System Buyer’s Guide: $1700 Performance Midrange
by Mike Jones and Jarred Walton on May 12, 2010 4:52 AM ESTClosing Thoughts
As usual, with the passage of time the amount of performance you can get for your dollar has increased quite a bit, and there are a ton of options. The choice today between midrange AMD and Intel platforms is really a question of priorities. Intel still wins the performance crown in single-threaded performance and has a commanding lead in many of our gaming results. Intel also appears to benefit from application specific optimizations in a few tests (i.e. 3dsmax). However, for thread-heavy work the AMD 1055T generally beats out Intel, sometimes by a large margin. Your choice boils down to 10~25% better multithreaded performance on AMD versus gaming performance that's anywhere from 5% to a whopping 60% faster on Intel. In most other areas, performance is close enough to not worry too much, which means we need to look at other factors.
For the same price, you can get similar features like SATA 6Gbps and USB3 (SATA6 is native with the 890GX on AMD, though). The Intel platform does use around 15W to 40W less power, however, so for a 24/7 system that works out to $13 to $35 per year--or just $4 to $12 per year for a system that's on eight hours per day. That being the case, depending on your particular needs you can go with either system and be happy. Gamers and "greenies" will likely prefer the Intel system while the content creators and video editors will like the AMD setup.
If you're not sure which system is right for you, again, we suggest you look at our complete Bench results. We've included the above chart with some of the more popular benchmarks to give you an idea of what to expect. While the components aren't the same as what we recommend in this guide, most of the differences will be slight. The Bench setup uses an appropriate motherboard/chipset for each platform, with an HD 5870 GPU and an SSD. The performance difference in gaming will be lower than what we show in our Bench results, mostly because the GPU becomes more of a bottleneck, but other than that, the performance will be very similar to what you see in those results.
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Makaveli - Thursday, May 13, 2010 - link
This article was fine the rest of you guy should stick to buying Best buy PC'sI also found this hilarious
"$1000~$1800 = top end, dual video card systems for uber gamers."
A top end gaming PC is $2000-$5000 range!
thanks for the write up Mike and Jarred!
ereavis - Friday, May 14, 2010 - link
Why would you not go with the more modern WD1002FAEX with twice the cache? If you had to spend $10 more at all, it's on sale at $100 every other weekgeokilla - Saturday, May 15, 2010 - link
$1700 is not midrange... And with $1700 I can get a Core i7 build instead. Come on guys.P.S. I'm Canadian so things are more expensive up here.
Navitron - Sunday, May 16, 2010 - link
I'm gonna take a wild guess and say that writer of this article is mainly a mac user.Heres a system I specced out in 10 min on newegg, Core i7 with an SSD for $1,700.
http://secure.newegg.com/WishList/PublicWishDetail...
(Prices on newegg as of 5/16 9:14 PM PST $1,723.84)
7Enigma - Monday, May 17, 2010 - link
I'm sick of reading through all of these comments complaining about what $1700 means. Here's a recommendation to avoid this in the future: just drop the name.System Buyer's Guide: $1700
Done. No more whiners with nothing better to do than complain that this is/isn't midrange, and instead focus on the actual part recommendations themselves. That's the point of the article!
Highlander944 - Wednesday, May 19, 2010 - link
Ok..I tend to agree with others who've posted that $1700 is NOT midrange. This is certainly upper mid range since performance increases from here are marginal at best and $1700 bucks is a good deal of money.
Next, what's with the benchmarks? I mean seriously. Your recommending a "system" why in the world would you bench the graphics at anything but native resolution of the LCD? The gaming benchmarks are utterly useless! Who is gonna lay out that kind of money for the 'system' and not game at 1900x1200? The only reason to not game there is if you can't... which we don't know because you didn't bench that!
shamans33 - Thursday, May 20, 2010 - link
1) Articles needs a title change: Something like "Mid-High End Gaming Machine"2) The system isn't $1700...it's $1182.
3) 5850 is high end. Seriously, a $300 graphics card is high end.
4) PSU is overkill.
5) CPU is borderline high end.
This machine seems a tad expensive for a midrange gaming machine.
People who take your advice literally might think that a mid-end gaming machine is expensive @ nearly $1200. You can practically play any game and/or do anything with this machine....the only limitations are 4 GB of ram and non-SSD storage.
shamans33 - Thursday, May 20, 2010 - link
Might be nice to start seeing a mini itx buyer's guide.MEH - Wednesday, May 26, 2010 - link
I used to have time (and enjoy) putting together my own system, but now with 3 kids it's not likely to happen. I also don't like the more generic alternatives at the big PC companies. Are there other companies who will build a system with components I select, maybe similar to what's here in the guide or with other things I choose?MIDIman - Thursday, May 27, 2010 - link
I'm looking at the difference between the i5-750 and the i7-930 routes, and maybe its just me, but doesn't the i7 route make more sense?In both cases the motherboards are almost precisely $200. I'm comparing MSI's USB3-supported motherboards at newegg.
In both cases, the CPUs actually cost the same. I can get the i7-930 from microcenter for $200.
RAM appears to be the only difference, but the difference is much more negligible - $50 maybe?