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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pjconoso - Wednesday, May 12, 2010 - link
$1700? Midrange? This is like PhP 85,000 in our currency and I'd like to think its high-end already.artifex - Wednesday, May 12, 2010 - link
If you think "performance" means primarily number crunching, not gaming, then go with the AMD choice, but just use the integrated Radeon 4290 graphics on the ASUS motherboard and save yourself over $300 by dumping the GPU card. Not to mention that if you can get by with a 19" monitor, there are several to be had for like $150 or less (Fry's actually has a 23" for $200 before rebate, too), etc. Oh, if you dump the graphics card, you probably can get by with a smaller PS, too, and that will save more... And honestly, doesn't that retail Phenom II come with a stock cooler? Knock another $27 off...isrial - Wednesday, May 12, 2010 - link
85.000 PhP !?That’s almost 290.000 Nigerian naira! The average nigerian would have to work two full years to be able to afford this system! Preposterous.
I demand this guide to be renamed into "System Buyer’s Guide: $1700 Super Computer".
jleach1 - Wednesday, May 12, 2010 - link
And....as you can tell by the title...it says "PERFORMANCE MIDRANGE"JarredWalton - Wednesday, May 12, 2010 - link
I'm just putting this here so it hopefully doesn't get lost in the discussion below. You'll note that I added a paragraph on the "Base Components" page discussing the SSD/Blu-ray debate and making specific note of the option to downgrade one and upgrade the other. I sort of take that thing as a given, but obviously a lot of you want us to explicitly mention stuff like that.whatthehey - Friday, May 14, 2010 - link
Just FYI Jarred:http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php...
You struck a nerve by pissing on their "requirement" to have SSDs in any modern system. Now we know why GullLars has been such a prick over here. Of course if you're into competitive benchmarking, SSDs will help out. PCMark Vantage is a fucking joke the way it boosts your scores just by putting in an SSD. "Oh wow... my gaming score got 100% higher by using an SSD!" NOT!
Maybe everyone from AnandTech should go over there and piss in their forums for a while? Except, I know from being around here quite a while that the people here are of much higher caliber material than the idiot ORB-Penis worshipers at XtremeSystems.
So GullLars and pals, if you come back again, let me wish you a fine PISS OFF. Someone posts an informed guide that doesn't cater to your every whim by recommending a $200+ upgrade to a reasonable SSD and you tell people to come over here and complain. Real nice. And you can forget that 32GB SSD garbage... just my Windows and Program Files directories use up 20GB, and I don't have a ton of stuff installed! I doubt most mainstream users want to deal with telling every Tom, Dick, and Harry application to put files somewhere other than C:. I still spend 10 minutes on every tech support call trying to get people to open Windows Explorer and browse to a specific location. Those that know how to deal with multiple HDDs, changing user documents default location, etc. are more than capable of determining on their own whether or not they need an SSD without you pushing them as the be-all, end-all of computer performance.
Bipedal Humanoid - Thursday, July 1, 2010 - link
To those who complain: Before you post in a renowned place such as anandtech, make sure you know what you are talking about. You obviously have NO idea.This is a HARDWARE website not a MONEY website... Need more clarity? Ok then, Performance midrange means that in terms of the currently available hardware this guide hits the sweetspot between PERFORMANCE and cost.
If you still don't understand, I'd recommend you go buy yourself a Dell.
And to isrial: You can't make such demands, this is still a free country the last time I checked, your demands are reflecting poorly on your country mugu.
Phate-13 - Wednesday, May 12, 2010 - link
1. I absolutely agree that this is NOT a midrange pc, but that it is high end. You can play (almost) any game at its maximum with that config, how can you call that midrange?2 . Please make up your mind internally, about ssd's:
"Though the time for suggesting the purchase of an SSD boot/OS disk in this segment appears to be drawing closer, prices just aren’t there yet." And that's it in this article, while over a year ago:
@ The SSD Anthology: Understanding SSDs and New Drives from OCZ
@ 3/18/2009
And even later explicitly:
Title: Why You Absolutely Need an SSD
The SSD Relapse: Understanding and Choosing the Best SSD @ 8/30/2009
Over half a year ago you absolutely needed an SSD and now all of sudden the time isn't just there yet?
And on the other hand, you do put an Blu-ray player in it.
In general I really do like the articles on Anandtech, but personally I think this one is a swing and miss.
JarredWalton - Wednesday, May 12, 2010 - link
The old "my midrange is not your midrange" argument rears its ugly head again. The classification is technically "Performance Midrange", which means it's closer to high-end than entry-level (as opposed to Entry Midrange, or Mainstream, or whatever you want to call it). You can, as someone above pointed out, make many changes--quite a few of which we mention in the text--to get the price lower.As for the SSDs, Anand loves them. He also loves Macs. And he happens to have far more available spending money than the vast majority of people... plus he gets them for free. Personally, I've used systems with and without SSDs and I don't feel the difference as much as Anand. For $100 I can get a 1TB hard drive. For the same $100 I can get a dumbed down 30GB or 40GB SSD. It will handle random file access a lot better, but you will fill up a big chunk of it with just your OS and Office.
Personally, I am fine having all of my documents, images, movies, etc. reside in C:\Users\Jarred. At present (and with much of my pre-2009 data moved to backup on a different drive), my user folder checks in at nearly 60GB of data. 12GB is just for the 2009/2010 AnandTech stuff, and another 12GB or so is for family pictures. I could store it in a different location, but I prefer not to as I like being able to open Explorer and get straight to my pictures with the link in the top-left.
Is Anand wrong? Nope. And neither am I. It's merely a case of different priorities. For the cost of a reasonable sized SSD (160GB is the smallest I'd be okay with), I can get a lot of other performance upgrades that will matter more to me.
Phate-13 - Wednesday, May 12, 2010 - link
Thanks for the quick reaction. But when you state that you don't feel the difference that much, then I can hardly imagine that you can actually feel the difference between the WD black and other 1TB HD's. Which makes it hard to justify going for the faster WD Black.And by shaving off those additional costs + switching out the Blu-ray for a normal dvd writer, I can fit in an Intel Postville 80GB for only a small extra.
Because you used newegg as reference, I'll use it as well:
HD: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8... (-30)
Dvd: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8... (-85)
GPU: (HD5770 in crossfire, which is actually faster a lot of times) http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8... (-20) (and 30 rebate)
Memory: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8... (-12) (and 15 rebate)
Which adds up to 147 + 45 rebate.
With the intel ssd costing 215: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...
That's only $23 extra with extra GPU performance. The only thing your missing is the blu-ray.
Well, that's my point of view. I think most people don't need a blu-ray player in their computer, I even don't get the point of having one. If you want to watch a blu-ray movie, you'll do it on your tv.