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DIY 4 GHz Dual Core Gaming Rig For $720
Tom's Hardware has posted the detailed results of their recent quest to build a beefy gaming rig without a visit to the poorhouse. The trick it seems is to find a processor with 'cores designed for a much faster clock than their nominal rating at a speed of up to 4 GHz without problems.' They provide shopping lists for both a 'budget version' and a 'top flight version'.
By the time I got to page three, Toms Hardware was reeeaaallly slow.
Maybe try using a Coral Cache version so other folks get a chance to see the article.
Cheers!
Now minesweeper will REALLY rock!
(end of post)
Or at least stop grabbing the Digg headlines and submitting them. One site or the other, people. If I read it on Digg, I don't want to see it on Dot. And vice versa.
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
Before you even get past the first component they mention that you can't get it at the price they got it anymore.
"we purchased a stock processor at the prevailing retail price. Since then, demand for this CPU has spiked, and prices have also gone up."
I always see these "Build a super system for no money!" articles, but when *I* try to price the components, it never seems to add up.
"There are more important things than stopping terrorism. Upholding the Constitution is one of them." - Ars Forumer.
I love the idea of a dual-core 4ghz processor, but the memory and video card selections on that rig are pretty shabby.
Most game programmers optimize their engines around video cards these days, not the CPU.
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
Is that page 3 out of 52? I know Tom's has to pay the bills, but their page lengths are painful to read.
"They provide shopping lists for both a 'budget version' and a 'top flight version'."
Lovely. Now I can runs some games with in-game advertising from a sparkless industry.
what's interesting about this is the unique
Just a
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visit to
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the mother-
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*next*
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fucking adhouse.
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"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Your complaining about cross-site dupes? At least the same-site dups are reduced.
Or even find someone to read his work before publishing it.
for those who dont want to browse through n pages http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/06/12/your_diy_ga ming_rig_for_720/print.html
And for those of you who will complain about the article being split into so many pages, here is the print version. Coral Cache Directly No ads and one page. Enjoy.
Okay, notice on the first page, there are 2 systems, a cheap one and a $1200 one. The $1200 one was what they actually built and OC'd. Several things here will limit their OC. First, cheap "550W" power supply that puts out ~350w at the most and likely has unstable rails. All power supplies that come with cases are shit unless they're Antec Enlight Enermax or Fortron. Second, noname motherboard. Bad, bad, bad idea if you want a anywhere near stable system. For the more expensive system,who in their right mind would pick Gigabyte for an overclocking mobo? DFI, Asus, or MSI would all be far better choices.
Next, that X1300 is godawful. Lastly, I disagree with water cooling. A thermalright XP-120 with a ~80 CFM fan and decent thermal grease would provide very similar thermal performance, albeit louder.
FOR WAY LESS you can get a PS2, XBOX , XBOX360 or when it comes out the PS3. And never ever worry about low space for instalations or graphics and sound settings...
Why is this posted here when everyone knows it's a bunch of bs?
"I guess I'm gonna fade into Bolivian."
Crazy nerds have done it again - this time it's DO IT YOURSELF WATER PUSSY. See pictures HERE!
I would love that. I already have a water cooled system so I would only need the chip, motherboard and ram. Then again, Intel hasn't been floating my boat for a while so I will stick to AMD for now. Lets see how that Conroe chips hangs.
Click Click Bloody Click PANCAKES!
but if you read their article on overclocking the Intel chip in question, you'll see that the thing draws over half a kilowatt at full load, and around 300W idle. Yikes! You will get a bargain on the machine and pay through the nose on your electricity bills over the subsequent months.
The table of contents has an entry Stable Power Supply: 400 Watts Is Plenty, but the page says "...which is why we chose a 550-Watt unit." Huh?
Only 9 pages? Tom's getting tired! I wish he will write at least 50 more pages for describing how water is brougth to the waterblock and the effects of using mineral water or pepsi+mentos!
pepsi&mentos should really give a 10GHz burst!
4GHz means virtually nothing to me these days. All it says is that the CPU is cycling at 4 billion times per second, but it doesn't say how much work is being done per cycle. Comparing GHz is apples and oranges. Real life testing is where it's at. Give me hard data.
