Who do you trust for your Gaming PC/Graphic Card reviews?
- Thread starter ROII4Me
- Start date
I build and rebuild for me and others. So I focus on tech reviews for each part. Tom's is one good source, and so are many of the others mentioned. But one good place that many overlook is Newegg customer reviews. Most of the the folks who post there are builders with a fair amount of experience. A few are drama kids. You learn to sort one from another. Then I look for chronic or repetitive problem patterns, if any, for my chosen product. It's not a bad tool.
I trust my own results, i get to work with both AMD and Nvidia cards on daily basis
But work aside - i always trusted tomshardware... Also check out sites like http://www.newegg.com/ and see what people say about cards. Because not always do the review sites talk about the noise level, or how they got the defective one,
I personally became rather a brandwhore, video cards i trust are EVGA (anything ending in -AR is lifetime warranty). I prefer NVidia, they are bit more expensive, but imo worth the extra moneys. That doesnt mean AMD is bad, there are some AMD cards out there that are better for the money.
When picking a card, i dont always go for the most top one (like i did this time around) often times it makes sense to pick 'fused-off' version (the very next down line) because it'll be 85% of original performance for about 70% of cost (generally)
If you got any questions, feel free to shoot me PM, i'll try to help out any way i can
Yep.
As much as I am reluctant to admit it, Intel's latest are definitely the way to go in this game.
Personally I am going to stick it out with AMD, as I can not stand giving my money to Intel. They are a bad company that make anti-competitive behavior part of their regular business practices.
One thing I will say though is looking at the hard drive interface speed (SATA= 1.5GB/s, SATA II = 3GB/s, SATA III = 6GB/s) is not the best way to do things. The reason for this is that these interface speeds are so much faster than the drive itself (good harddrives usually peak at 120MB/s) that it is pointless. If you are considering hard drives, it is usually better to look at rated seek speeds (in ms) and sustained transfer rates (in MB/s).
If you really want to load maps fast, the best way to do this is with a Solid State Drive (or SSD). It's essentially a really large very fast USB stick that replaces your harddrive. Since there are no mechanical parts, things tend to load VERY fast. They are expensive though, so most people buy a small one for their boot drive (OS&programs) and use a traditional separate hard drive for their files.
It's not a theory, it's a fact.
and I'm a big HardOCP fan.
Excellent
I look forward to this!You can get a 60-80Gig SSD for 80 bucks on newegg, and install your OS, and few of the MOST demanding programs, and spend rest of money on a huge 7200rpm drive. That will be best price for performance, solution
Wait, go back a step, how is Intel a bad company with "anti-competitive behavior part of their regular business practices."?!
AMD and Intel are covering two different segments of same field, are you going to say that Mercedes is a company that is making anti-competitive practice, compared to say Hyndai?
AMD provides you with a cheaper alternative, for less power; Intel poses itself in a premium market, and you pay premium for a better product...
And right after stating that, you go off and talk about technology creates by Intel, the SSD's... Example of anti-competitive practice? Created by them, and few years later the prices on SSD's are down SIGNIFICANTLY, because of competitive practices all around.
Wait, go back a step, how is Intel a bad company with "anti-competitive behavior part of their regular business practices."?!
AMD and Intel are covering two different segments of same field, are you going to say that Mercedes is a company that is making anti-competitive practice, compared to say Hyndai?
AMD provides you with a cheaper alternative, for less power; Intel poses itself in a premium market, and you pay premium for a better product...
And right after stating that, you go off and talk about technology creates by Intel, the SSD's... Example of anti-competitive practice? Created by them, and few years later the prices on SSD's are down SIGNIFICANTLY, because of competitive practices all around.
yes true - but hardly anyone has them yet.
I get my first choice of weapons/class every time right now with my 6gbs hard drive and I'm keeping the system under $980.
Edit: later on you may need a SSD to get first choice.
You should stop using this phrase as it only makes you look like you have no idea what you are talking about.
There is no such thing as a 6Gbps harddrive. That is only the speed of the SATA interface. You could have a 3GBPS or 1.5GBPS SATA interface and that harddrive in your machine would - for the most part - be just as fast. You get nowhere even near saturating 6, 3 or 1.5GBPS. Your hard drive probably operates at closer to 0.12GBPS.
It's like taking a really tiny hose and squirting it through a massive pipeline, and saying "well my pipeline can transmit 6000 liters per second of fluid. It doesn't matter, cause your tiny hose is still the limiting factor.
What's more important is the spindle speed (probably either 7200rpm or a green variable speed drive in your case), your seek time (9ms?) and your sustained transfer speed (~120+MB/s?)
