luckybob wrote:

Intel has almost always been the #1 performer. Amd has always come in 2nd with the "I'm a better value".

Since the Intel Core 2 Duo, AMD has fallen a lot farther behind than it has traditionally been in the past. They made some missteps, and Intel kicked them while they were down.

Gemini000 wrote:

Dant wrote:

I also cut $75 off the cost of the build if I go back to AMD...

Gemini, going with AMD will cost you more money. The machine will be also be louder and hotter. You think you're saving money but you're not.

I know that people look at the performance and see that an i5 and 8350 are similar. But what I see is:

The 8530 needs twice the cores.
It needs to be clocked a lot faster
It draws a lot more power. More heat, more noise.
It will cost more money in the long run.

For the same/similar performance. I simply can't think of any logical reason to purchase AMD?

Don't forget all single core applications/movies/DOSBox 😉 will be way slower on amd

btw same goes with radeon vs geforce:
It draws a lot more power.
It will cost more money in the long run.

For the same performance...

Am I the only person noticing that opinions about my CPU choice are going back and forth? I say I'll go with AMD, I'm told to go Intel. I say I'll go Intel, I'm told to go AMD.

It's kind of ridiculous. x_x;

There's pros and cons either way you slice it and it all equalizes out. Plus, the CPUs I looked at on either side are still powerful processors. I'm sure I'd be perfectly fine with either one.

Cost in the long run though is not a concern to me because we're only talking tiny amounts of money per year in comparison to what it costs to do things like buy food, pay for a mortgage, etc. Going with the FX-8350 over the i5-3570 would raise my annual cost of living (as it is prior to moving out) by about 0.35%. :P

All things considered, I think we should stop debating the CPU choice. I think it's pretty clearly established now that it's a HIGHLY opinionated choice based on very small and minor differences. The FX-8350 and the i5-3570 are very similar processors in terms of overall power and there's no way I could choose between them without incurring SOMEONE'S wrath. ;D

All things considered, I think you should just order your parts and be done with it.

You are going to order what you had in mind anyway, really ignoring all the advice given here, having an argument for everything, I know the type.

Regarding the running cost, on the one hand it's tiny amounts of money for you but on the other hand you're penny pinching with a platter driver instead of SSD (not getting an SSD is really silly IMO) or not going with the 3770 right away.

So please just let us know when you ordered your parts 😀

You'll be fine either with Intel or AMD. But it is not about the wrath or being a fanboy, it is about the misinformation and misconceptions. I think if you choose Intel you should wait for Haswell, it is out on June 2nd, and from what i could understand looking at the architecture it is not a big evolution compared to Sandy Bridge. Why? They are just widening the cores all along, decode, fetch, branch prediction tables, more execution ports... They can do it because they are far ahead in process technology. There's gonna be a bigger multi-thread boost than a single-thread one.

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

All things considered, I think you should just order your parts and be done with it.

You are going to order what you had in mind anyway, really ignoring all the advice given here, having an argument for everything, I know the type.

I haven't ignored any advice. My initial case, motherboard, RAM, PSU and HD selections have all changed since I started asking for advice here and on the Allegro.cc forums. The only thing that seems to have survived the mass of opinions since I started my planning is the FX-8350 chip. :D

...oh, and the GPU, since I'm never going Radeon unless nVidia really screws things up, and no one's disputed my choice of an EVGA-branded GeForce 660 GT card. ;)

Also, I haven't ignored the advice about the SSD, I just don't feel the performance boost in loading programs and device drivers is critical enough to spend an extra $100+ on, at least not right away. Let me see for myself what the performance is like without an SSD and I can add one later if I find the loading times too much of a hassle. ;)

I hate ssd drives. I had 2 sets die in 2 years. Long story short, it was a defective model. That said the performance is PHENOMENAL. I dropped $350 on a set of four. I would do it again in a heartbeat. I've been spoiled by programs loading instantly.

What brand? I have always bought Crucial, no issues whatsoever. I currently own a Crucial M4 128GB and it's great.
P.s. My vote is with Intel (3570K?). The 2500K was anawesome chip, nippy as well once overclocked 😀

http://youtu.be/4et7kDGSRfc?t=9m

All I can say is, go Intel. Current AMD chips are crap IMO. They may offer more "cores" (not really true cores though 😜) and cost less in the short run, but in the long run they don't offer as much performance as Intel chips, and they're a lot less power efficient, leading to higher energy bills. It's sort of like the whole Pentium 4 vs Athlon XP debate, only now Intel has the speedy efficient processor, and AMD has the power-hungry inefficient processor. 🤣

Strangely enough, as far as GPUs go I've always preferred ATI/AMD to Nvidia, but that's because I've seen lots of Nvidia cards burn out and die, while I've only ever seen like one or two dead ATI cards. As well, ATI/AMD cards tend to have less driver issues. Nvidia cards do offer good performance though, and they tend to have more features like PhysX, but just don't be surprised if you have to get a new card after a few years. 🤣

Slightly bizarre to me that the current intel vs amd debate usually seems around intel wiping the floor with amd on performance in games. But those youtube videos on performance if they are to be believed seem to show that the "intel is best" mantra is utter rubbish and even with gaming it depends.

