I R COMPOOTER UPGRADES

[Onibaku]

so ive been looking at cost effective computer upgrades and looking where the computer market has gone.
damn i should just keep up to date on this stuff instead of having to research it every 2-4 years LOL


so right now i have an amd athlon 2 64 3800+ dual core

running on OB gfx.

OB GFX has come along since when it first came out.

now theres crossfireX and upgraded SLI (just read up on normal crossfire vs SLI and its variants)

suffice to say CrossfireX sounds awesome and the upgraded version of it even better....


TO THE POINT NOW
if i get a computer and want to run crossfire or even an APU like AMD A6-3650
will it even be able to run msc? or will it be to new to even run properly....

havent looked at directX and compatibilities with this APU at all...
but i Definitely want to get a GFX discrete class card to run with this set up in the future.
ideas? up here a setup with 4gig (2x2) dual channel is being sold 450 CAD no tax.

obviously i COULD get an I7 ultra bs and what not... but the price doesnt give me the biggest bang for the buck.

 

[Keldorn]

ATI cards generally don't work well with MSC.

The main appeal of the cheap Llano APUs is that you can get them instead of getting a cheap CPU + a cheap GPU.

It's kind of a bad idea to get a low end APU if you're getting a mid to high end graphics card though. The graphics on the APU will remain unused, so you're basically spending the same amount of money for a strictly worse processor than this one.

An i5 2500k (Was around 150 USD at microcenter recently, which blows away any processor in its range in terms of price vs performance), or a Phenom II X4 955 black edition (Around 120 USD right now) + a mid-range card would probably be your best bet at the moment.

 

[Thothie]

AMD has just being going downhill ever since they took over ATI. I really think they're just spread too thin, as it seems they can do neither CPUs nor GPU's right these days. Unlike their Graphics, they at least still offer some good high end CPU's from time to time, but they rarely compete with a like-tiered Intel, and even their most elite CPU's, on those rare days they make some gains, get pounded down pretty quickly.

ATI is bad with MSC and anything OpenGL (eg. Minecraft). In Windows 7/Vista, there's four separate software emulation layers to go through before you hit the GPU, which not only slows things down and swamps the CPU, but allows for all sorts of chaos to happen in-between via misinterpretation- which ATI does patch from time to time, but they still haven't fixed every issue, and the performance issue is unavoidable. Even under XP, it still goes though two levels before hitting the GPU. Vs. Nvidia's two levels in 7/Vista, and direct hardware access in XP.

I don't want to see OpenGL go the way of HTML, where every interface seems to have it's "Own Idea" of how OpenGL should be interpreted, but that's where ATI is trying to take us with their system. Which, I suppose, is slightly better than where Microsoft wants to take us: OpenGL extinct.

 

[Onibaku]

@ keldorn

HD 6670, HD 6570 and HD 6450 are the cards i can crossfire with the a6 3650


on benchmarks between phenom2 X4 955 vs a6 3650 the a6 ranks 1500 pts HIGHER than the phenom
(on passmark benchmarks)
should i be shopping based on bench marks or am i missing something?
how does this benchmark happen when the a6 has only a L2 cache
vs phenoms L3
..

i do know the apu cores are based on the phenom.

lol maybe i should just go intel? ... however when i look at price per performance the apu outperforms the I3 and some I5
based on benchmakrs

hmnnnn

 

[Keldorn]

Passmark doesn't really tell the full story.

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/399?vs=88 (vs. 955)

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/399?vs=288 (vs. 2500k)

The a6-3650 cores are not phenom, they are athlon, so it wouldn't make any sense for the a6-3650 to strongly outperform the 955.

Judging from this, it seems that asymmetric crossfire doesn't work well at all in DX9 games.

 

[Onibaku]

ohhh sad face

starcraft2 was on there ... thats one of the games i plan on playing with new compooter.
lol
ok back to drawing board then....


thx for the benchmark site...

 

[Onibaku]

based on tothie and keldorns info i guess im getting an i3 with geforce or nvidia cards now

i checked out the i3 vs apu and im kinda shocked at the diff btwn passmark and anandtech's scores.
lesson to be learned... look at how the testing methods are carried out... doh! damn you college!! damn you to hell!!

 

[Onibaku]

so in looking further...
im looking at socket 1155 and not 1156 b/c 1155 is the newer model motherboard for the newer i3/i5/i7 stuff...

im looking at buying an i3 1155 board cpu combo then maybe a year down the road an i7 2600k later

is the i7 extreme any good?

 

[Thothie]

Jes, if you can put out the cash for both it and the mobo it requires.

 

[Onibaku]

whats wierd is current intel chips out there only use 1333 mhz...

so should i buy the 1600mhz ram and mb to support it? or ? i have tried to find some reason why 1600mhz is available intel side and there is none.

im not rendering or mapping .... yet for msc lol so i dont think i would miss the diff btwn the two ram speeds...
if thats the case i can get a kick ass gfx + mb+i3+1333mhz ram +ssd hd

good combo? plz advise

 

[Thraxis]

I know it's a few days old, but no word on if you are still looking for information as to why certain ram speeds are "supported" or not. I'll make it quick and watered down. When intel/amd/ect make computer chips they have x amount of certifications they have to run, ram being one of them. When "normal" (cheap) ddr3 ram is 1333mhz, intel/mobo makers/ect go after the lowest common denominator and test that and usually a bit outside of that (1066-1600). More testing = longer time to market, more cost due to labor, and lost market opprotunity by launching earlier. Just about any decent board out there that takes the i series will go to 1600, but you won't see any benefit (really ddr2 800 mhz is just about all you need outside of the A series apus which actually due see a benefit in ram speed due to using it for caching textures for the apu itself).