Hi fellas, I think I'm going to be in a position to buy a new desktop soon. I've been using my laptop, which is awesome, for the past four or five years and its about time for an upgrade. I've never been quite as in touch with the hardware specs as some of you guys, so I figured I'd make a topic and ask a few questions.

Where is Intel/AMD processor technology at? I know Intel's model is "tick-tock" i.e. new processor architecture = tick, speed it up = tock (watered down of course, but that's essentially as I understand it). Is AMD still as competitive as Intel's hardware? I know the i3-i5-i7 basics, but what's the deal with Sandy Bridge/Ivy bridge, and if a new architecture should be out in a month or something should I just wait till then? Like I said, I haven't been keeping tabs well, but I feel as if AMD lost significant ground in terms of processing power (versus Intel), but I know I could be straight up wrong, so what's the deal Excalibur and/or Rockz and/or Shadowflare and/or etc etc etc?

How about motherboard/RAM technology? I 'think' DDR3 is still the standard, is there going to be a DDR4 soon or something crazy and new and awesome coming out? Or maybe motherboard changes? In this next build I want a motherboard with a T_junction of like 900C because I melted the motherboard on my laptop twice. Is RAM uber expensive now?

How have SSD's been progressing? Is it feasible to have a SSD as the only main drive nowadays in terms of space, or is the SSD + HD still the way to go? Or again, if I wait a month will it change?

What's the deal with Nvidia v. AMD in GFX? Is there a clear best right now?

I suppose what I'm asking is the overall state of the hardware industry lol. I figure it's impossible to get the best of everything because as time progresses the technology will too, but if I only have to wait say a month or so for a really big leap (for example waiting for when SSD's became feasible versus only HD's) I would like to just wait then capitalize on that.

An "8-core" AMD FX-8120 is being sold at the price of a dual-core i3, and people still buy the i3. This should answer your question.


RAM is extremely cheap nowadays and the price will only continue dropping. DDR3-1600 is as high as you need if you are going for an Intel build. DDR3 will remain standard until maybe two or three years later.


Some SSDs have crossed the $0.50/GB price threshold, which is quite surprising considering they were $2/GB just a year ago. If you can afford it, a 128/256GB SSD should be plenty of space for an OS drive, and you can buy some 2TB-4TB HDDs at about $50 per TB. If that's not your cup of tea, you can get a single 64GB SSD and use SSD Caching for your HDD.

It probably won't change in a month, but Seagate did announce that their current research enables them to increase the capacity of 3.5" form factor HDDs to 60TB, so the platter density hasn't hit a ceiling yet.


I don't see much coming out in a single month. If you are patient, you can wait until the holiday season for the inevitable price drops, or wait for Spring for the newer generation refreshes. In a single month though? Not really.

Meaning that the Intel technology is so superior right now that the 'low end' i3 is still better than the high end 8-core AMD? Honestly I'm not sure because I'm used to Excaliburs way of talking about tech. If he were to say something like this I would almost assume it meant AMD is better because so many people are dumb and buy stupid stuff just because they're an "Intel fanboy" or something like that.

Good.
Is there higher? Why "for an Intel build"? Is there some motherboard or FSB limitation that I should know about?
This is the kind of thing I'd like to know, thank you very much.

I think I will be able to. Seems like SSD+HD is still the way to go then. I won't need a 60TB HDD either luckily so no worries there.

Thank you very much Aristocrat, exactly the sort of thing I wanted to hear. Of course, I still want to hear from our other tech enthusiasts just to gain a larger picture of the market.

Yes, the low-end i3 still has significantly higher single-threaded performance than the 8-core Bulldozer CPU, which determines your perceived daily computing performance. The 8-core Bulldozer will still perform better in heavily threaded applications, but their IPC is still lower than Intel (a 3.6GHz Bulldozer loses to a 2.6GHz Pentium in single-threaded benchmarks), not to mention their CPU consumes a lot more power under load.

