Recommend Thanas a PC

[Thanas]

Alright.

I've got to upgrade either my PC(7yo) or my notebook (4yo). I've decided to limit myself to around 700-800 EUR. I mainly use it for office work, watching DVDs and gaming (in that order). It should be able to run current games, though not necessarily at the highest detail level.


I've looked around myself but to be honest, the sheer number of different versions of GPUs and CPUs is starting to confuse me, especially since I suspect that a large number of them are labeled that way for marketing reasons.

So basically, what would you recommend as the basic specifics for a PC and/or Notebook in that pricerange?

Does not have to be a full recommendation like "you need to get Dell Model NR. X" or so (though that would be nice), rather I am looking for features the hardware should at least have (e.g.: you should at least get a XXX as a GPU).

[General Zod]

With their latest marketing shenanigans, I'd suggest at least avoiding machines with Intel processors and get an AMD system. You'll probably be able to get better value for your money at any rate.

[Joviwan]

That's what, about a grand in USD?

Things I suggest you look out for:
-Intel Core i3 or i5. These are 'budget' versions of Intel's current high performance poster processor, and generally provide very good punch for the price. Commonly found in laptops these days. Lean toward the i3 if power consumption is something you're concerned about.

-ATI video cards. ATI's cards have been nudging ahead of nVidia for a few generations now, in terms of price for performance, and power consumption. I think someone else said their new generation of cards comes out in a few weeks, so it might be worth waiting for that to hit to see if prices come down on the very adequate 5XXX series of Radeon cards. You want a video card with at least a gig of memory, and those are fairly common. I use a Sapphire brand ATI radeon 5770 at home, and I haven't encountered anything it can't chew up and spit out.

-DDR3 memory. Any system that runs an i3/5/7 series processor uses this already, but you're going to want at least 3 or 4 gigs of it. Any statistic other than brand doesn't really matter for you. Someone else might be able to tell you what current brands are more reliable, but I'm not too educated on that myself.


It should be ridiculously easy to find a computer that does all you need at your price point, as a desktop OR a laptop, though I admit I'm unfamiliar with the european market.


EDIT: I can't see that link at work, Zod. What's with their shenanigans?

[General Zod]

EDIT: I can't see that link at work, Zod. What's with their shenanigans?

Hold onto your hyperthreaded horses, because this is liable to whip up an angry mob -- Intel's asking customers to pay extra if they want the full power of their store-bought silicon. An eagle-eyed Engadget reader was surfing the Best Buy shelves when he noticed this $50 card -- and sure enough, Intel websites confirm -- that lets you download software to unlock extra threads and cache on the new Pentium G6951 processor. Hardware.info got their hands on an early sample of the chip and discovered it's actually a full 1MB of L3 cache that's enabled plus HyperThreading support, which translates to a modest but noticeable upgrade. This isn't exactly an unprecedented move, as chip companies routinely sell hardware-locked chips all the time in a process known as binning, but there they have a simpler excuse -- binned chips are typically sold with cores or cache locked because that part of their silicon turned out defective after printing. This new idea is more akin to video games that let you "download" extra weapons and features, when those features were on the disc all along. Still, it's an intriguing business model, and before you unleash your rage in comments, you should know that Intel's just testing it out on this low-end processor in a few select markets for now.

Essentially they want to charge you to be able to unlock stuff your processor can already do while pretending they're selling you an "upgrade".

[Ace Pace]

EDIT: I can't see that link at work, Zod. What's with their shenanigans?

Hold onto your hyperthreaded horses, because this is liable to whip up an angry mob -- Intel's asking customers to pay extra if they want the full power of their store-bought silicon. An eagle-eyed Engadget reader was surfing the Best Buy shelves when he noticed this $50 card -- and sure enough, Intel websites confirm -- that lets you download software to unlock extra threads and cache on the new Pentium G6951 processor. Hardware.info got their hands on an early sample of the chip and discovered it's actually a full 1MB of L3 cache that's enabled plus HyperThreading support, which translates to a modest but noticeable upgrade. This isn't exactly an unprecedented move, as chip companies routinely sell hardware-locked chips all the time in a process known as binning, but there they have a simpler excuse -- binned chips are typically sold with cores or cache locked because that part of their silicon turned out defective after printing. This new idea is more akin to video games that let you "download" extra weapons and features, when those features were on the disc all along. Still, it's an intriguing business model, and before you unleash your rage in comments, you should know that Intel's just testing it out on this low-end processor in a few select markets for now.

Essentially they want to charge you to be able to unlock stuff your processor can already do while pretending they're selling you an "upgrade".

So? You're not automatically deserving of a higher preforming device then you pay for.


For Thanas. I mostly agree with what Joviwan said, with an additional recommendation that you start from what monitor you work with and work backwards from there. What this means is if you do all your work on a 19 inch screen, a high end GPU is wasted money as such a small (for these days) resolution won't even make it turn up.

