Was this a good buy?

A

Aguiluz

Active Member
http://www.tigerdirect.ca/applications/ ... &CatId=332



  • [*] GIGABYTE M68MT nForce 630a Socket AM3 Motherboard
    [*] AMD Phenom II 1055T Six Core Processor
    [*] Corsair CMX4GX3M1A1333C9 XMS3 4GB DDR3 RAM
    [*] Western Digital 500GB Caviar Blue Hard Drive
    [*] DiabloTek Elite 450W PSU ATX Mid Tower Case



All this for $335, without rebates and tax and shipping. Good buy or not? The Hexa-core processor really swung me to buying it, and that mobo can accept one GFX card if I needed to.
 
Phenom IIs are pretty Dang overrated.
As of now, pretty much nothing most people will use are written to take advantage of more than 2 threads/cores.
This thing has 6.
Basically, AMD knows they have slow cores so they stick more on instead.
Result?
Sandy Bridge i3s outperform Phenom IIs in pretty much everything.
For 300 bucks, you could have an i5 2500k and possibly a mobo too.
Good price, but you could also say that finding a dog turd in a bush for free a good price.
Sorry, but I wouldn't have bought it.
 
Mako, that's almost a complete computer versus just a motherboard and processor. No, it's not a great package, but for $335 it's a Dang good deal. Slam a $50 graphics card in there and you've got a pretty decent budget box.
 
For a budget computer? Decent. Sandy Bridge has the Phenom II beat in every way possible though.
 
If you can, bump your budget up some more. A $500-$600 hardware budget is the sweet spot for PC building now; too far above or below that and value-for-money goes down.

For processes that don't take advantage of that many cores the six-core Phenom will be worse than a quad with more cache. (And both will be worse than the Sandy Bridge Celerons i3s. :trollface:) The only reason that processor exists is because ***
emot-pcgaming.gif
SIX CORES
emot-pcgaming.gif
*** For gaming you have to look more closely at memory bandwidth and processor cache than number of cores.

According to Tom's Hardware's benchmarks, the i3 2120 is a better buy than the six-core Phenom II 1075T, and i5 2400s are an even better buy.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/bes ... 59-10.html

There's really no reason to even think about buying AMD until Bulldozer comes out, and given the steady march of Intel's Tick-Tock development cycle, disappointing prerelease reviews, and the Valve-like delays in its release, it won't be a repeat of the early 2000s Athlon XP vs NetBurst dogfight the fans seem to think it will be. :neutral2:

e: quickie example setup:

http://www.newegg.ca/Product/ComboDealD ... mbo.674752
http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.as ... 6822148697
http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.as ... 6820233132

There's your motherboard, an i5 2400, 1 TB 7200 RPM hard drive, and 4 gigs of DDR3 1333 for CA$401. Just add a power supply, case, Windows license, and optionally a video card. (Intelgrated video is far from fantastic, but the HD 2000 is "good enough for now" on a shoestring budget.)

e2: More parts for example:

http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.as ... 6814121363 - Radeon 5770 for $90 after $20 MIR
http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.as ... 6817371015 - Antec EarthWatts 650w PSU - $85
Any old random ATX case you can get your hands on - $50 or so for a nice one

So that's about $625 for a really decent machine out the door. You can lower that by recycling parts or stepping down the CPU and motherboard a bit, but this should last you 5 years at the least. I know from experience that if you buy cheap junk that's "good enough" now, it costs more in the long run because you have to replace it sooner. The 2400 is the cheapest SB Intel quad you actually want. If you want to be cheap you could browse Craigslist or Kijiji to see if an enthusiast with deep pockets is trying to dump an older rig for a decent price. Sometimes you might even get a legit Windows license out of the deal! :awesome: (That reminds me, if you or someone you know is in college you can probably get a really inexpensive license from the school bookstore.)

bentomo said:
That six core processor alone is $300
Click to expand...
$150

http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.as ... 6819103851
 
Oh man, I made this thread a heck of a lot too late. :neutral2: I forgot to emphasize that I bought the thing two weeks ago and the parts are here and I'm just waiting for the case. I'm doing a lot of video encoding on x264 and xvid, which takes advantage of multicore.

The integrated GeForce 7025 should be enough to run DJMAX Trilogy (the only PC game I play, everything else = PS3) as even a crap integrated ATI x1200 from my current laptop pushes out 60fps (tops at 500 with vsync off) at 1024x600 maxed settings.

I would be looking at adding a decent GPU to mine these "bit-coins" people are talking about.

EDIT: Windows 7 would come from a college bookstore as I am in college now. :p
 
If you're doing a lot of encoding, I'd say that it was a good purchase after all. It's one of those things that actually takes advantage of multi core setups.
 
I think it's still a good buy though. I assembled the thing and fired it up and loaded Win7 on it.

When I render h.264 on it using all 6 cores I get 50-55fps and when I render on 5 threads I get a respectable 40-45fps on it. Haven't tried XVID yet, but I think it's going to be faster.

While rendering on 5 cores, I can place one core to running Warzone 2100 at 60FPS locked (no frame drops or anything) at 720p maxed out.

The board didn't have a PATA port, so I can't use my old Optical Drive, which means no DJMAX Trilogy yet. :confused: I really wanted to run that game at 1080p mode.


EDIT: After a few hours of fumbling around, I managed to install DJMAX Trilogy. It does not support resolutions higher than 720p (crashing) but 720p is better than the 1024x600 I used to run it at. The higher resolution makes it look very good, even at 720p. Framerate is still the same at my laptop though, and still has very rare framerate dips.

EDIT 2: Trying to encode 720p h.264. While it is much faster than my laptop, I noticed that it only uses the CPU halfway. Not a single core is maxed out, not even getting close to 80%. Most of the cores sit at 50% and 60% utilization. :confused: Maybe using three cores may be better?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top