Heres some hard data.
Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer
A buddy of mine and I joke about owning the 6 million dollar computer. Sometimes we even repeat lines from the TV show (...gentlemen, we can rebuild him...better, stronger, faster, wuuu-eeeee-oooooo) This article should be titled "The $1200 computer" and sub-titled "For only 6 million dollars". All DIY'ers, myself included, know that we have spent a kings ransom on our systems. I've stopped adding up how much the frankensteining on my box has cost me. All in all it is a very cool article and I am glad that people are trying to combine budget computing and gaming rigs together.
Where's the 0xBEEF
I think that $299 on an XBox360 is a better investment for gaming.
As with most rigs, if you can, reuse components from the previous rig like optical drives, hard drives, case + power supply even. You really want to get the upgrade down to CPU, Motherboard, Memory, Graphics Card.
In a month's time, and AMD X2 3800+ will cost around $170 due to upcoming price cuts. That's far better than any house-cooking Pentium D 805, and will probably overclock nicely as well. Stick that onto a $100 motherboard, with $100 RAM and the best money for the rest of your budget apart from the othe rparts you need to upgrade.
If you're really in the poor house, the Semprons are going down to $60 or so, and can also be overclocked, and as most games are still single threaded you will get great performance still, you just can do that media transcode in the background.
I've noticed that at least up until recently, if you really wanted to play games with good graphics your best bet was a nice home built computer system. Game consoles were OK but it was always computer graphics that mesmorized me. Looking at the specs for the 360 and the PS3 now it looks like they are finally getting pretty competitive with gaming computers. Are we now at the point where the game consoles, built solely for pixel rendering greatness, are going to surpass computers for gaming experience?
Just FYI, not talking about availabilty of games on one or the other. Talking about pure pixel/rendering power.
CPU: Crap, can't even get it at that price anymore.
Motherboard: Not available in US. Crap.
Ram: 1gb is quickly falling to the low end. Crap.
Soundcard: Onboard sound, ie Crap.
Case: Ugly gimmick & built in PSU? Crap.
GPU: Crap
Summary of article: We pieced together a bunch of budget crap that won't last more than two years, if you could even aquire these things.
Any enthusiast can build a much better rig for around $1000
My $800 system from 3.5 years ago would beat this in most games with justa a $100 video card upgrade.
Dude... you meant grammar, not grammer.
LOL
* Intel Pentium D 805
* Tagan i-Xeye 480 W PSU
* Asus P5WD2-E Premium
* OCZ DDR2-800 (2x 512 MB)
* 2x Western Digital WD160
* GeForce 7800 GTX
* Gigabyte DVD-Rom 16x
Honestly, do you think that 7800GTX might have helped with those game benchmarks? Maybe...
Now duplicate those results with the machine in the article.
argumentum ad fallacium: Fallacy of defining a fallacy which allows one to dismiss the argument in question.
How is it that Dell, HP and Gateway are bashed for what components they offer at the low-end, yet he builds an incomplete system. When I say incomplete, I mean that he left off Windows. I didn't see anywhere in his pricing, the cost of Windows. Did I miss it, or did the author completely leave it out because it would add 150-200 bucks(Don't know the price of Windows... I use OSX). Even worse... does he expect you not to pay for Windows?
Well obviously the system was different and will provide different performance, however the results of the tests are what is more important. The overclocked CPU was able to ouperform processors 4 times more expensive with everything else being the same (the key part is everything else being the same). He wanted data on the CPU, which this gives, as the other hardware remains the same. Thats the whole point of the benchmarks, to see how performance will vary as the CPU changes.
One of the conclusions that you can draw from the benchmarks is that if you build the $720 system and test different CPU's in the motherboard, the overclocked Pentium will outperform most other CPU's for that setup.
You need to be able to interpret what the data means and apply it to the setup in question, which you aparently did not do.
Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer
This article is completely misleading, the true gaming rig is $1223. The $720 version has a water-cooled 4Ghz CPU, but a PCIe 128MB, 64-bit, 4-pipeline video card. "Gaming machine"? Maybe for Duke Nukem or Castle Wolfenstein.