[Thanas]

Alright, I got a few offers after looking around:


Offer 1, for a 17" notebook:

AMD Phenom II X4 N930, 2GHz,
4GB RAM,
320GB HDD,
ATI HD 5650

Price range 700€

Desktop PCs, same pricerange of 700€

Intel Core i5 650 3.2GHz
6GB RAM
1TB HDD
ATI HD5570

INTEL CORE "i5 760" 4x2,80GHZ
4,00GB DDR-3 RAM PC1600
1TB HDD SATA-2
NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 460

AMD PHENOM 965 4x3,40 Ghz
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 DDR5 1024MB
1TB HDD SATA-2
4,00GB DDR-3 RAM PC1600

Intel Core i7 870 4x2,93MHz
4GB DDR3 PC1600
ATI RADEON HD5770 1GB
500GB HDD SATA

AMD 6 CORE PHENOM 6x2,80 Ghz
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 DDR5
1 TB HDD
4,00 GB DDR-3 RAM PC1333

[Joviwan]

Alright, I got a few offers after looking around:


Offer 1, for a 17" notebook:

AMD Phenom II X4 N930, 2GHz,
4GB RAM,
320GB HDD,
ATI HD 5650

Price range 700€

For a laptop? Not a bad deal. Fairly swanky, all things considered.

Desktop PCs, same pricerange of 700€

Intel Core i5 650 3.2GHz
6GB RAM
1TB HDD
ATI HD5570

Intel Core i7 870 4x2,93MHz
4GB DDR3 PC1600
ATI RADEON HD5770 1GB
500GB HDD SATA

These two stand out from the rest. Especially the i7. For approx. 700 euros, that's not a bad little box. You may or may not notice/care about the processing difference between the i5 and the i7 (I haven't personally played with that generation of processors yet), which might make the 6 gigs of RAM and terabyte drive look tastier, but I don't know your storage habits.

I'd choose the i7 desktop over the i5 or the laptop. I am not knowledgable enough about the AMD examples to give you sound advice regarding them.

[Ace Pace]

INTEL CORE "i5 760" 4x2,80GHZ
4,00GB DDR-3 RAM PC1600
1TB HDD SATA-2
NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 460

This would be my preferred option. Good balance of power, noise (asumming a decent brand of GPU and case).

[Thanas]

Anything I should look out for on the laptop? Especially the 2 GHZ AMD Phenom II X4 N930 - how does it rate?

[Ace Pace]

Joviwan, while stronger, I'd avoid the the i7. Thanas is unlikely to use it's capabilities (which mostly end up being HT and faster RAM, both useless to Thanas) and it comes with less storage, which is likely to matter more to Thanas.

[Starglider]

Obviously you must buy an AMD machine because their processors are made in Germany (specifically, Dresden).

[Ryan Thunder]

Anything I should look out for on the laptop? Especially the 2 GHZ AMD Phenom II X4 N930 - how does it rate?

2GHz isn't really good enough for modern games, I find, even if the GPU is adequate.

[Joviwan]

Joviwan, while stronger, I'd avoid the the i7. Thanas is unlikely to use it's capabilities (which mostly end up being HT and faster RAM, both useless to Thanas) and it comes with less storage, which is likely to matter more to Thanas.

I started leaning in that direction myself after some consideration, for those exact reasons. The i7 part sure does look delicious, but yeah, Thanas isn't going to notice that. The storage space and extra RAM are more likely to be used and appreciated.

[Ace Pace]

Anything I should look out for on the laptop? Especially the 2 GHZ AMD Phenom II X4 N930 - how does it rate?

2GHz isn't really good enough for modern games, I find, even if the GPU is adequate.

Enough of talking about fucking Mhz as if they mean anything except in the context of that specific architecture. Got benchmarks?

[Thanas]

Joviwan, while stronger, I'd avoid the the i7. Thanas is unlikely to use it's capabilities (which mostly end up being HT and faster RAM, both useless to Thanas) and it comes with less storage, which is likely to matter more to Thanas.

I started leaning in that direction myself after some consideration, for those exact reasons. The i7 part sure does look delicious, but yeah, Thanas isn't going to notice that. The storage space and extra RAM are more likely to be used and appreciated.

Why are the advantages of the i7 useless to me? Is it only marginally better?

The storage and the 4 GB part are not that important to me, I got a 1.5 TB external HDD already and RAM is cheap enough.

[Lonestar]

I feel that this computer is the level of class that Thanas deserves as an academic.

[Ace Pace]

Why are the advantages of the i7 useless to me? Is it only marginally better?

The storage and the 4 GB part are not that important to me, I got a 1.5 TB external HDD already and RAM is cheap enough.

Marginally better sums it up. Some of the advantages of the i7 are triple-channel memory, which gives close to 5-10% performance improvement in some scenarios. Most of the time, the i5 is near equal.