SSD's are also not that rare these days. Most people who build their own computers and down't rely on store bought crap are getting them now.
1.) In the late 90s through approximately 2006, when AMD was competitive with Intel for the first time in history from a performance perspective with their Athlon CPU's against Intel's Pentium III's and Pentium 4's, Intel feared losing market share, so they went out and bribed all the major OEM PC manufacturers NOT to use AMD chips in their products.
This severely limited AMD's capacity to sell their shiny new CPU's and in turn limited the revenue they could spend on R&D, which is one of the reasons AMD has once again fallen behind in performance to Intel. They used illegal and unethical methods to maintain their market leadership, and it worked for them, as they knew they had a lot to lose if AMD could continue to keep up the competition.
2.) Intel has a separate business unit to their CPU business that releases and maintains the Intel Compiler, one of the most highly regarded compilers used in the industry. (compilers turn raw high level code into executable files) A few years back, the compiler was disassembled, and it was found that Intel intentionally looks for the CPU identification strings "GenuineIntel" and "AuthenticAMD". When it encounters "AuthenticAMD" it intentionally sabotages the code to make it slower than on Intel CPU's, thus utilizing it's dominance in one market to sabotage competitors and sup[port its dominance in another. A classic example of Anti-Competitive behavior that is illegal.
These are only the biggest ones. There are many many documented examples of unethical behavior by Intel, and because of this I refuse to give them any of my money.
Uhh, Intel did not invent the SSD nor create its technology, or the underlying Flash RAM it relies on. These technologies were first developed in research labs in the 1950's under the term "magnetic core memory" and CCROS but srum storage units turned out to be much more cost effective, so the technology was never used.
In the 1970's supercomputers used by IBM, Amdahls and Cray among others used early SSD's for disk intensive applications. Even then it was still to expensive and was discontinued.
The first more mainstream desktop/server SSD's showed up in 2007, launched by Mtron and Memoright.
Intel was kind of a follower on the SSD front.
If you are interested, feel free to read up here.
You should stop using this phrase as it only makes you look like you have no idea what you are talking about.
laughed - yes sure - the points are true
When I had it built - the invoice said > "2TB SATA-III 6.0Gb/s 64MB Cache 7200RPM HDD (Single Hard Drive) " so If you have that one you'll still currently get first choice loadouts like I do
*someday but not now you'll have to go SSD to get 1st choice
Intel got the greatest now,If I'm on your place and want to upgrade I would of go with i5-2500K,GTX 570,8GB ram,z68 mobo chipset for possibility of Ivy bridge upgrade, and get urself the XSPC 360 liquid cooler if you want to go for some OCing later on down the road.
New Bulldozer is nice and will give you minus 1-2 FPS in most games which are asking for not more than 4 cores than the I5-2500K,but the only game it can do better is BF3 and only by plus 1-2 FPS.
In my eyes I5-2500K FTW,its like the smaller brother of I7-2600K but that hits the gym every day and can take down on its bigger brother out of nowhere in any given time or situation
I love AMD,but Bulldozer price/performance/power efficience is not in the ballpark of the I5-2500K.
If you can waith till mid 2012 Ivy Bridge is coming out and piledriver too,2012 should be the year when Intel and AMD trully cross swords and we see if that FX logo means something then.
Best of luck whatever you choose and enjoy it no matter what.
BTW if money are tight,I would go 990FX chipset mobo(future upgradability),1090T OC at 4.0Ghz,ATI 6970 XFX (they still have the stock board)
Look at my system specs I sometimes hit 100FPS,but when things goes bad which it happens to even people with i7-2600K or I-990X + 580 SLI's and what not else,they experience the same thing I do,FPS drop aftyer 15 min of gameplay....
New Bulldozer is nice and will give you minus 1-2 FPS in most games which are asking for not more than 4 cores than the I5-2500K,but the only game it can do better is BF3 and only by plus 1-2 FPS.
In my eyes I5-2500K FTW,its like the smaller brother of I7-2600K but that hits the gym every day and can take down on its bigger brother out of nowhere in any given time or situation
I love AMD,but Bulldozer price/performance/power efficience is not in the ballpark of the I5-2500K.
If you can waith till mid 2012 Ivy Bridge is coming out and piledriver too,2012 should be the year when Intel and AMD trully cross swords and we see if that FX logo means something then.
Best of luck whatever you choose and enjoy it no matter what.
BTW if money are tight,I would go 990FX chipset mobo(future upgradability),1090T OC at 4.0Ghz,ATI 6970 XFX (they still have the stock board
)Look at my system specs I sometimes hit 100FPS,but when things goes bad which it happens to even people with i7-2600K or I-990X + 580 SLI's and what not else,they experience the same thing I do,FPS drop aftyer 15 min of gameplay....