I was able to easily obliterate this $720 "Gaming Machine" for under $700 with a configuration I originally did a month ago: $698 Gaming Machine
I'm actually a fan of Tom's, I like their method of LCD analysis...but the $720 rig is pathetically underpowered and the spending on it was ridiculously misallocated. After comparing their system to mine, Tom's credibility has taken a serious hit with me.
I used to overclock my processor, and while I was doing that I was also reading the various hardware boards. One thing I learned is that overclocking is a false economy. Very few people get the results of THW, because when Joe Random buys a processor they don't get a hand-selected golden sample. The same goes for motherboards and memory. Modest overclocking gains are often wiped out by system freezes and reboots. And even the best overclockers end up spending a small fortune buying cooling systems and replacing burnt out components. Overclocking is a fun way to learn about your computer, but it is not a practical way to economically improve the performance of your computer.
Maybe they could screw some erector set parts on the sides, and weld a spoiler on top. Great price, but I question their choice in casing.
For $299.99, they got a Asus EN7600 GT (350 MHz). That seems unwise to me because, for $10 less, they could have gotten a much faster XFX 7900GT (470 MHz) or, for the same $299, they could have gotten another XFX card overclocked to 520 MHz. I own the latter card, and am very happy with it. And don't get me started on Radeon X1300...
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http://geeklimit.com.nyud.net:8080/2006/06/13/geek limit-vs-toms-hardware-800-gaming-machine/
http://geeklimit.com/2006/06/13/geeklimit-vs-toms- hardware-800-gaming-machine/
http://ultimod.org/?url=http://www.tomshardware.co m/2006/06/12/your_diy_gaming_rig_for_720/print.htm l
Use this url if you're too lazy to copy and paste. It should strip the referer header and take you straight to the one-page print version.
I only mod funny =D
...block of wood and the twist ties? I scoured newegg and pricewatch and came up with nothing.
Well of course it was cheap, they used monopoly money!! Or at least thats what I'm assuming that stands for.
Arguing with an engineer is like wrestling a pig in mud. Soon, you realize the pig is dirty, and he likes it.
4GHz means virtually nothing to me these days. All it says is that the CPU is cycling at 4 billion times per second, but it doesn't say how much work is being done per cycle. Comparing GHz is apples and oranges. Real life testing is where it's at. Give me hard data.
Dude, Give it a rest. Apple finally switched to Intel. You can quit reciting the ole GHZ doesn't mater mantra.
I don't think I like Tom's Hardware any more.
First of all, a few comments about the article itself... The article mentions that the $720 rig is "sufficient for non-gamers". I think they're considering it more for high-end video editing... this also explains the choice of RAID 0. I'm somewhat puzzled with their choice of using 3G/s discs on a 1.5 G/s SATA board, however. I suppose this could be for economic reasons -- those Samsungs could be about the cheapest disc on the market at the moment.
Moreover, since when is Dual Core really a gaming solution to begin with? Sure, if you want to make big downloads or burn CDs in the background while gaming, there might be some benefit. Other than that, we have a handful of games that actually support dual core. I guess it makes sense to include dual core for the sake of future releases, but what's the point of installing something that's basically bleeding edge (as far as gaming is concerned) on a budget system? It seems to me that your other components are going to be horribly dated well before most game releases are really supporting dual cores.
Am I wrong here? Have games started secretly taking advantage of two physical cores while I wasn't looking? Are we in the future yet?
Why is something that gobbles up power & sounds like a lawn mower considered attractive to people ? I'd rather have something quiet & efficient. Are games really needing this type of power ?
I can imagine plenty of business uses for a box like this, however is the home draw for this very big ? If so, is it purely the "pimp my PC" crowd that goes for this ?
Just curious.
No, GHz really is of very little importance. Take a look at the benchmark differences between AMD and Intel chips. AMD's Athlon XP chips did more work per clock cycle than any Pentium 4 processor of the same vintage. Next, look at Intel's offerings compared amongst themselves. A 3GHz Pentium 4 and a 3GHz Celeron are also drastically different. A 1.8GHz Opteron will spank a 2GHz Athlon XP any day.