Intel's memory controller does not go above 1600MHz without O.C. on Ivy Bridge, 1333MHz on Sandy Bridge. An AMD build will support faster RAM, but barely anything is bottlenecked by RAM nowadays.

AMD's APUs require faster ram. They are severely bottlenecked by ddr3-1333. If you don't get an APU, then there's no reason to get anything other than 1333. That being said, 1600 is the same price as 1333 ($3-$4/GB).

The only SSDs worth buying are ones that are $0.80 / GB or higher. OCZ is a terrible company for many reasons, which I am not going to list here. If there's a really great deal on one of their SSDs, maybe, but even then I say stay away (because they're a bad company). Also, I recommend getting the cheapest non-hitachi, non 7200.11 drive you can find. Usually that means green drives. Greens have excellent sequential read/write and very high response times, and require less energy than normal HDDs. I personally have a raid 5 setup with old drives and a 1 tb external (not backed up).

When gaming, dual cores are pretty well the max. However, run a virus scan on top of that, and the 8 core processor will decimate it. The only reason I'd buy an i3 over an 8 core AMD though is if I were planning to upgrade later, or if it were for an HTPC (but then I'd get a pentium).

When buying, you really want to buy during the "tick" phase. New architecture is almost always a significant improvement over a die shrink. Nehalem and sandy bridge just blew everything else out of the water. Westmere and ivy bridge were major disappointments in comparison.

Assuming you're talking about the Western Digital green drives, they use less power because they don't always spin at 7,200 RPM - they can (and do) throttle down to 5,400 RPM. This means lower performance. Of course if you've got an SSD with your OS and choice selection on games/apps on it this doesn't really matter. Also the power saving is really quite marginal - it's really just a greenwash. SSDs use a tiny fraction of the power of even a green HDD.

Here's a good place to start: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/build-a-pc-overclock-benchmark,3276.html and check out the other articles there as they have $500 and $2000 pricepoints too.
Also: http://www.anandtech.com/show/6229/midrange-system-buyers-guide
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6182/fall-budget-system-buyers-guide

Also you'll want to pick up something with USB3 support, and SATA600 is also worth getting especially if you're getting an SSD.

I'm personally not thinking about doing a significant upgrade until early 2014 when new technologies will have bedded in more; most of my current PC is from 2007: Q6600 2.4Ghz, 4 gb RAM. I've since replaced the HDs with 2x1TB in RAID 1 + 64gb SSD and replaced the 8800GTX with 460 GT IIRC.

O.o Since we're on the subject of SSDs... Is it me or are the simply no affordable 3.5" SSDs? Do you really need to buy an adapter 2.5" to 3.5" for any decent SSD you can currently buy? Is it possible to just put 2.5" drives into 3.5" bays?

Usually SSDs come with a tray so you can screw it into a 3.5 slot.

Mine did anyway.

Your case should come with either an SSD bay or a 2.5" to 3.5" mounting kit. Your SSD usually includes a mounting kit as well, if your case didn't. Check box contents to see if it does have them. Flash memory takes up so little physical space that you don't really need to give it the larger form factor.

It's cheaper to produce only 2.5" SSDs, since they fit in laptops as well.

I say green because there are other greens out there.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822152245
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148764
Greens are also generally significantly cheaper than standard 7200s.

What about current motherboard connections? How much RAM does a typical motherboard support at max nowadays? Is the GFX connection still typically PCI x16 or whatever? I know I should look for USB 3.0, someone mentioned that in the thread earlier. What exactly do I need to know about the 2.5 v. 3.5 SSD connection?
Can you explain further?

All I have is my laptop. Waiting till 2014 for me would be silly.

I know this was a good rule of thumb 5 years ago, but as multithreaded coding becomes more prevalent, isn't this probably not quite so true anymore?

Is this due to the superiority of Intel's L2/L3 processor caches? Or are AMD APUs just that much better?

I assume the next architecture won't be out anytime soon?

I'm somewhat of a hardware noob, but I went through this recently so I can pretend like I know what I'm talking about.

