Build Me a Computer!

[Kraznaya]

Hi, I'm going off to college soon and I have a $1500 scholarship on tap ostensibly for buying a "laptop." Now, that's not actually what I'm going to do with it, but it does mean I have the funds to get myself a nice desktop for the first time in my life (I don't recall owning a computer that didn't have an integrated graphics card >:|). So I ask you, honored residents of CFC Computer Talk, to help me put something together so I don't end up with an overpriced Dell from Best Buy or something.

Here's what I'm looking for:

• I want a PC. I don't want to get into the Mac-PC debate but I want a PC running Windows 7 because of personal taste.
• I'd like a nice graphics card. Preferably one which can run all the games that simultaneously release on the PS3 and 360 quite comfortably, as a benchmark.
• For the processor, hard drive, and memory, I'd like something matching what's standard for my price level. Nothing special. Enlightenment on the newest AMD and Intel brand and numbering systems would be appreciated (i5, i7, what the hell is actually going on?).
• If a suitably tempting prepackaged PC is on the market, I'm willing to go for that instead of building my own.
• My preferred price point is $1000ish for the core system, as I'd like to also get a monitor and some other goodies.

Thanks!

 

[Fëanor]

The Machine:
CPU: $159.00 AMD Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition
MB: $94.99 GIGABYTE GA-770TA-UD3
GPU: $309.99 GIGABYTE GV-R585OC-1GD
RAM: $125.99 OCZ Platinum 4GB (2 x 2GB) DDR3 1600 7-7-7-24
HDD: $64.99 800GB WD Caviar Green WD8000AARS
H&F: $39.99 Scythe Mugen 2 Rev. B
PSU: $104.99 Antec EarthWatts EA750 750W
CASE: $139.98 CM HAF 932 RC-932-KKN1-GP
DVD: $26.99 SAMSUNG SH-S223L
-$15.00 CPU+RAM Combo
-$30.00 GPU+PSU Combo
-$15.00 Case+DVD Burned Combo
Total: $1006.91 ($956.91 After Mail-in-Rebates)

Peripherals: These depend mostly on personal taste and needs, for example if you can only use a headset while gaming so to not disturb your flat/roommates there is no point in having an expensive 7.1 Speaker system, so speakers build in the monitor and a good headset would be the best solution, wired or wireless mouse and keyboard is another matter of personal taste.

Monitor: $179.99 ASUS VH226H 21.5"
Keyboard: $79.99 Logitech G110
Mouse: $42.99 Logitech MX518
Sound: $69.99 Creative Fatal1ty Gaming USB Headset
-$25.00 Headset Promo discount (otherwise i would recommend the non USB version of the Headset for $49.99)
Total: $347.96 ($297.96 After Mail-in-Rebates)

Grand Total: $1354.97 ($1254.97 After Mail-in-Rebates)

Best Value Pre-Assembled PC's with Similar Hardware and Price on Newegg: (No Monitor Included)
$1249.99 CyberpowerPC Gamer Ultra 2031
$1229.99 CyberpowerPC Gamer Xtreme 1047

You can also create a customized system on CyberPower's site, building the system with the components i suggested (or the closest i could get) comes out to about $1500 (inc Monitor and OS and 2 free games (DiRT 2 + BattleForge or StormRise) so basically a pre-assembled system will cost you an extra $100, gives you some better goodies but limits the choice of components.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

Peripherals: These depend mostly on personal taste and needs, for example if you can only use a headset while gaming so to not disturb your flat/roommates there is no point in having an expensive 7.1 Speaker system, so speakers build in the monitor and a good headset would be the best solution, wired or wireless mouse and keyboard is another matter of personal taste.

Peripherals you can take from your old computer. (This is assuming that you don't have a laptop with everything built in.) I'm hoping to get a new pair of speakers soon as mine make a lot of farting noises.

 

[Fëanor]

At current price level the GeForce GTX 470 (at about $350) can also be considered a viable alternative to the HD5850 (at about $300), however the GTX 470 cards are very hard to get right now and the HD5850 is expected to considerably drop in price once GTX 4x0 cards become more widely available. That, combined with the reports that Fermi card production yields are pretty bad, will likely mean that the HD5850 will remain the king of Price/Performance for the time being.

Interestingly here in Europe the GTX 470 cards are prices way higher than in the US ($440 vs $350), making them a pretty bad deal right now.