Ahh, is it a Western Digital?
I have those drives in my storage server. 2x 3TB drives, 3x 2TB drives and one old 1TB drive.
I just re-read my post, and noticed it didn't really come across as it sounded in my head. I apologize if I came across as a little harsh. That was not intended
Or today, if you play on a server with me, or a good portion of the people over on the hardforums.
Ahh, is it a Western Digital?
I have those drives in my storage server. 2x 3TB drives, 3x 2TB drives and one old 1TB drive.
I just re-read my post, and noticed it didn't really come across as it sounded in my head. I apologize if I came across as a little harsh. That was not intended
Or today, if you play on a server with me, or a good portion of the people over on the hardforums.
I hate to admit this,but I have RO2 on my 60gb SSD from kingston,no its not Sata 3 but its Sata 2 due to the fact that I'm running my setup on ASUS Crossfire 3 mobo and only has sata 2 on it.....
My other slave drive is WD Caviar Black 500GB,and maeby I get in the game 1-2 sec at the most faster with the SSD,not really that fast comparing price/performance/available storage.......
Caviar Black is a monster,but peeps are splitting hairs over 1-2 sec that really dont matter at all,although i got my 60GB pretty cheap brand new from Ebay for $65 + free shipping,this puppy in the days when it came out was like adding fuel to the fire at $300+!!!!!! No way Jose!!!!
no prob - I laughed - you know what I meant -
I can't remember brand but 64mb cache SATA III in i5 system - is much faster than 32 mb cache SATA II in 1090T system
I can't remember brand but 64mb cache SATA III in i5 system - is much faster than 32 mb cache SATA II in 1090T system
Re:1. From what i understand, it wasn't so much "bribing OEM's" as it was giving them discount for using Intel parts, providing incentive as such. In my eyes, it's not bribing... it's driving the prices down. In the end of the day, OEM can take bigger cut for themselves, or pass the 'savings' down to end customer. And that's exactly what happened. Did you by chance notice how the prices for computer ultimately went down during exactly same time? I agree, from standpoint of business morals, it was probably a messed up approach, since AMD at the time was a new player, and trying to get into the business, and couldn't afford to drive it's prices (as incentive) down as much, due to their cash-flow restrictions. And if i'm not mistaken, Intel has paid dearly for it, something on the order of multiple billions (at convenient [hard] times for AMD too
)2. Ah, the same way as most of the video games do it to Intel? Ever bothered checking code for game engines vs. the graphics ID's... Most of them, until literally last two years would say no to Intel graphics... Granted, i dont think that we could call "graphics" anything that the company created before their Sandy Bridge, but still... commonly used practice, doesnt surprise me. And it's fairly easy to bypass it... So this one is kinda meh, as far as i'm concerned
As for hard drives:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...=100007603 600003340&IsNodeId=1&name=7200 RPM
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Thank you Mr.Obvious,you will enter a server 1 - 1,1/2 sec before me,oh and BTW when loading map your I5 has nothing to do with your enetering faster or loading the map faster.
Want me to show you benchmarks where the 1090T surpasses the I5-2500K??? talking of single threaded benchmarks(games) and multithreaded too. I saw bunch of them where they were pinning down the Bulldozer vs the 2600K,2500K and the 1100T(my bad not the 1090T...same $hit BTW)
Lemme know I'll post them for ya,so that you can see that 1100/1090T got the 2500K by the neck. Mein runs at 4.0Ghz and if you have your 2500K at stock speeds its more like your holding me by my neck...BTW congrats on the 1 second faster entering a server and grabbing the Mkb,I'll stick to my Bolt or MG.
And if i'm not mistaken, Intel has paid dearly for it, something on the order of multiple billions (at convenient [hard] times for AMD too
Yeah, as I remember they settled for $1.25B out of court in 2009. Analysts speculated AMD did it out of desperation to get cash in the door. The predicted settlement if it had gone to court was expected to bemore than 10 times as much, spread out over a few years.
*found it*
I usually just read several websites such as guru3d, hardware.info, toms hardware, tweakers.net user reviews, anandtech and overclockersclub. Take the estimated average of all those reviews and to top it off I also watch youtube reviews(that can actually show me proof) and read some forums here and there.
In the end, putting your money into hardware based on just one or 2 sources is far from accurate. By using loads of sources, you ensure that any weird differences between the reviews become apparant and give the information you need to research the subject some more.
In the end, putting your money into hardware based on just one or 2 sources is far from accurate. By using loads of sources, you ensure that any weird differences between the reviews become apparant and give the information you need to research the subject some more.