So the argument falls back from straightline performance where there is no clear winner, to power consumption.

I'd still be tempted by amd because increasingly I'm running vm's and four cores is a bit cramped for that. I need two and preferably three or four vm's running at once under 7, each ideally needs more than one core. And I wanna game at the same time. When will they release 12 cores I wonder. I guess 8 will have to do.

Well, I just came back from the local TigerDirect store. They had almost everything I was aiming to get. For the rest, I can just buy online, especially since they're all small things. ;)

Here's what I ultimately bought in comparison to what I was originally going to get. And remember, I'm not opposed to getting an SSD later on, I just want to see how well the system performs without one first.

-----------

CASE: ThermalTake VN700M1W2N Full-Tower Gaming Case
(Original Selection: Diablotek Mid-Tower Gaming Case)

PSU: Corsair GS700 700W
(Original Selection: CoolerMaster 750W)

MOTHERBOARD: Asus Sabertooth 990FX R2.0 AM3+
(Original Selection: MSI 990FXA-GD80V2)

CPU: AMD FX-8350 4 GHz 8-Core
(Original Selection: Same)

GPU: EVGA GeForce GTX660 2GB GDDR5
(Original Selection: Same, but with only one fan. The one I bought has two.)

HD: WD Black 1 TB
(Original Selection: WD Blue 1 TB)

BLU-RAY WRITER: Asus BW-12B1ST 12x
(Original Selection: LG WH14NS40 14x)

OS: Windows 8 Pro 64-Bit OEM
(Original Selection: Same)

Along with all this, an internal memory card reader and a 5 1/4" to 3 1/2" bracket to fit it in, as well as an APC surge protector.

-----------

And here's what they didn't have at the local store which I need to order after I'm doing posting this:

RAM: Kingston Hyper X Beast 16GB 1866 MHz
(Original Selection: Corsair 16GB 1600 MHz)

WIFI: TP-Link TL-WDN4800 Wireless-N Adapter
(Original Selection: TP-Link TL-WN881ND Wireless-N Adapter)

MOUSE: Azio Corp Levetron GM533U Gaming Mouse
(Original Selection: Same)

-----------

But yeah, overall, I really appreciate all the advice I got from everyone here and I'm pretty confident I've got a good selection of parts. Yeah, some of them you could do better for sure, but I didn't want to go completely overboard, plus for some of them, especially the CPU, "better" is a matter of perspective and changes from person to person, so I simply went by what made the most sense to me.

Only three of my original selections survived all the advice I was given: The CPU, the GPU, and the OS. The mouse I never asked for advice on actually, specifically because this is actually a VERY new brand and mouse to the market but looked appealing to me, so I wanted to take a chance and give it a try, especially after the reviews of it noted that while it's not perfect, it's a good mouse for the price. (Which has actually gone up over the past few days.)

Wish me luck in building this sucker! :D

In before the rage that you bought Windows 8 😜

vetz wrote:

In before the rage that you bought Windows 8 :P

It made the most sense to go with, as much as I agree that it's a far-from-perfect OS. But as I've stated before, I hate EVERY OS, I just hate Windows the least. ;D

vetz wrote:

In before the rage that you bought Windows 8 😜

Yea, you probably will catch a bit of flack for that. 😜 I'm just going to frown and shake my head in shame.

Aside from that, looks like a good system! The only thing that bugs me aside from win8 is the power supply. I'm not that familiar with coolermaster psu's. Corsair on the other hand are cream-of-the-crop as of late.

*shrug*

As long as you are happy, that's all that really matters.

Windows 8 is actually not that bad of an OS. It's fast and stable, and it doesn't seem to have too many compatibility issues, though the interface does kind of suck. Otherwise though, in some ways I actually like it better than Win7. *ducks*

XP SP3 is still the best version overall out of the versions Micro$oft still supports. 😁

Just install Start8 for the lack of the old style taskbar and you're set with Win8, it's actually faster than Win7. Have fun with your new hardware 😁

F2bnp wrote:

Just install Start8 for the lack of the old style taskbar and you're set with Win8, it's actually faster than Win7. Have fun with your new hardware 😁

I'm waiting for someone to make a dock for it and make it look like OS X.

F2bnp wrote:

Just install Start8 for the lack of the old style taskbar and you're set with Win8, it's actually faster than Win7. Have fun with your new hardware :D

As I've mentioned before, I was using slide-from-the-side bars and windows full of icons to start programs back in the days of Windows 98, so having them in Windows 8 isn't going to bother me. Also, my current system is Windows XP and I VERY rarely use the Start menu. Every program I primarily use is placed somewhere on my desktop and I have folders on my desktop for collections of programs, like my DOS software.

luckybob wrote:

The only thing that bugs me aside from win8 is the power supply. I'm not that familiar with coolermaster psu's. Corsair on the other hand are cream-of-the-crop as of late.

*nods* My PSU selection IS the Corsair. My "original selections" are the ones I originally picked out prior to advice from here and the Allegro.cc forums. ;)