Differences in work done per clock cycle don't just apply to the PowerPC architecture. I know you were probably just trying to be funny/cute, but the fact remains that once CPUs started hitting the hundreds of MHz, the performance gap grew and people began to notice how architecture efficiency really played a part in performance. It's even more true today than it was then.
That way I can add the following to anything from Tom's Hardware:Because if add do that, the site becomes readable, without it being too infringing on the layout. I use Web Developer's `outline Blocklevel elelemnts` and can then easily determine wich one should be places fixed -10000 px, so out of sight.
This would also work for many other add infested sites that use CSS where Adblock can not do much,
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
"Am I wrong here? Have games started secretly taking advantage of two physical cores while I wasn't looking? Are we in the future yet?"
Yes, yes, maybe.
Maybe I'm showing my age here, but anytime I see a PC that isnt inside a nondescript beige box, I hear this voice inside my head that says "Wow, that's cool they make those trick boxes nowadays."
Yes, this voice sounds alot like Grandpa Simpson.
I was shopping around for a new machine today, and what I discovered is that the "state of the art" in America doesn't QUITE match the specs of the machine I bought in akihabara a year and a half ago... which was half the price! I was really shocked and depressed. The best of the best you can get in America these days is shameful... In fact, for the price of some of these systems, especially the prepackaged ones (over $2000 at DELL and all you can give me is 800 Mhz FSB!?!?), it would be cheaper to fly to Japan, build a new machine with top of the line parts and bring it home in the carryon. I could probably resell my machine today for a profit...
And the ironic thing is, these are mostly American parts!? They will seel them to Japan, but they won't give them to us!
Tell me, where in America can I buy a 3.7Ghz Intel + 4mb dual channel ddr2 677mhz + 1066mhz fsb mobo + 250GB SATA2 + 19 in LCD (1280x1024@92dpi) + Nvidia 6600 256MB PCI-E + DVD+/-RW (plus silly foo-foo "packaged" add-ons like gigabit lan, 7.1 surround sound, various memory card readers, etc) for less than about $900? Because if you can find that place, you can tell them they are Just Now selling what I bought the October before last in Akihabara.
Oh, and before I forget... 100MBit fiber, to the home, for less than $40 a month, but that is a different rant.
The amount of Tom's Hardware articles has been rediculous lately. Does noone check the news page of toms site? Why do we have to mirror it on /.?
If Tom's page is so important to the slashdot crowd then twice a year do a summery of "The best Tom's Hardware Articles" or something along those lines. Quite frankly it seems to me Slashdot is getting paid to keep metioning this place, or the editors are just obsessing over Tom's hardware way too much.
So, on to more important things ...
no, you're right. But honestly, they are probably just going for the future curve bit, where you spend a coupla bucks more now, and then don't have to worry about it in the future, because, ya know, building these things is so danged difficult that most folks that build one (or read THW for that matter) won't remember how to change simple components in the future, so might as well save time and "money" by installing it now
I agree with the thought that they forgot this was a gaming rig. I mean, how many bleading edge gamers __need__ raid anything? SLI maybe, but raid???
2^3 * 31 * 647
Any idea how those setups compare to overclocking an Opteron 165?
*Looks for the buy it now link*
But I looked on newegg and I found it for... oh wait, have we done this already? /me goes back to sleep
In this world nothing is certain but death, taxes and flawed car analogies.
Some of the pics of water cooled systems I have seen look about as safe as Lady Godiva in a Tehran street market.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
This isn't an ultimate gaming rig, hell it's not even a decent gaming rig. An ATI x1300? That's very sub-par. So yes you'll end up with a super fast CPU, but using slower memory and a value graphics card you won't do much gaming. To really get something decent you need to go to their $1250 version, and that's not really cheap anymore, anyone can come up with a good configuration for that price.
Kenny Rogers' gaming rig...
in my book, both under/overclocking have benefits. i underclocked the gpu in my laptop in hopes of saving on heat and battery. if i ever get around to buying water-cooling, then i will look more closely at overclocking.
i'm a fan of overclocking to get the best value. good example, the manchester core x2 and the toledo core. the 4400 with the toledo core performs almost on par with the 4600, at around $90 less. introduce some good cooling and overclock it to achieve approximately the performance of the fx60.