Hardware PC Hardware Buyer's Guide September 2011

Can we get a ban on the whining that AMD products aren't on the expertly and thoroughly tested buyers guide by Bit-Tech?

It's getting boring now!

 

The new budget Fractal Design core cases have been out for a couple of weeks now. Are we going to see them reviewed?

 

price of all rounder has gone a bit high. £3-400 is more like most peoples budgets in this market.

£2100 for a pc at premium player is beyound what id consider premium its more like money no object, And unless your running 3 screen gaming ( in which case the pc would cost around £3000 ) its totally overkill for every gamer on the market.

re bsod issue in the ssds they have been fixed now in latest firmware.

Judging by the release of this bulldozer must perform pretty badly as its less than a week away acording to most sources so is this bit tech jumping the gun or have you actually got the performance stats that show it is not a great success.

or is it just hugely overpriced for the performance it offers which would be a huge shock.

 

If one of the Intel rigs were to disappear in favour of a Bulldozer rig:

1 - We could reasonably interpret performance based on what it does and doesn't replace, which would probably be cutting any NDA quite finely
2 - There's no actual retail price for them yet (merely the occasional RRP), so it's tough to tell where retailers will price them.
3 - You can't get hold of them yet. B-T never retroactively updates its guides, and doesn't include future purchases that may or may not be in the lab. Read the reviews once they land, and see what the conclusion says.

My honest-to-goodness guess is AMD are banking on the strength of the integrated GPU to sell millions of low-end processors, but that won't quite cut it against the top-end that Intel has to offer. And with a discrete GPU in every machine here, the possibility of a replacement coming in is slim.

 

Given that we don't know how bulldozer will perform we'd be nuts to recommend people buy inferior kit now in preparation for it.

We realize the PSU in the Affordable All-Rounder is a little on the dear side which is why we recommend some cheaper alternatives if you want to reduce the cost of the build. There is a sentence specifically addressing this issue with recommendations on how to get around it.

We talk about the Bulldozer launch and whether we have any review samples in the Podcast we just recorded today. If you want to know more about potential Bulldozer performance i'd suggest you give it a listen - it should be up in the next few days, probably at the start of next week.

 

only real gripe i had was the 590 recommendation. and the psu's on a couple of builds...but hey, they are owned by a publishing company and, well, you can see where the advertising dollars are coming from...don't get me wrong....completely agree on the intel chips...but the gpu recommendations are a little puzzling. but i am basing this off of US prices, so....

 

Thanks for the guides, I will probably get the enthusiast one soon, but with a 6950 and fractal design instead

 

re:read what i originally said again instead of just ripping into AMD (seems to be a trend on this site)

The phenom 840, in many reviews, scores as well performance-wise as the core i3 2100. Please explain how that is inferior?

 

would this not be a better option for the premium player PSU:

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/850w...-gold-sli-crossfire-eps-12v-quiet-fan-atx-v23 ?

That build shouldn't need more than 850w.

 

Sounds suggestive ;P

 

what do you guys think the minimum power supply for SLI gtx560 ti oc (msi twin frozr II)?

 

Yes it could possibly be, but as we haven't reviewed it we cant recommend it. We can only recommend thing we know are great.

This is true but as the i3-2100 is at the very bottom of Intel's range and the Phenom II X4 840 is more towards the middle of AMD's range we'd suggest that getting an LGA1155 mobo is a better bet - the best CPU an AM3 board can take currently is a Phenom II X6 1100T whereas a LGA1155 board would be able to take a i7-2600K. This, we think, means that the upgrade path for LGA1155 is way more compelling - buying a board now gives you the potential to upgrade to some stonking processors in the future.

 

Also, in many instances a radeon 6950 is as fast as a 570, yet ~50 £ cheaper... more value right there. Therefore, 2x6950 is much cheaper than a 590, yet as fast or faster.

of course, the 560 vs 6950 is an excellent question indeed, and i guess it boils down to a person's wallet - the 560 is some 30£ or so cheaper than the 1GB 6950, yet the 6950 is faster, and you can maybe unlock it into a 6970 (i'm not sure if that is doable with the 1GB version though).

Is it just me who simply sees better value in AMD-s offerings? Not to mention they are more friendly on the power bill...

 

ok will this stop? its just getting annoying.

 

Do you not read bit tech reviews or something? In nearly every game, resolution and setting the 560Ti beats the 6950 1GB. And no, unlocking is impossible on the 1GB version of the 6950. It's next to impossible now on the 2GB version.

The 6950 again, gets beaten by the GTX 570. So how in the hell does 2 6950s beat what is essentially 2 GTX 580s?!?!?!? So yeah, 590 is more expensive, but would outperform 2 6950s with ease.

Sick of people complaining about bit-tech reviews and recommendations. Their monitor reviews are a bit naff but they're working on them. But other than that their reviews and thus their recommendations are nearly always dead on the mark.

 

A "little on the dear side"

The whole point of the affordable all rounder is that it is affordable. Having a PSU that is not only expensive for what it is (as I say the Corsair TXv2 650w is £10 cheaper), but also expensive considering the overall build cost (15% of the overall total) just doesn't make sense.

Replace the expensive PSU with one of the cheaper suggestions and leave it as a suggestion instead.

 

HD69xx series scales better than the GTX5xx series. It really is that simple. The GTX590 is also significantly castrated when it comes to clock speeds hence why 2 HD6950's can happily keep up or beat it depending on the game and / or resolution.

Bit's reviews have a lot of room for improvement, but overall they are pretty good.

 

Bit-tech's review shows the GTX 590 beating the 6990 quite a lot. 2 6950s are less than 1 6990. So how does this equate to beating the GTX 590?

 

no offence to anyone here, but this is the only site i have seen that places the 590 above the 6990 in flat-out performance. the 590 is the better card overall when thermals noise and size are factored in. but the 6990 is the faster card

 

thing is.. nvidia has no chance to do this



that's a single 6970, the 580 doesn't break 37-38k passphrases/sec in pyrit.. I don't know how you can label a card better when it's 2-3x as slow in raw speed (alu performance) and in cases like bitcoin-

http://www.backtrack-linux.org/forums/beginners-forum/38193-latest-gpu-cracking.html

pretty much explains the mentality of people who buy nvidia nowdays for crunching rigs.. or they are strait gaming or look at huang as some sort of rockstar with flashbacks to 680i + 8800gtx

AMD Radeon HD 6990 = 2550 billion 32-bit instruction per second
Nvidia GTX 590 = 1243 billion 32-bit instruction per second

and don't get me started on folding