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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.
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Now minesweeper will REALLY rock!
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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
For those of us that don't read both it's kinda nice...
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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.
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.
Maybe you should stop reading dig? Are you telling me that /. editors should monitor dig and not post stories found there? What if the story is not highly rated? What if it comes up on google news? What criteria should they use? Pretty dumb idea IMHO.
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Lots of us don't read Digg since it's mainly targeted at retards and young children. I know this is a lot to ask of a Digg reader, but please at least try to think before posting.
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?
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.
You're so right; slashdot should change all of their editorial and submission policies based around the news sites you read.
Give me a break. I don't read digg because the site annoys me on several levels. When this site's charter changes to "News for Nerds Who Also Read Digg", then everyone should get right on making your life easier. Until then, if the dupes bother you so much, hack together something in RSS that listens to both sites and presents an unduped, merged view of things that are important to yourself.
Heres some hard data.
Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer
The article seemed to be written from the point of view of
"how cheap can we make a rig that is based around the Pentium D 805"
rather than
"what is the best rig we can specify for ~$700"
When a huge amount is spent on exotic cooling (plus a 12" fan on the case, lol) because the processor gets so hot when overclocked and you want to still hear the gameplay, and sucks down nearly half a kiloWatt of juice, you know something isn't right. The video card is the obvious casualty in this situation, nullifying the entire worth and purpose of the article.
It's a typical THG article, written with a certain bent that almost seems as if it is sponsored, rather than having any real use to the reader.
You missed one:
:P. DIY at it's worst. Next article, how to install a mp3 deck in your car only using chewing gum, spare change and a couple paper clips.
Heatsink: Mounted with piece of 2x4. Super Crap.
Seriously I'd be embarassed to have this computer. Chipset fan mounted with twist ties and a heatsink held in place with a piece of 2x4? That is ridiculous. I stopped reading the article as I was afraid I'd find out they mounted the harddrive with some chicken wire
"If you are going through hell, keep going." - Winston Churchill
The onboard sound chip on my motherboard rocks. The technology of those chips is a great deal better now then it was 5 years ago.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
My $800 system from 3.5 years ago would beat this in most games with justa a $100 video card upgrade.
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
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.
Those numbers were a surge ahead when the specs were announced. At the time of launch they were equal with pc tech and quickly became defunct. The fact is that a console is a dedicated game machine. That is the primary focus. All this BS by Sony is just stupid. I don't even feel comfortable with the Wii potentially having Opera for web browsing (unless it is how they will make the online story for the virtual console).
Of course, I could be wrong. It might be nice to have an upgradable game machine. Oh, that's right, I already do, and since most of the parts conform to some "standard" they are fairly inexpensive. Do you really think that Sony or Microsoft or even Nintendo won't gouge people on the prices of those "upgrades"? It's their hardware, so they can do what they want and people will buy since they want to play that "Ultra Super Console Fragfest XVIII".
I have nothing to say.
Hey, but at least we aren't accusing Tom of being biased for AMD's like /.ers usually do.
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
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
Thomas Pabst (the guy who started the site) is from Germany. He just recently sold/left the site, but I doubt the blokes running the show have English as a primary language.
...block of wood and the twist ties? I scoured newegg and pricewatch and came up with nothing.
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.
But I looked on newegg and I found it for... oh wait, have we done this already? /me goes back to sleep
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