Gaming Buyer's Guide - November 2004
by Jarred Walton on November 21, 2004 5:54 PM EST- Posted in
- Guides
Intel Budget Gaming System
At the lowest end of the spectrum, AMD doesn't have quite as much of an advantage in performance over Intel, since the CPU is less of a bottleneck, and there is one item that Intel can offer which AMD cannot (yet): PCI Express. Suffice it to say that especially for die-hard Intel fans, they are not a terrible choice, although they do cost slightly more. Here is our best attempt at matching the Budget AMD system's price and performance.| Budget Intel Pentium 4 System | ||
| Hardware | Recommended Component | Price |
| Processor | Pentium 4 520 2.8 GHz 1MB Cache | 158 |
| Motherboard | DFI 915P-TAG i915P | 118 |
| Memory | 1x512MB Mushkin Basic 2.5-4-4 | 75 |
| Video Card | XFX GeFORCE 6600GT 128 MB | 178 |
| Hard Drive | Seagate Barracuda 80GB EIDE model 7200.7 | 59 |
| Optical Drive | NEC DVD+/-RW Drive Model 3500A | 72 |
| Case and Power Supply | Athenatech A602 Black/Silver with 350W PSU | 62 |
| Display | Samsung 793DF 17 Black/Silver CRT (1280x1024@75 Hz) | 139 |
| Speakers | Logitech Z-640 5.1 | 52 |
| Keyboard and Mouse | Logitech Optical Desktop Combo | 26 |
| Bottom Line | 939 | |
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Another drawback is that dual-channel RAM helps the Pentium 4 more than it does the Athlon 64, so using only one DIMM is going to cut into that performance boost a bit. If you plan on adding 512MB of RAM in the near future, that's not too big of a problem. Otherwise - and we hesitate to say this as they may not be of much use in future systems - using two 256 MB DIMMs will cost about the same as a single 512 MB DIMM. The extra $70 or so spent on an Intel system could be put into other items like a better graphics card or a faster CPU, and AMD also has the 64-bit factor to consider. This is why we still give AMD our primary recommendation, but it really is a close match-up in this price bracket.
Besides shipping PCI Express support, Intel also has their HyperThreading feature, which can help in certain multi-tasking applications. We have not yet seen any performance benefit to HyperThreading in the gaming realm - quite the reverse, in fact, as most games run a few percent slower with HTT enabled - but that could change in the future. With both AMD and Intel shifting away from increasing clock speeds to multi-core designs, it would make sense that games at some point will need to shift to a multi-threaded programming environment in order to extract the most performance from the processor. HTT ends up being nothing that we are overly concerned with as far as games go, but it's still there and it could come into play in the next year or two.
If you feel that our budget recommendations are almost impractical, just take that as an indication of the difficulty of selecting parts for this price segment. These three platforms are all very capable, however, and none of them is truly a bad choice. If you're the type of person who upgrades parts frequently - i.e. more than twice a year - over the life of your system, the socket 939 and socket 775 platforms will be a better choice. From a pure price standpoint, socket 754 still wins out.
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JarredWalton - Sunday, November 21, 2004 - link
Xsilver - We really don't know when AGP will be fully phased out. It could be mostly gone in a year, or it could stick around for four more years. With NVIDIA's HSI bridge chip, they should be able to continue to support AGP as long as it's a reasonable market, and with dramatically faster processors more or less on hold for a year or so, I would expect AGP to continue to get support for at least two years. It might come a little later than the latest PCIe cards, but that's better than nothing.Regarding the choice of motherboards, right now I would have to go with the Abit or ASUS boards over the Gigabyte. Some people like Gigabyte a lot, but I'm not really one of them. The boards always seem to have issues - my one Athlon XP system with a Gigabyte board has constant "overheating" problems, even though temps never actually break 60 C. The motherboard *thinks* the CPU is running too hot. I've never been seriously disappointed by Abit or ASUS, so that's what I would take.
Moletus: the 6800LE is available, mostly in Europe, but short of unlocking the extra pipelines there's no real reason to go with it. The 6600GT is close in performance to the 6800, and the LE is going to have the same number of pipelines with a lower clockspeed. If you can't find the 6600GT, or if you want to take a chance on unlocking the extra pipelines, the 6800LE is worth a shot.
xsilver - Sunday, November 21, 2004 - link
Also some news on WHEN Agp is going to be phased out would be good.... are the next gen nvidia/ati products still going to be availble with AGP? if not, it would make sense to switch now?xsilver - Sunday, November 21, 2004 - link
I am considering the second AMD option -- want to know more about the choice of motherboardsWhere I am, only the abit, asus a8v and gigabyte "Gigabyte GA-K8NS Ultra-939" are abailable which is nf3 based...
I've heard good things about the nf3 but bad things about this particular gigabyte board.... is the abit still the way to go? the gigabyte is actually the cheapest though... marginally
The MSI nf3 is also availble but is $45 more..
Is the abit going to be the most stable with the best ability for good overclocks?
And on stock cooling/voltage how much could be extracted out of the 3000+ / 939? is 2.4ghz guaranteed?
thebluesgnr - Sunday, November 21, 2004 - link
This guide bothers to add an option for those who want an Intel processor because there are AT readers that prefer Intel platforms (processor+chipset), even knowing gaming performance is a little better on AMD.I'm not one of those readoers though ;)
Pollock - Sunday, November 21, 2004 - link
I assume stock cooling for all processors......but what about the OEM 3000+? $140 at Monarch...
moletus - Sunday, November 21, 2004 - link
You really cant blame Intel only machines for stability problems. (just finished playing hl2 with p3-800 and ati 8500, and no im not a masochist) And on the long run i think Intel boxes will outlive any Amd counterpart, and yes i would buy Amd too :)MAME - Sunday, November 21, 2004 - link
oh, the only thing I am curious about is why even bother putting the Intel counterparts in there in the first place? AMD has the clear advantage over Intel in gaming. Since Intel's offerings are more expensive and perform worse, I really don't see a reason to go that route.moletus - Sunday, November 21, 2004 - link
Hey where is 6800le ? i havent seen a single thing about it, even thou you can buy one.. atleast in europe, no benchies no nuttin :( i woulda bet that beats any price/performance ratio when you get those pixel pipes running (with luck:)MAME - Sunday, November 21, 2004 - link
prepare to be bombarded by everyone who thinks they can save $2 and build a much better riganyway, looks pretty decent to me
Christian Fitchett - Thursday, February 20, 2020 - link
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