Opinion on a Newegg bundle deal

[Leveller]

Hi,

 

I have been looking at doing a new build and had put together a wish list on Newegg including 560ti's in SLI, but saw this bundle deal today and am curious on thoughts:

 

Bundle Deal

 

Not a huge fan of the bundled True image or antivirus, but it seemed a reasonable price?

 

As a reference point, this was the wish list I had put together earlier this year which I didn't have a shared wishlist for:

NZXT Phantom case

ASRock P67 Extreme Mobo

2x MSI N560GTX-TI Twin Frozr

Intel Core i7-2600K

Intel 510 (Elm Crest) 120GB SSD

Corsair CMPSU-850TX PSU

8GB G.Skill Ripjaw RAM

WD Caviar Black 1TB

Lite-On DVD-ROM

Cooler Master Hyper 212

 

Would currently run at $1697 incl. rebates.

 

Neither of the above include an OS, it's a given that I'll obviously need one.

 

I have a 27 inch Samsung at 1920x1080 (no multiple monitor setup) and am looking for something that would do similar service to my current rig which I put together in late 2007 but is now starting to struggle with newer games bearing in mind I'll likely be playing a lot BF3 (which is the main reason for looking at a new build), but would like some feedback from the collective brain that is GC.

 

If I'm way off the mark/hugely out of date with the above please let me know, I'd be willing to go up to $2K for something that is going to give me a couple of years of pain/upgrade free gaming but would be happier the more change I got back obviously.

 

Thanks

 

Lev

[boiler]

That bundle would be a pretty awesome way to spend $1300. The motherboard is newer with the z68 chipset instead of the P67, with the only other biggest difference being the graphics card.

 

The GTX 570 is a beast (I have an EVGA superclocked version), and has handled everything that I have thrown at it at max or near-max settings (i.e. certain DX11 effects turned off, like DoF). From a benchmark standpoint, SLI'd GTX 560s will outperform the 570, and give you performance on par with the 580. With the price of that bundle though, I would be tempted to throw in another 570. The PSU might be a limiting factor, since it is 750W. That said, it's a Corsair, so you might be fine running 2 570s.

 

With that bundle, don't forget to add a standard hard drive for storage, as the 60GB SSD included won't hold much more than the OS and a few high-priority programs.

[onyxdragoon]

Could you post your current specs?

[mookie]

If I read that right, you save about $130 by buying all that stuff together, but could save $85 just by dropping the two software pieces. Seems pretty pointless, unless you specifically want all the rest of it.

[lousiest]

*jealous*

[Leveller]

If I read that right, you save about $130 by buying all that stuff together, but could save $85 just by dropping the two software pieces. Seems pretty pointless, unless you specifically want all the rest of it.

 

A very valid point (although I think there's an additional $55 in mail in rebates) and I hadn't factored in that my original plan had a SSD double the size + a 1tb data drive.

 

The other issue I see is that the 570 they are quoting is, according to the website, out of stock. Not that I'm looking to build something tomorrow.

 

Seems like I may be better off going with very nearly my original wishlist and picking a single 570 (boiler, appreciate your feedback on that and it would save me $150 off my original list) or 580 and then a second when the prices come down/if I need to...

[boiler]

I was looking at the parts and neglected to see the "bundle price". I think you might as well select your own parts and roll with that, swapping the 570 in for the 560s. I obviously have had awesome results with the EVGA superclocked version, so you can't go wrong there. If you do get a 570, i highly recommend you download and use EVGA Precision (free utility). Using precision's fan profile helped to significantly reduce my GPU temps and keep it at a reasonable noise level.

 

My only though on the parts you originally listed is slight apprehension about the ASRock motherboard, as I have no experience with them. My personal future build will possibly have an EVGA board, and I've used asus and gigabyte often for previous builds. I do think you ought to go for a Z68 board as well.

[ZeroDamage]

I say wait a few weeks and see what AMD pulls off. Their new Bulldozer CPU's will be showing up any day now and they may actually be comparable to what we are seeing with Intel but cheaper. It is a given that AMD stuff by default tends to be cheaper from the get go. The Asus Crosshair V Formula is out and it is amazing. I am running the previous version and it is the best mobo I've ever owned.

 

I am still of the frame of mind that the i7 setups cost too much which is why I went with AMD's 1090T 6-core a little while back and it plays everything I throw at it game wise. Crysis 2, CoD: Black Ops, whatever. You do not need to spend so much money to get great performance where you may get 5 - 10 fps more in certain games at very specific moments of the game. You will not see a difference between 140 and 130 fps. Not worth all that extra cash IMO.

[amertrash]

Heya, don't know you I'm CS:S/Minecraft player on GC myself. Some humble thoughts on your two options here.

