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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GullLars - Wednesday, May 12, 2010 - link
Logical fail; strawman argument.
The motherboard on either setup has 6 SATA ports, not 1. You are not limited to using 1 storage device.
Also, most users that watch BluRay films has either a PS3/xbox360 or a BluRay player. Choosing a BD player over an SSD for this build makes me want to go /wallbash
I would also like to correct you on another point. Windows 7 64Bit proffesional edition with all updates and security essentials + MS office + Open office + Firefox + Burning program and most other _core apps_ will take up roughly 16GB once pagefile and hibernation is deactivated (or pagefile reduced to a few hundred MBs). Adding the full CS4 suite, a music editing program, 3DS max, and a couple of other apps will still leave you around the 30GB mark.
It's not much trouble at all to set up W7 to have OS + Apps on a SSD, and have a 1TB(+) HDD for all media, games, and others. Configuring "libraries" takes 1 minute and is easy to do. I've made libraries on a partition _NOT C:_ for: Pictures, Music, Videos, Documents, and Downloads on all computers i've set up. Running Ccleaner once a week keeps you from building up temp files on C, and restricting system restore to using 1-2GB will keep it from inflating over time.
whatthehey - Thursday, May 13, 2010 - link
Nice try, but people aren't that stupid. Straw man argument:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man
Accusing Jarred of using straw man: EPIC fail! Accusing your opponent of using a straw man in order to pretend he didn't say anything useful on the other hand happens to be a form of the straw man argument, so congratulations!
Now, where did he misrepresent someone's position in order to knock it down and thereby make his position stronger? All I can see is that he said Anand loves SSDs. He gave examples of other things where he may not agree like Macs. He points out that SSDs cost a lot of money. Where is the attempt to refute something without actually refuting it?
Elsewhere, Jarred admits that the Blu-ray is unnecessary, and the article text now reflects this. So get off the damn high horse and quit bitching and moaning about what amounts to a difference of opinion. Sheesh!
GullLars - Thursday, May 13, 2010 - link
The strawman part was representing SSD as a replacement for a HDD and arguing that it's too low capacity and too expensive.The case you want to use an SSD in the majority of cases in is an addition to a HDD. Then capacity demands are way low, and the price pr GB can easily be justified because of the system acceleration effect.
AssBall - Thursday, May 13, 2010 - link
What part of his explanation of wanting to keep all of his files in the same place did you not understand? Go make your own damned buyer's guide if you are having so much trouble accepting or understanding this one.GullLars - Thursday, May 13, 2010 - link
I understand he wants that, but it's not an argument against an SSD as a system drive. You could simply move all documents to the harddisk, and have them in one place there.I'm not looking for a flamewar here, but i don't like it when people misrepresent the uses of SSDs.
The number one reason to use an SSD is system and application acceleration, not storage. The reasonable capacity range for that starts around 32GB, at wich point you will fit the entire OS and quite a bit more. Not being able to put everything you might want on it, and therefore ruling it out, denies you the benefits the stuff that would fit would get.
Jediron - Tuesday, May 18, 2010 - link
While he explains his preference, it's still his own personal preference. A good reviewer should look beyond that. SSD's are becoming more and more populair and i understand why. More populair then Blueray drives, but, aldo he admits it is not a dealmaker; the Blueray player is chosen in the configuration. WHY?The WD Black 1TB i can understand, WD Black series come with a 5 year warranty. That's a good argument to pay a little extra.
futrtrubl - Wednesday, May 12, 2010 - link
You can pretty easily have it set up so the \users folder is located on another drive with it behaving exactly is it currently does. It`s how my computer is set up in fact.spigzone - Sunday, May 23, 2010 - link
" For $100 I can get a 1TB hard drive"make that a 1.5TB hard drive for $99.
or 2TB for $119.
jleach1 - Wednesday, May 12, 2010 - link
You guys are dumb. There is more than one way a system can be mid-range. This PC is midrange performance-wise...not money-wise. Don't be stupid. Use your brain. And if you make less than a thousand dollars a year....move.Phate-13 - Wednesday, May 12, 2010 - link
Excuse me?!This system has quite top-notch performance.
I'll quote myself: "You can play (almost) any game at its maximum with that config, how can you call that midrange?" A system of 900 is low-range to you then? That makes no sense at all.