Looking at technical specs for the i7-870 and the i5-650 we see the differences (besides speed) come out to be cache size (8MB vs 4MB), power consumption (the i5 is 20W less, if power draw matters in Germany) and that the i5 comes with integrated graphics, which is useless to you. The i5-760 that I recommended equalizes the cache size, turns 4 logical cores into 4 physical cores (reducing the chance of performance mysteriously dropping but other than that, useless), removes some useless features you don't care about (no VT instructions, no AES instructions) and drops the useless HD graphics.

I'll dig up some benchmarks and see if I can show a performance difference.

EDIT: i7-870 vs. i5-760. From a quick look at the gaming section, the i7 is marginally ahead by a few percent. The rest of the stats there either show a tiny difference, or edge scenarios that you did not list as your hobbies (archival, movie editing).

[Thanas]

*rant*

Why the heck does it seem like every laptop on the market comes with this glaring display? I do not need a mirror, thank you very much.

*end rant*



Ace, have you had experiences with the Phenom?

[Ace Pace]

Experience? No. Especially not with a notebook Phenom.

EDIT: Buy AMD, support your high tech fabs! Depending on your worldview, this arguably is a good enough reason considering both will provide better than decent performance.

[Uraniun235]

*rant*

Why the heck does it seem like every laptop on the market comes with this glaring display? I do not need a mirror, thank you very much.

*end rant*

They're typically referred to as "glossy" displays over here - contrast with "matte" displays, which aren't quite as clear and bright but are far less reflective. Basically it comes down to lowest-common-denominator marketing, and a lot of people find glossy displays much more striking and impressive than matte displays.

I definitely feel for you, though, I also don't particularly enjoy very reflective displays.

[Starglider]

As a general rule, the mid-range Phenoms (actually Phenom IIs) provide slightly better performance/price, but slightly less battery life than the Intel equivalents. Note that the big refresh for this product segment is scheduled for spring 2011; AMD and Intel are both releasing chips with integrated graphics that are vastly better than the current chipset graphics. Probably not a big deal for you, since you want to play games and have ample budget for a discrete graphics card. That said, as I noted in the other recent threads of this type AMD are refreshing their mid-range graphics cards next month, so waiting a few weeks could net you significantly better gaming performance/price.

[Ace Pace]

As a general rule, the mid-range Phenoms (actually Phenom IIs) provide slightly better performance/price, but slightly less battery life than the Intel equivalents. Note that the big refresh for this product segment is scheduled for spring 2011; AMD and Intel are both releasing chips with integrated graphics that are vastly better than the current chipset graphics. Probably not a big deal for you, since you want to play games and have ample budget for a discrete graphics card. That said, as I noted in the other recent threads of this type AMD are refreshing their mid-range graphics cards next month, so waiting a few weeks could net you significantly better gaming performance/price.

Being quite..far from the U.S. I've never experienced any price drops as a result of new parts. Is this felt right away in the EU?

[Thanas]

As a general rule, the mid-range Phenoms (actually Phenom IIs) provide slightly better performance/price, but slightly less battery life than the Intel equivalents. Note that the big refresh for this product segment is scheduled for spring 2011; AMD and Intel are both releasing chips with integrated graphics that are vastly better than the current chipset graphics. Probably not a big deal for you, since you want to play games and have ample budget for a discrete graphics card. That said, as I noted in the other recent threads of this type AMD are refreshing their mid-range graphics cards next month, so waiting a few weeks could net you significantly better gaming performance/price.

Sadly, as my laptop just died on me (repairs would cost 140€ which is just ridiculous for a 4 year old laptop) and I need it for work - travelling, speeches etc - I cannot afford to wait.

***************

Anybody have experiences with anti-glare screens?

[starslayer]

Anybody have experiences with anti-glare screens?

I think my laptop has an anti-glare coating (it's most definitely not a glossy screen, at least), and I know my desktop monitor has one. For the laptop, it can definitely be helpful, especially if you're using it outside. The desktop version just gets annoying, because instead of actually preventing reflections, it just smears them out over a larger area.

If you do end up upgrading your desktop, I'd go with the one Ace recommended. I have a virtually identical system (I'm running 460 SLI and an i7-860 instead), and it is easily fast enough for the latest games, plus it runs cool and quiet.

[phongn]

With their latest marketing shenanigans, I'd suggest at least avoiding machines with Intel processors and get an AMD system

How is this fundamentally different than differing versions of Windows or AMD disabling (perfectly fine) cores or ATI doing the same? Or what IBM's been doing for decades?

*rant*

Why the heck does it seem like every laptop on the market comes with this glaring display? I do not need a mirror, thank you very much.

*end rant*

'Glossy' displays can provide perceptually deeper colors and higher contrast. Matte displays are available, but they tend to be on more expensive business-class laptops (e.g. higher-end ThinkPads, MacBook Pro, etc.).