 

On the bundle deal:

That motherboard it's a very nice board with lots of bells of whistles but also very expensive. I'd suggest this which still sports the Z68, UEFI BIOS, and two 16x PCIe slots supporting both Crossfire and SLI while being nearly $100 less. The video card is also a nice girl but rather expensive for what it is, you could pick this at the same price and it'll happily trounce that 570. That SSD is bottom end and I'd avoid it, and original SandForce(SF-1200) drive will be the same price with way better performance such as an OCZ Vertex II.

 

On your list:

The Asrock motherboard is fine brandname wise, they were rolled off of Asus to be more competitive in the OEM market against Foxxconn and ECS. However its dated now, get something with a Z68 chipset. The Intel SSD wouldn't be my pick, the new Intel SSDs are using a Marvell(famous for their earlier S-S-S-S-S-uttering controller) controller with a custom firmware by Intel. Don't know why they didn't continue what they did with the X25 series of SSDs. The SF-2200 drives(like the OCZ Vertex 3) happily beat it in nearly every mark and are priced in the same range. As for the hard drive I'd buy one of the "green" ones if its gonna be a secondary drive, either Hitachi, Seagate or WD whatever is cheapest. It'll save power, probably won't make any noticeable performance change and save you money. As for SLI(or Crossfire for that matter) lots of games still aren't supported, and lots of games it doesn't scale well, or suffers from stuttering. I'd suggest buying a single card, and a faster one, unless you're looking to churn out bitcoins this winter(and heat your house).

 

And for something completely different:

Asrock 990FX AM3+ board $159

AMD Phenom II 970 3.5Ghz BE $139

Corsair 750W 80Plus Gold $169

AMD 6970 $349

OCZ Vertex III 120G $219

Corsair DDR3-1600 2x8G $49

Thats just around $1100, minus a case, optical, and extra hard drive and gaming performance it'll slap that bundle deal in the face. Switch the video if you like, but the 6970 will run over the 570. AMD and nVidia's highend cards benchmark against each other well usually with nVidia pulling just a hair higher for matched cards. (both the 6950 vs the 570 and the 6970 vs the 580), I'd buy what ever is cheapest and the 6970 is a beast for the money and it'll run triple monitor gaming. As for the i7 yes it'll mop the floor against the Phenom II, but in gaming its not gonna make much of a difference as just about everything is GPU bound(with one notable exception being GTA IV) while being a whole lot cheaper. That board will also support the 8-core upcoming Bulldozer which is an entirely new CPU built grown up, the first new design for AMD since the original K7, and they just started shipping the server Socket C32/G34(16 cores, quad DDR3 channels, hubba) Bulldozer CPUs this month. As for really 8/6/4 core CPUs its not going to make any difference for gaming, as years into everyone having multicore computers very few game engines support multiple threads and the ones that do typical can't utilize more then two cores. You could drop in a Phenom II X2 at the same clock and probably get the exact same gaming performance in 95% of the stuff out there. Muchless with the money saved you could pick up two more monitors and run triple screen gaming at 5760x1080 . Oh, and you could probably buy a cheaper PSU(that one is nearly the highest 80+ certification which adds a bit) but that is one thing I don't typical skimp on, PC Power and Cooling, OCZ, Enermax, Corsair, Antec and Seasonic are all wins. HardOCP tests just about all of them in the most brutal manor known to man if you wanna look it up on there.

[ZeroDamage]

Amertrash, your information is so off. Most every game out there now utilizes multple cores and the technology behind the cores matters a lot more than the number of cores. Without getting into technical details, there is a reason that Intel's quad core CPU's beat AMD in just about every test out there. Dropping in a X2 process would be literally stupid as the technology is old and would cripple a gaming system. Everything in a PC plays a part and that goes for the CPU as well as the Power Supply. I would NOT buy anything right now and see how the Bulldozer performs in comparison to the Intel unless you are in an immediate hurry.

 

The ATI/AMD video cards still out perform the Nvidia's in just about every game except the few exceptions in the same way that Intel CPU's own AMD in just about every task and game. The CPU does matter and any upgrade that doesn't take that into an account isn't an upgrade. Please be careful of the advise you give out.

[Leveller]

Amertrash, your information is so off. Most every game out there now utilizes multple cores and the technology behind the cores matters a lot more than the number of cores. Without getting into technical details, there is a reason that Intel's quad core CPU's beat AMD in just about every test out there. Dropping in a X2 process would be literally stupid as the technology is old and would cripple a gaming system. Everything in a PC plays a part and that goes for the CPU as well as the Power Supply. I would NOT buy anything right now and see how the Bulldozer performs in comparison to the Intel unless you are in an immediate hurry.

 

The ATI/AMD video cards still out perform the Nvidia's in just about every game except the few exceptions in the same way that Intel CPU's own AMD in just about every task and game. The CPU does matter and any upgrade that doesn't take that into an account isn't an upgrade. Please be careful of the advise you give out.

 

Advice received and plans put on hold for a couple of weeks, seeing as how someone kindly clipped the corner of my car in the lot outside the office sometime between me parking up at 8:15 and me being told about it at 8:25 it may be just as well....

[lousiest]

Ouch!