 

[Kraznaya]

Thanks a bunch Feanor. I've never used anything but an Intel CPU before; what's the current market opinion on the difference between AMD and Intel (if any)?

 

[plarq]

AMD is slightly better on price per performance, both in CPU and GPU.

 

[Genocidicbunny]

Thanks a bunch Feanor. I've never used anything but an Intel CPU before; what's the current market opinion on the difference between AMD and Intel (if any)?

AMD is slightly better on price per performance, both in CPU and GPU.

Intel is still king in terms of absolute performance, but like plarq said, AMD is a bit better in the price/performance area.

GPU wise, AMD is the king hands down. nVidia's got no real competitive offering yet (The GTX 470 and 480 are *not* competitive) so AMD is still leading.

 

[Fëanor]

Thanks a bunch Feanor. I've never used anything but an Intel CPU before; what's the current market opinion on the difference between AMD and Intel (if any)?

AMD is slightly better on price per performance, both in CPU and GPU.

Intel is still king in terms of absolute performance, but like plarq said, AMD is a bit better in the price/performance area.

They already pointed it out but here is a quick overview i made of Intel's Offering

$159 AMD Phenom II X4 955 (AM3) (Quad Core)

Intel's 1156 and 1366 offering with speeds compared to the Phenom II X4 955
$120 Intel Core i3-530 (LGA 1156) 25% Slower, Dual Core
$140 Intel Core i3-540 (LGA 1156) 20% Slower, Dual Core
$185 Intel Core i5-650 (LGA 1156) 15% Slower, Dual Core
$200 Intel Core i5-66x (LGA 1156) 10% Slower, Dual Core
$280 Intel Core i5-670 (LGA 1156) 5% Slower, Dual Core
$200 Intel Core i5-750 (LGA 1156) 10% Faster, No HyperThreading
$280 Intel Core i7-860 (LGA 1156) 25% Faster
$280 Intel Core i7-920 (LGA 1366) 25% Faster
$295 Intel Core i7-930 (LGA 1366) 30% Faster
$550 Intel Core i7-870 (LGA 1156) 35% Faster
$570 Intel Core i7-950 (LGA 1366) 40% Faster
$570 Intel Core i7-960 (LGA 1366) 45% Faster
$970 Intel Core i7-975 (LGA 1366) 50% Faster
$1,080 Intel Core i7-980X (LGA 1366) 70% Faster, Six Cores

Good AM3 Motherboard: $80+ ($34.99 for the cheapest on Newegg)
Good LGA 1156 Motherboard: $130+ ($56.99 for the cheapest on Newegg)
Good LGA 1366 Motherboard: $240+ ($144.99 for the cheapest on Newegg)
"Good" Motherboard meaning with SATA 6Gb/s and USB 3.0 support

GPU wise, AMD is the king hands down. nVidia's got no real competitive offering yet (The GTX 470 and 480 are *not* competitive) so AMD is still leading.

The GTX 470 is on average 10% to 15% faster and 20% more expensive so basically it depends on what value you put on PhysX, CUDA and the slightly better NVIDIA 3D Vision (almost none to me).
The scarcity of the GTX 470's plus the availability of factory overclocked HD5850's (which perform practically the same as the GTX 470) make the HD5850 by far the better choice, but current pricing make the GTX 470 worth mentioning.

 

[Genocidicbunny]

Are you using straight speeds for the x% faster/slower?

Intel cpu's I believe are slightly more efficient per clock cycle, so a 2.2ghz amd would be something like a 2.0 intel.

Your points are valid for the GTX 470, but as it stands, its not competitive. Like you said, 15% faster and 20% more expensive, so you're paying more for the same with nVidia.

 

[Fëanor]

I used behardware's Giant roundup average CPU performance.

As for the Fermi's, its also worth mentioning that nVidia has only delivered about 25% of the amount of cards they promised would be available because of horrible Yields and Binning which also means that nVidia is currently selling their cards at a loss and will look to replace the Fermi will with a "28nm Fermi II" as soon as TSMC adopts the 28nm process.

Hopefully nVidia has enough cash to last until then (or manages to fix the horrible Fermi production), after all its in no one's interest in giving AMD/ATI a GPU market monopoly, the last 6 months have been a sneak peak at that with the prices for the top HD5xxx cards actually rising because of no competition.

