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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strikeback03 - Wednesday, May 12, 2010 - link
Flip that around, what would you call a system with a 980X and multiple Fermi GPUs if this is high-end? I suppose you could call this the bottom of high-end, upper-midrange or lower high-end is really semantics.I wonder why they keep saying the i5-750 is faster than the i7-920 in most benchmarks when Bench shows the opposite.
Phate-13 - Wednesday, May 12, 2010 - link
So a Porsche 911 Turbo S is midrange because there happens to be a Bugatti Veyron that costs more than 10 times as much?In my opinion, midrange is the "typical" range. What the average person would buy. Low end is below that, high end is above that. This is not something the average person would buy. But this argument is actually quite irrelevant, imho. You can't "prove" that something is mid-range, that depends on personal factors. I repeat, I was just stating that it was my opinion that this is rather high-end.
JarredWalton - Wednesday, May 12, 2010 - link
By that definition, midrange is a $600 Dell. ;-)You can go so many routes with a $1000 to $1750 build, and whichever route you go and whatever you call it, it's still a $1000 to $1750 build. For the price and for a complete system, I'm very comfortable with the recommended components. If you don't want Blu-ray, I assume you're all plenty smart and can manage to not add the Blu-ray drive and--GASP!--even put a DVD-RW in its place. I figure the same goes for the GPU, storage, case, keyboard, mouse, and LCD. All of those are literally drop-in replacements, and we have plenty of other articles reviewing things like SSDs for the interested.
In my opinion, the biggest decision in any build really comes down to the choice of motherboard. That's the one where you have to really think about what you want and what you're willing to spend. And I spent time chatting with several others here just to make sure we had good motherboard recommendations.
As for high-end, I personally start that at $2000 and go up. This is close to that, which is why it's "performance" midrange--or "upper" midrange if you prefer. At $2000, I'd seriously push for adding an IPS LCD, and if you give me $3000 to work with, there's no beating 30" LCDs (still) with most likely a 5970 GPU to drive it. Or you can grab three 24" LCDs and run them in portrait mode. I'd also call that sort of setup "Dream" but regardless of the label it's still just a really expensive and fast PC.
artifex - Wednesday, May 12, 2010 - link
Jarred, I agree, the biggest thing to think about is obviously the motherboard. Could you give a little more insight into your decision that 890FX isn't worth it? I'll be buying a board quite soon, and up until today, based on info here and at TechReport, I'd been leaning heavily towards an FX-based board, with the same CPU you selected. Since I don't need the latest and greatest graphics support, however, the GX's integrated one would be fine. ("Performance" for me is a solid number cruncher that also does some HTPC and storage duty. The only game I play for now is WoW.) I'm trying to build this thing to last more than 3 years without heavy upgrading, though :)JarredWalton - Wednesday, May 12, 2010 - link
I talked with Raja about the motherboard and chipset, and he said that the primary benefit of 890FX over 890GX is better extreme overclocking. 890FX also has dual x16 links for CrossFire while 890GX will drop to x8/x8 for dual GPUs. So if you don't plan on running dual GPUs and you don't intend to pursue extreme overclocking, 890GX is a great chipset.artifex - Thursday, May 13, 2010 - link
Thanks, Jarred. I think you just saved me a bunch of money.Benoit_P - Friday, May 14, 2010 - link
Good article. One taking the time to read it calmy and understand the caveats will find how to modify the hardware list.However, I think that you have overlooked the fact that the 890FX chipset can do virtualization, something the other 8xx chipsets are incapable of.
Given that running WinXP mode in Win7 Pro/Ultimate requires virtualization capabilities, this is an important point for some users.
The article does not mention virtualization capabilities for the intel builds either.
Question:
Does a PC used only for photo editing (Photoshop) and video capture/editing/encoding (Première) from an HD camcorder (AVCHD codec) benefits at all from a powerful graphics card ? or can do with an embedded solution ?
BP
JarredWalton - Friday, May 14, 2010 - link
I know Photoshop benefits from GPUs now (via OpenGL), but I don't know how much of a difference there is between IGP and dGPU. I don't know if Premier benefits from GPU or not, though I know there are other video manipulation applications that leverage CUDA (in which case the AMD GPU we selected wouldn't help, obviously).As far as virtualization, I thought that was the CPU that handled that. I wasn't aware of any limitations with 890GX not supporting virtualization. It appears that the IOMMU isn't virtualized except in 890FX, which isn't a problem with Xen, Hyper-V or VMware ESX but prevents its use with WinXP Mode on Win7.
Honestly, I hear about Virtual WinXP in Win7 so often that it's really quite surprising, as I don't know of a single person who uses it. I'm sure businesses do, but do home users really care? I have been using Vista on my machines since 2007, and outside of a few 64-bit compatibility issues (which have since been solved with updated applications), I haven't had any apps that didn't run properly. Who is actually using this (which means you need to buy Win7 Business or Ultimate... a small minority of home users), and what are they using it for? It just seems like something 99.99% of people won't ever use.
Phate-13 - Wednesday, May 12, 2010 - link
Let me rephrase that, the midrange is the typical pc a consumer buys with a specific goal in mind. What the average person with (game-)performance in mind buys, thats what I call midrange.But anyway, why would de motherboard be the most important part? There is barely any difference between specific motherboard, except for some very specific features that most of the people don't need. When looking at motherboards, performance is a non-issue, there is barely any difference. The only difference is features, but what are features that are so important that you need to have them, but not important enough so that not all motherboards have them? (And no, I'm not stating that any motherboard is ok, I just wouldn't know.)
Phate-13 - Wednesday, May 12, 2010 - link
And damn it's annyong that there is no "edit" button.Anyway, if everything is a drop-in replacement, than what is the point in making a guide at all?
(Though again, let it be clear, I really like the effort that is put in these articles, but there is a fundamental flaw with these guides, almost any guide. And that is that every person has different needs and the persons who can adapt these configs to their needs are often the persons who actually don't need a guide, while the ones who can use a guide very often don't know anything about it and what to and what not to replace.)