Hardware What Hardware Should I Buy? - May 2009

Pixmania is owned by Dixons, aka PCWORLD and Currys, apparently they are a bugger to deal with if anything goes wrong, are based in France (last time I checked) so delivery and returns could be a pain, but they are a "reputable" company, and it is a steal of a price.

Apparently ATI have dropped the price of most units by 10% which is slowly filtering through retail but that still seems like a good barging, being Dixons though I wouldn't be surprised if you got a 4950 or 4930 through the post when it arrives.

If true, why ATI is applying even more pressure on Nvidia is anyone’s guess, but maybe they trying to make up market share or just grab what ever buyers there are out there at the mo. Saw a GTX260 for £120 the other day so deals everywhere.

 

Bindibadgi - This is getting off topic so I'll just say this... I thought you wrote articles for EVERYONE no matter what level they were. I can see where we disagree as your comments are based in the knowledgeable, high end user area where your comments are of course, correct, even if it is not the best way to make new comers feel welcome. My opinion and comments have been based from an overall view. It would be intersting to see which product sell more from SCAN over the next few months. The budget gaming or the high end. I am absolutely certain that a decent GPU with 1GB of memory will be absolutely fine to play future games for the next several years unless you are an extremist where an overclocked i7, 24GB Ram and Tripple SLi isn't good enough.

I personally am happy with a 32'' TV. I do not NEED a 50''+ or even a 32''. I am also happy with a 22'' montior. I do not NEED a 24''+ monitor. To play current and most likely nearly all PC games in the next 2-3 years on my monitor with the settings maxed out I need a certain level of hardware but it is, and I believe will be far less than your comments have suggested.

A 2GB dual GPU card is not the standard and should not be taken as a current rule of thumb. Evidence has shown that most PC gamers are playing current games on 1280x1024 on older hardware. They are not the elite but they are the majority (and as they are PC GAMERS I do hope you write for them) and therefor to suggest that an excess of 4GB RAM is NEEDED is surely incorrect. Just to claify, There are scenarios that NEED as much RAM as possible but as a rule of thumb, it is not NEEDED (in general terms but even for gaming) yet.

 

Gigabyte GA-MA790X-UD4P for £95.

 

I understand where you're coming from, but bit-tech is written with the hardware enthusiast and hardcore gamer in mind - not every one of our readers has thousands of pounds to spend on a high-end system, but what we consider 'low-end' is pretty high end for the mainstream gamer. Let's just say mainstream gamers really don't want to know the difference between a stream processor and a ROP or the amount of L2 cache from the size of a CPU's registers.

Bit-tech has always had the mantra of 'written for enthusiasts, by enthusiasts' and that mantra has never changed, even though our audience has grown significantly since running the site became a full time job for us in 2005. Of course, the mainstream market is much bigger and there are be more sub-£399 PC sales in a month than there will be GeForce GTX 295s sold over its lifetime - there's no denying that - but we've chosen to focus ourselves on the more knowledgeable enthusiast market because that's where the passion is for us.

Our success has and always will be built on the fact that our articles are tailored for our audience... and, based on the vast amounts of money we've spent on conducting independent reader surveys, our audience is not made up of 'typical' PC gamers like the masses you'll find opting into the Steam Hardware Survey. But they do love playing with high-performance PC hardware and PC gaming just happens to be the main application for a high-end PC.

I have to say I hate talking about our readers in that way, because it feels like an us and them when bit-tech has always been quite the opposite - it's one big community here and the staff are not above that.

 

1280x1024 is 19inch monitor territory, you have 22", a lot of people are still using a 28 inch crt not 32" (LCD or otherwise) that you have and integrated graphics instead of discrete, I fail to see your point, the majority of people use lesser spec'ed kit, this site is for gamers... and this article is a buyers guide for pc enthusiasts looking to buy new kit/system. A recommendation on RAM seems to be in keeping with said topic?

RAM is very cheap right now and is something that has a real tangible effect and something you'll be thankful for when future applications (be they desktop or something online akin to flash or silverlight) require more resources, something that has very little reason to skimp on unless your on a very (very) tight budget.

I'd rather have 4GB ram over 2GB rather than a slight bump in CPU speed that could be had for the same price.

I don't think there is any need to muddy the waters with GPU memory and system RAM.
I also fail to see how a bit tech staff members opinion that says 4GB ram should be an aspiration minimum amount of system memory (£20 vs £38 for 2GB vs 4GB) some how alienates new members/lurkers?
But we can all have our opinions

Also you don't NEED anything but some food in your belly.

 

where is it available for 180quid?

 

snap

 

Tim S - Thank you for your response, it is much appreciated. I just found it disconcerting to read opinions and comments that seemed very narrow and almost oblivious to a much broader spectrum.

 

I'm confident that my £700 PC built last July could admirably hold its own against your Enthusiast Overclocker PC at the very least... And I'm proud of that.

 

Page 6 says:
"...Formula and 4GB of 1,066MHz DDR2 equates to about £360, while the AMD Phenom II X3 720 Black Edition, with MSI 790FX-GD70 and 4GB of 1,333MHz DDR3 is only £320. This is a £30 saving, but also at a loss..."

This 'Global Financial Crisis' must be pretty bad if £10 can disappear like that.

 

Excuse me being an idiot, but is there any chance that sound cards could get something like this at some point, or have I missed one or something?

 

In the monitor section I'm still missing an affordable 24"er...
You keep squeezing in full-hd 22" but at this resolution we're really in 24" country...

 

I changed the prices for stuff that was in stock, but forgot to change the saving amount!

 

pcbuyit.co.uk and quote their ebay price (ebay shop: xps bargains. only people that seem to be selling them on ebay)

 

No love for the P182 anymore?

And I wish we could get the HD4770 with the Dual slot cooler.

 

LOL What browser are you using there, Tim? I use Opera 9.64 here and with about 1200 tabs open (in about 50 browser's window; don't ask why XD) it only eats up about 2 GB.. With those 8 GB RAM, I would say I could easily open like... 3000 or even 5000 tabs? XD

I completely agree with you. A bigger RAM isn't always the best way. Actually IMO, it's a very bad way of thinking. If we keep thinking like that, we'll be faced with a more serious problems, where adding more RAM wouldn't improve anything because of the diminishing returns. If more and more peoples doesn't care about adding more RAM (because of it was cheap enough), then more and more developers will be too lazy to make their software more efficient (in terms of RAM usage). Then we will start seeing games or softwares who need a lot more RAM to run. I certainly wouldn't want it to happen.

 

I think the whole thing with more ram, more ram, stems from the disk caching problem of HDD with platters being a huge speed bump. Things might change once SSDs are mainstream and we can get uptra fast data transfer. But then again, to quote Spinal Tap "ours go to 11."

 

My choise is Gaming Workhorse, but I would rather build it around Intel CPU. As this is all about graphics card, I wonder what CPU would be enough for it (won't create a bottleneck). As in April's guide you've chose the Q6600 and changed to 940 BE in may, I think if I chose C2D E8500 (what costs around the same as Q6600) and put it into Biostar TP45-HP and OC'd, it would be perfect rig.

 

A high clocked dual core isn't always the better choice we've since found out: http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/cpus/2009/05/11/overclocking-amd-s-phenom-ii-x3-720-be/6

We'll be changing the enthusiast overclocker for next month I think.

 

There is still 2-3 weeks when I'll start buying parts. And as much as I would love to have more than 2 cores, something in me doesn't want go AMD. Now I'm considering something from Intel's Q9xx series, but then again if I go AMD and get DDR3, It won't take me much to get awsome Core i7. I can always strech my budget.