I was talked into a 256GB SSD + 2TB HDD and I kinda regret it. My storage usage is pretty low, so I have 150GB used on the SSD so far and I don't even know if my HDD works because I haven't used it at all. If given the chance again, I would have gotten a 512GB SSD and no HDD.

However, if you do use a lot of storage, going purely SSD will burn a hole in your wallet. Also, prices are still dropping gradually; over the course of 4 months, my SSD has dropped maybe $20 (it used to be one of the cheaper SSDs per GB, but there are cheaper drives now).

I've seen motherboards that support up to 128GB if the sticks existed. I have 16GB and haven't really done anything warranting much more than 4GB to be honest; you'd probably be good with 8GB.

For the graphics, you'll want at least one (and probably just one) PCI Express 3.0 x16 on your motherboard.

As far as the SSDs go, my case came with a 2.5" to 3.5" dock that I fit the SSD into. It's just a size thing for putting it in your case; nothing to worry about there.

Coming from someone that doesn't yet have USB3 peripherals, I can tell you it's more of a bother than anything else (drivers and the rare compatibility issue). If you use flash drives a lot, though, it's close enough to a necessity to have them.

Edit: SATA-600 (SATA 6GB/s) is way faster than SATA-300, and you wouldn't be utilizing the SSD to its fullest if you only had the latter.

A lot of programs are moving towards multi-threading, but gaming is still predominantly single-threaded, and your money is generally better spent on a better GPU than CPU for gaming performance. I'd still go with at least 4 cores though if you want to somewhat futureproof your build.

I was in your situation a few months ago (no desktop, only laptop). Here's my topic if you're interested: http://www.staredit.net/topic/15148/

Hope that helps!

Post has been edited 3 time(s), last time on Oct 3 2012, 3:06 am by Roy.

Not 100% sure what you mean here as it's a little ambiguous. Do you mean the presence of USB3 ports on your computer is more of a bother than it's worth?

Also the reason I say to get it, is to be future proof. In 3-4 years time it'd be good if your computer could still do all the 'reasonable' things like use new peripherals. I did also say that personally I won't be upgrading until early 2014, for this very reason. I'm not sure if Intel actually have any motherboard chipsets with native USB3 on them or not.

Yes. I've had issues with some devices not working properly through USB3, so I prefer to use the USB2 ports because my devices don't benefit from the additional speed anyway. As of right now, if all my ports were USB2, I'd probably be happier. If devices start to not support USB2 (doubtful, because USB2 devices support USB1), then obviously there'd be a serious problem in my scenario.

Granted, my opinion would change immediately if I had a USB3 flash drive (and actually used it), which is the only thing I can think of that makes USB3 awesome (hence my last sentence in the quote). And all the new motherboards seem to have USB3 on them, so you'll kinda be forced to have them in the future anyway. In any case, it would never be a deciding factor for me.

TL;DR: I think USB3 is good if you use flash drives, and just a novelty otherwise.

USB3 is supposed to be completely backwards compatible. Wonder if your motherboard is bad, or you've got old drivers / shitty implementation. Or quite possibly the peripherals you're using just don't abide the spec properly.

You've come to the right partially insane certified Staples EasyTech.

AMD is always at their top range, at Intel's mid range. AMD's top CPU is equal to about the high mid CPU Intel has at that time. However AMD's top price is equal to Intel's lower mid range. So you get more value with AMD, or at least I think so. AMD is coming out with their new Trinity APUs. See here: http://www.anandtech.com/show/6347/amd-a10-5800k-a8-5600k-review-trinity-on-the-desktop-part-2

DDR4 isn't going to be viable until early 2014 in my opinion. Keep in mind I refuse to pay over 8$ per GB because I think any more than that is not a fair price

SSDs will take a long time to replace HDDs, and thats if they do at all. SSDs are far superior to the traditional mechanical HDD, but its going to be a long time before they become a complete replacement, and who knows if we'll have a new method of storage by the time that happens. I still say SSD for OS, HDD for storage. I like a NAS for large storage but that's because I'm in favor of very powerful routers as well.