It is also worth mentioning that even though TSMC canceled the 32nm process and forced ATI to modifying its "Southern Isles" GPU refresh from 32nm to 40nm, these new ATI GPU's are expected to hit the market before the mainstream Fermi's, so its quite unlikely that nVidia will offer something really competitive in any segment this year.

 

[Genocidicbunny]

nVidia better hope TSMC gets 28nm up and running asap then. You pretty much can't fix yields for the gpu's nVidia has out now as they're so big. They also only have 2 models out which means that binning will suck majorly.

nVidia's monolithic core strategy has bitten it in the arse before, and it's doing it again.

 

[Fëanor]

Yields do variate per revision, the original (A1) Fermi had yields of less than 10%, the A2 revision has yields of 20-25% ($250 per chip) a 40% yield ($131 per chip) is the goal for the A3, if TSMC screws up the transition to 28nm like they did with 40nm and end up with a full year delay the yields could be improved up to 60% ($87 per chip).

ATI on the other hand is already having 40-50% yields ($90 per Chip) and its speculated that with the Southern Isles die refresh yields of 60-70% ($70-60 per chip) can be achieved by the end of the year.

Also ATI can fit over 150 Die on a wafer while nVidia just under 100, which means that even if nVidia improves the Yields ATI will have tons of room to reduce prices.

nVidia's current "band-aid" strategy to "increase yields" has been to reduce the Streaming Multiprocessors from 16 to 15 (reducing "CUDA Processors" 512 to 480), hopefully the A3 silicon revision will be better and they'll release a improved GTX 480+ or GTX 480 core 512, but for now it would seem the first next nVidia card will come in June and be called "GTX 460" which will basically be GF100 chips too defective to be made into GTX 470's.

Still, the DX11 battle seems firmly in ATI's favor, ATI has shipped over 6.000.000 DX11 cards with wide profit margins versus nVidia's 8.000 GTX 4x0 cards that have been sold at a loss.

 

[Genocidicbunny]

Yields do variate per revision, the original (A1) Fermi had yields of less than 10%, the A2 revision has yields of 20-25% ($250 per chip) a 40% yield ($131 per chip) is the goal for the A3, if TSMC screws up the transition to 28nm like they did with 40nm and end up with a full year delay the yields could be improved up to 60% ($87 per chip).

ATI on the other hand is already having 40-50% yields ($90 per Chip) and its speculated that with the Southern Isles die refresh yields of 60-70% ($70-60 per chip) can be achieved by the end of the year.

Also ATI can fit over 150 Die on a wafer while nVidia just under 100, which means that even if nVidia improves the Yields ATI will have tons of room to reduce prices.

nVidia's current "band-aid" strategy to "increase yields" has been to reduce the Streaming Multiprocessors from 16 to 15 (reducing "CUDA Processors" 512 to 480), hopefully the A3 silicon revision will be better and they'll release a improved GTX 480+ or GTX 480 core 512, but for now it would seem the first next nVidia card will come in June and be called "GTX 460" which will basically be GF100 chips too defective to be made into GTX 470's.

Still, the DX11 battle seems firmly in ATI's favor, ATI has shipped over 6.000.000 DX11 cards with wide profit margins versus nVidia's 8.000 GTX 4x0 cards that have been sold at a loss.

Thats pretty much exactly what I was saying. I also add that AMD's net yield is much higher. I assume those 50-60% figures are for perfectly working HD5870 parts. The other 50-40% can then be turned into lower end parts, kind of how they did it with their CPU's. nVidia does not have such a luxury. All of it's chips either work, or they get tossed, which is a huge money drain for them.

I fully expect nVidia to release a plethora of GF100 parts just to put some of those trashed chips to use (heck, they might in fact be stockpiling the current failings just in case too)

The only reason to go with a nVidia part right now would be if you have some use for CUDA, such as folding at home. Once OpenCL really comes into it's own, even that advantage will be gone. At that point, we might see more than a half-assed effort by nVidia.

Also, this all reads like a huge deja vu. AMD went through what nVidia is going through back when Conroe first came out. Intel went through it before with their Netburst parts. My point is, while disappointing, its kind of obvious this would happen. nVidia was resting on its laurels after it beat out AMD with the 8x00 vs HD3xxx parts.