with the newest of the newest and most of them will even tell you half the stuff they have a normal user or gamer wouldn't even make use of

As for the bias with Intel and amd, there are always fans of each side arguing whoes better, but the point should be what do you need and what works for you with your budget

Also as I see it at least a lot of ppl are currently on the Intel bandwagon cause they typically do a tick tock schedule for there updates with a 4 year plan, except recently Intel has been dropping a lot of stuff all at once, amd so far hasent had a chance to really answer back, although Ihave seen rumors of a new aand processor that's supposed to trash the haswells


Same thing with ram, some ppl will try to max there board out and normal users or gamers don't need anything like 32gb or more, they won't even use probly half of it unless there doing virtual boxes and editing and other heavy duty stuff

[wmunn]

my hesitation on this build stems from what I had spent in the past to jump up a generation. Typically I usually just went out of pocket at most 4 or 5 hundred to get just the motherboard, cpu and ram, and recycle the rest of the box. Had been doing that for years and years, so this was my first full rebuild in quite a long time.
My last build was an athlon II x4 640 propus, and it served me well, however I just recently picked up elder scrolls online since the xbox one version was pushed back to the end of the year. Due to this I tried playing on my old rig with an HD 5750 video card (didn't game at all on the old rig)
and it was only able to wheeze out 35 FPS on eso at 1080p. So I slapped the gtx 750 ti into it, and that knocked the FPS up a bit, but still not good enough.
athlon II x 4 640 with HD 5750 on ESO FPS were 34-35 @ 1080p
athlon II x 4 640 with GTX 750 Ti on ESO FPS were 55 - 60 @ 1080p
FX 8350 @ 4.7 ghz with GTX 750 Ti on ESO FPS were over 100 @ 1080p

Since I haven't been playing games at all on the pc to begin with, I believe the current setup will serve me well into the next 4 - 5 years with ease.

Moral of the story, I wanted to play ESO on the PC very well, this new build does it, and that attains my original goal.

[kkn]

IF you play enny FPS game, try a free one and see how you do there compare to a console, try the keys and see how the reaction time is when you come up against an enemy.
not saying you have to buy a game, but if you look around on the free to DL section on steam or origin if you have that there are some ok games to grab.

[wmunn]

thought I would attach a few pics of the build

[MatsGlobetrotte]

There is 3 eternal truths when it comes to buying computer system no matter how you do it.. 1. It is old the day you buy it. 2. No matter how much money you spend on a computer you can always spend more to make it better. 3. That no matter how hopeful we all are that we will get a significantly better machine by using the same MB but the next generation CPU, Intel and AMD will always find new sockets and issues that dont make it worthwhile to upgrade just a processor. This whether we or they like it or not.That has never changed since I got my first computer eons ago. Thus unless you yourself feel that you cant get out what you want of the machine based on what you are doing with it then it is good for you. So stepping out to buy new machine or parts is like betting money on the stock-market. You win some ,lose some with less risk the more you have read up and evaluated it yourself. I used to buy computers for a large organisation and we bought 50-200 at a time though standard models and effectively we had to approach it as, standardize on a brand then buy within x price bracket we saw useful and then try to get the best overall deal in terms of overall package. Speeds on computers in various parts does not really say anything as just about all measurements reported are linear rather than logarithmic. Thus while good fun, many times 2x 3x 4x faster on a part does not really feel different when using the computer.If you are overclocking and checking results on HWBot you can not really compete with the tops (unless that is your specific hobby and are ok with spending the money and occasionally burning out a CPU or something else while doing so) but rather have a look at how your machine fares vs other similar setups. If your machine runs on average above what others with same cooling, same processor and GPU for example then be happy with it as you have done what is reasonable with what you have.Rather look at the day you get fed up editing videos due to the slowness of your machine or you see that no matter what you machine seems slow for the new games you want to play as they suck life out of your machine to an extent that simply aint interesting to play with. Then it is time to change the machine or parts of it.

[wmunn]

It's a lot easier buying simple desktops in bulk quantities for the corporate environment, we do everything cookie cutter to simplify and expedite rollout and service during the lifecycle. It's all about defined costs, warranty coverage length, and cost per deployment.

everything we do is geared towards the huge numbers of devices we have to turn over on a daily basis, without standardization, your costs rise dramatically.


my home builds are another story entirely, as it should be for an enthusiast evaluating their personal needs.