[amertrash]

Amertrash, your information is so off. Most every game out there now utilizes multple cores and the technology behind the cores matters a lot more than the number of cores. Without getting into technical details, there is a reason that Intel's quad core CPU's beat AMD in just about every test out there. Dropping in a X2 process would be literally stupid as the technology is old and would cripple a gaming system.

Well instead of opinion here is a spreadsheet I've made at work demonstrating CPU scaling in recent games.

Note that in the first set going from a faster X2 to a slower X4 results in a loss of less than 4%, in the second set going from a slighty faster X2 to a slighty slower X3 resulted in a loss of less than 6%, and in the third set going from a slightly faster X3 to a slightly slower X4 resulted in just about even performance(a net gain of 0.8%). Also included is an i7 in the last test as reference against a similarly clocked Intel quad core(which performed near the same as the other two). As for multithreading support in current game engines, go google "cpu OR processor scaling benchmark" and a game engine such as Anvil, Dunia, X-Ray, Source, Chrome, MT-Framework, Gamebryo, Unreal, IW Engine, or just about any other engine and you will that in general they gain less than 10% performance after scaling past two cores. This simple fact is in most of the current games out there two very fast cores will perform similar to a processor with more albeit slower cores. I also never stated to buy an X2, I simply that in gaming it will perform near the same. Also the X2 is in no way "outdated" its the exact same die as the X4 and X3 simply with two cores disabled, which with the right motherboard can simply be re-enabled a good portion of the time.

 

Please be careful of the advise you give out.

I wasn't giving advice if you would have read my original post where I stated "my humble opinion", and if you look at the actual facts I've posted or do the research yourself you'll see my opinion seems correct. Further more I more than understand the "technical details" as I've been a geek for a long time and a capable programmer in a few different languages(even 6502 assembly, the little sweet prince), done IT consulting for a number of years, and have been a FreeBSD committer for nearly a decade now. I found your post rude, belittling, and offensive for no reason as well. Keep it classy.

[lousiest]

Aye, ZD, that could have been worded better

[ZeroDamage]

Bad advice is as simple as being bad advice. I read your post as get an dual core insteadof a 6 core because you will see better or similar results which is simply wrong. Most normal computer users do more than just play a game. They may be recording a demo. They have ananti-virus. They have other crap runningin the background and if all they have is a dual core they will see significantperformance hits. Not everyone uses their computer in the same way that a testerat HardOCP will. Those of us in the realworld (compared to a testing lab world) do not have a super fine tuned gamingonly machine; we use it for multiple things including browsing the web andrecording TV shows and backup server and a million other things. Buying anything less than a 4-core CPU these days is a bad idea no matter what your spreadsheet shows. The most demanding of games out there right now utilize more than just 2 cores and that number will only increase as time goes on.

 

Your source links are all 2+ years old and none of themtake into account the changes over the past couple of years in CPU technology and game engine improvements. I went from a Core 2 Duo to a 6-core AMD and despite what some people told me and what some reviews said, I saw and felt a huge performance boost. Windows in general was so much more responsive and alt-tabbing was seamless in everything I did. Games that had occasional stuttering and FPS drops went away. Same video card. Samedrivers. Different CPU's with more cores that technically should have been slower than the dual core in most games. While some of the games may have seen a fps drop from 80 to 77 fps due to architecture differences and optimizations forone cpu over another, my overall experience was greatly improved. That dual core system is still in use for my son alongside an older HP workstation with an older dual cpu Xeon setup. The dual xeon cpu's are the fastest Ghz wise but performance wise are the slowest. The C2D system that my son uses feels so slow compared to my 6-core and my 6-core felt slow when a power outage caused my BIOS to disable a core and had it running in 4-core mode and it was slow. Games took longer to load and everything. Once I fixed that it felt like an upgrade again with response time, etc.

 

With all of that said, I did not intend to be insulting or rude. I am sorry it came off that way. I just wanted to make it clear that any thought of dual-core cpu's being an upgrade was wrong and would be a bad decision. In 2008-2009, going from dual core to quadcore was often times a downgrade in gaming but this isn't the case anymore.

Edited September 14, 2011 by ZeroDamage

[Preacher]

[ZeroDamage]

By the way, here is a link to my forum post last year when I upgraded to the 1090T 6-core setup. I said even back then that the move from dual core to something with more cores made a better than double difference and let me also do full time wegame recordings.

 

http://gamrs.co/forums/index.php?showtopic=39640&st=0&p=480267&hl=+4870%20+x2&fromsearch=1&&do=findComment&comment=480267

[Hailfire]

My system is no beast only

intel i5 2.67 ghz

8gb ddr3 ram

but the real kicker is the Radeon hd 5850 black edition.

 

With that card I have been able to run everything (from crysis 2 to deus ex:Hr) on max settings.

Preacher was actually the one who built most of the system I added a few things mainly the video card.

 

Overall (i/o things like mouse/keyboard not included) I spent roughly $1k on it and that was early 2010.