As usual NV might have the 'performance crown' but AMD has gotten my vote since NV dropped the GTX 200 series and said 'FUCK POWER AND TEMP, GET DAT FPS' But really I'm about value because people trust me with their money on a daily basis and in a value sense I can't recommend NV. AMD gives better value per dollar in most price segments while using less power and generating less heat.


Nothing game-changing is happening too soon in my opinion. I'd like to see what HD 8000, Trinity, and Intel's next lineup bring to the table, but even so my predictions are as such:
Intel continues to dominate and over-charge.
AMD's Trinity is nice but nothing shocking.
HD 8000 is the same marginal improvement that 7000 was to 6000.


Whenever you want a build priced out, just let me know.

More likely when the time comes, I will make my own build, post it here, and let you rip it to shreds Ex

Right now all I'm 100% sure of is that I want an SSD and more than 4GB RAM. My laptop has 4GB and its not enough. I like Roy's idea of a 512GB SSD. I really don't have that much media, I don't fill up TB disks like some people do. But considering how cheap HDDs are I might try and go 256GB SSD + 1TB HDD.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ivy-bridge-benchmark-core-i7-3770k,3181-10.html
Doesn't this suggest that Ivy Bridge supports 1866 and 2133? Obviously the performance gains over 1600 are nothing incredible in the real-world benchmarks according to this site, but I might want to go with 1866 if the cost isn't prohibitive. (As Tom essentially says too.) I'm not afraid of overclocking or anything.

I've been looking at graphics cards, so far this is what I've got. I'm not exactly sure what my best bet is here, but within those 4 cards the price differences are negligible to me, so I went with what I perceived to be the higher performing card. Going to a GTX680 I think would result in negative cost/performance ratio compared to these guys.

So here's the build I'm thinking at the moment, not final of course. I expect to be called an [insert company] fanboy at least six times, a techno-nub at least twice and outrageous nine times. Otherwise I simply won't be satisfied with my experience in this tech forum

Crap Drive: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16827151256
HDD: Western Digital 1TB 7200RPM : http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136533
SSD: 256GB Samsung : http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820147164
GFX: XFX HD 7970 : http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814150632
RAM: 1866 G.Skill (2x4GB) : http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231550
HOBO: MSI Z77 : http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813130643
CPU: i7 3770 (quad/ivy) : http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819116501

I realize I'll need a case. And a power supply. Actually, I believe I'll need monitor/keyboard/mouse/speakers as well. I've been using a laptop for so long I forgot about those, but that's time for me to waste another night I didn't look up a case/psu because I know nothing about them.

For the HOBO, I went with the MSI because I was looking at some ASUS's with big variable price ranges and, while they all seemed to have the right socket and variations of the RAM speeds and USB 3.0 & sata 6gb/s, something just wasnt sitting right with me. There were some cheaper Gigabytes but they jumped from DDR31600 all the way to 2400. There was an Asrock but I've just never heard of that company before. The MSI I listed has "3 (16/8/4)" listed for PCI 3.0 x16 expansion (and 4 PCI x1). What does this mean exactly? I know some MOBO's (like the ASUS's I mentioned) list like "2 (x16/0 x8/x8) meaning you can either use 1 PCI 3.0x16 or 2 PCI 3.0x8, but does the 16/8/4 mean theres only 1 PCI 3.0 x16? Kinda confused by that.

Also, if theres no difference in $/GB between 1866 and 2133 mhz RAM, maybe I should just fork out the extra 50 bucks and saturate my motherboard at the higher frequency with this? (The one I listed above is $50 for 8GB 1866, below is $100 for 16GB 2133). I know RAM isn't going to change any bottlenecks much, but just thinking ahead in case I upgrade someday? Or will this be a complete waste of $$$? I figure maybe I'm just butthurt that I've been using 667MHZ DDR2 the past four years
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231501

Post has been edited 4 time(s), last time on Oct 5 2012, 9:24 am by Vrael.

Wouldn't go MSI, I've had two of their boards be DOA.