Heya. I'm looking at setting up another system as a replacement for a laptop, as a temporary gaming solution as I don't have access to my main rig. The budget cannot exceed £370 The main things I will be playing on it are F2P games like Warframe, War Thunder, PlanetSide 2 and occasionally a bit of Fallout 3 (and modding). All at 1920x1080 I am looking at SCAN's "H81 VB10i" value system as the base ( http://www.scan.co.uk/value-hardware-bundles ), with the Intel Core i3 4130 Haswell CPU and 4GB of RAM, because it's cheap. This is to replace an i5 2410M CPU. As for GPUs, I am currently torn between two; the GTX 650 Ti Boost, and the R7 260X. From what I can see, the 650 Ti Boost is a touch faster, but also a touch more expensive. The GPU is to replace a GT 540M, so both of these are going to be faster Lastly, will this all fit nicely on a 430W Corsair CXM Builder series PSU? (Note: I have a case, HDD and OS already). Thanks =)
It will work on a 430 psu no matter what gpu you choose. 650 TI boost will likely last a little longer at the resolution but theres little difference between them. Id see if you can find reviews of the gpu in the games you are aiming to play. See if either card holds a significant advantage in those titles. the 650 boost is about as fast as a stock 660 for the record if your searching after benchmarks.
Not a huge AMD fan due to them being power hungry and hard to cool but for your budget and for games they are pretty good. Better than a dualie i3 anyways. Six cores, a propper GPU and a decent motherboard and PSU for £350? http://www.scan.co.uk/savedbasket/2de4ef1ff02344b88bcb1a2977c98b02
That's a pretty good build for the price... ... But the thing is with AMD CPUs; I'm a little concerned of the lower single-core performance vs current Intel chips. Most, if not all, of the games I want to play on this system are terrible at multi-threading - and I'm worried about being bottlenecked by that. About the GPUs, I am now leaning towards the 650 Ti Boost due to PhysX in Warframe and PlanetSide 2, but would it be worth seeing how Mantle / TrueAudio runs on the R7 260X in the future? Thanks for your replies
You have to remember the i3 does not boost, it is stuck at 3.4ghz forever. Cant overclock it either. The clock for clock performance of the FX isn't as good as the i3 but it makes a fair bit of ground up by the fact it will boost to over 4ghz in single threaded applications. If you pick up the haswell i3 bundle you also end up with a motherboard which won't let you overclock in future either. Very boring. I prefer Intel for high end but in the niche range of parts for a £400 budget the FX6300 is decent.
I'll let PCPer sum this one up for me tbh. http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Proces...cessor-Review-Vishera-Breaks-Cover/Conclusion So what do we actually get with this release? Well, it is a bittersweet release for AMD. The pricing on these parts is not only competitive, it undercuts Intel by a significant amount across the board. The 8350 is very competitive with the 3570K, and it can be had for $30 less. The 6300 will walk all over the Intel products that exist at the $132 price point, and in fact is more competitive in terms of performance with the $185 Intel products. Again, we get a nice $50 discount for essentially the same performance. In these cases though, expect the AMD CPU to consume more power. Would it be enough to make one nervous about energy bills? Not really.
Hi Starfall Check out this little system we do, If you upgrade the system to the latest AMD A10 6800K you will be pleasantly surprised as to how it performs, with windows 8.1 the A10 6800k is faster than the i5 4670K according to some of the latest Benchmark programs. We are checking on them in house just to make sure http://www.yoyotech.co.uk/warbird-se-mki
Hmm, I'd need a discrete GPU to be honest - something that is considerably faster than a GT 540M overclocked to 810 MHz core and 940 MHz memory. Whilst that is an awesome little system (and I like the idea of having it built & delivered) an APU isn't really what I'm looking at getting. But I'm gonna have a looksie on that site =) I'm leaning towards the i3 4130; due to the fact that I'm likely to drop a higher end intel in the system at a later date. I also have no interest in overclocking this system. I'm already aware of the performance of dual-core parts in the games I wish to play; since the laptop this is replacing is an i5 2410m dual-core part, the 4130 is the same but with higher IPC and clocks, right? Anyway I think I can stretch to a GTX 660... but is it worth getting a GTX 650 ti Boost and OCing it? To save myself a little bit of money =) Thank you very much for your replies!
you can overclock the 660 instead. System choice really depends on what you plan to do later. If you like AMDs chip line then going the AMD route makes sence, If you want a Intel Quad at a later date then going Intel makes sence. Either will work for gaming at this point in time, Who knows what the future will hold. But likely in the free to play market that your aiming for the games dont even use duel core in 90% of the cases. Planetside 2 is the only game you listed that actually uses more than 2 cores for the record. If you intended to get into Bf3 / bf4 crysis 3 ect those type of games then you would need a pretty decent spec quad intel or one of the fx chips mensioned.
