Motherboards H77 or B75 for an online occasional gamer?

I'm building a new PC for my mother-in-law.

She plays facebook games, but also Everquest and Lord of the Rings online.
Would a B75 motherboard be suitable, or should I get her a H77?
There won't be any overclocking.

She has an ATI Radeon HD 5450 in her current PC I plan to reuse, and I'm going to get a Core i5 3330 chip and 8Gb RAM.

Thanks

 

The AMD A-series would probably be better suited tbh, the on-board GPU even on the low-end chips would be superior to the 5450

 

Thanks for the reply.
I know very little about AMD - all my recent builds have been Intel.
Can you point me in the direction of some good info about these chips, please?

 

bit-tech review of the 6800K

HeXus review of the 6700

Motherboard wise they're all pretty similar, but you're better off with one of the A75/A85 boards like this one, The A55 ones are perfectly functional but they're a bit limited

 

Lets just stop for a moment and realize what he wrote in the second sentence...

Your mother-in-law plays Everquest and LOTR online?

 

Thanks for those, that helped.
Having read a little about EQ and LotRO (not being a player myself) the consensus seems to be that they tend to rely more on processor power than graphics, so I think Intel is probably a better bet for this build.

So, I think it's back to my original question - B75 or H77?


Sheiken - yep she does the main reason for the new pc is the lack of speed in those games.

 

Not necessarily, for single core the i3 will be better, for multithreaded stuff the 6800k will be better. Though overall the performance is pretty similar between the 6800k and the 3220

Another thing to consider should you go for the AMD, the onboard gpu benefits greatly from quick ram, the quicker the better.

EDIT: just noticed you said the i5 3330, *not* the i3 3220... of the two personally i'd go for the i3, the speed difference betwen the two is negligible, certainly not worth the extra ~£50 [imo]..

 

I'd go AMD too. As above, the integrated GPU will easily outperform the 5450, and you're certainly not going to have performance issues with those games with the CPU. The boards are pretty cheap, and the newer chipsets (A75/A85X) have USB 3/SATA 3.

I'd get the 5800K though. It's about £20 cheaper and performs almost as well, and still has Sim City included from some places.

 

Ok, AMD seems to be something to consider.
Which route is likely to last longer before an upgrade is needed?

My mother in law is also a keen photographer and often makes CD slideshows of her snaps, and she has a HD camcorder as well so will do some small amount of video editing.

Will that effect my CPU choice at all?

Thanks,
Janine

 

Don't worry about performance. Any current quad core CPU is really fast, no matter what differences the benchmarks show.

 

IIRC you can Crossfire X the onboard GPU with a stand alone GPU. Not that you'd want to right now, given the mess AMD's drivers are in, but it may be worth thinking about in the future (they reakon they're going to release a driver that fixes it in late July).

For any video editing core count is important. I use Virtualdub a lot and it likes as many cores as you can feed it.

 

This ^^

The question is: whether you'll think she will care more about graphics performance in her games than waiting a little longer for a video to render? Since she uses a 5450 now a GPU upgrade might be a very nice surprise. Unless she is the impatient type..? Or does she expect rendering to take a few minutes anyway?

 

Well, she wants the upgrade because of the lag she gets in games - often when entering a busy area it takes several minutes to load in everything. I'm not sure if that's graphics, processor or disk drive.

She didn't mention photos or videos beyond wanting a DVD-RW so she can send photo DVD's to her mum.

 

Loading times are a joint effort between the cpu and the disk. An ssd will absolutely decimate loading times, if you can stretch to it, but if not the cpu upgrade (any of the cpu upgrades outlined above) will still improve them a lot. Prioritize the cpu, because it'll affect overall performance ingame and in all other daily usage too.

LOTRO might struggle a bit on these integrated solutions, but if and when she complains about the framerate, stick a £50 graphics card in there and it'll be fine; that can be done anytime, so lowest priority.

 

I don't have it, but it should be fine on the APU. With fast memory it performs about the same as a current £50 card. It'd vastly outperform the 5450 currently used.

 

Thanks for the advice.

As she was complaining about the loading times, rather than the framerate, I think it might be better to go for the more capable CPU and use the current 5450 card for now.

I'll also see if the budget will stretch to an SSD for the OS/programs.
They have a couple of smallish HDD's I can use for storage.

I'm looking for a system that will hopefully last a few years with minimal upgrades, so an i3/5 is probably a better bet as they appear to outperform the AMDs in everything except graphics.

Is there a 'best bang for buck' comparison of recent CPU's anywhere?

Thanks,
Janine

(On a separate note, I'm not getting any notification emails from this thread, despite being subscribed to it. Any ideas why? Email address is correct, and they're not going to a junk folder.)

 

I have a 3220 coupled with a B75 board and it is fine with the games I play.
However, I do game with a GTX 670...which helps out a little.

 

Anandtech Bench + Amazon prices (usually the lowest) is how I do all my bang-for-buck comparisons. Pick the test/score most relevant to your usage \o/