Core i7 a waste of money for gamers, says Nvidia

[SickBeast]

NV is waging quite a PR battle against intel lately. :Q

 

[coreyb]

It is a waste if you're looking for gaming performance. The 285 will get you that, the i7 will not.

 

[dguy6789]

Originally posted by: coreyb
It is a waste if you're looking for gaming performance. The 285 will get you that, the i7 will not.

The i7 can get you gaming performance, just not very cost effective when it comes to price vs performance. Exactly the same deal with the GTX285. It's a little more extreme with the GTX285 though since there are as fast or faster cards than it that are available for a lower price.

Nvidia simply can not accuse Intel of making high end products that aren't worth the cost when they do the exact same thing only worse in the GPU market.

 

[alcoholbob]

They suggest SLI, but i7 is *the* SLI platform as its SLI scaling is BEASTLY. NVIDIA just wants you to buy their entire platform lineup and get the cheapest Intel CPU.

 

[mmnno]

Originally posted by: Just learning

Originally posted by: Golgatha

Originally posted by: Just learning
http://www.bit-tech.net/news/h...of-money-says-nvidia/1


Wow. This is pretty amazing coming from a company that is competing with AMD (ie, ATI).

For gamers, yes, the Core i7 is a complete waste of money if you're trying to get better gaming numbers. For everything else, the Core i7 is smooth as butter.

I also like the idea of being able to buy a mobo that supports two full PCI-E 2.0 x16 lanes for only $120.

We are definitely approaching the point (with GT300 and HD58xx on the way) where PCI-E 2.0 x8,x8 won't be cutting it anymore. That means a intel person needs x58 chipset which costs a lot more than a $120 AM2+.

How is SSD performance on the AMD side? If their southbridge doesn't cut it then you aren't saving any money if you want to go down that path in the future.

 

[Udgnim]

he has obviously never played GTA 4

although it's more of a fault of Rockstar's crap port job

 

[cbn]

Originally posted by: mmnno

Originally posted by: Just learning

Originally posted by: Golgatha

Originally posted by: Just learning
http://www.bit-tech.net/news/h...of-money-says-nvidia/1


Wow. This is pretty amazing coming from a company that is competing with AMD (ie, ATI).

For gamers, yes, the Core i7 is a complete waste of money if you're trying to get better gaming numbers. For everything else, the Core i7 is smooth as butter.

I also like the idea of being able to buy a mobo that supports two full PCI-E 2.0 x16 lanes for only $120.

We are definitely approaching the point (with GT300 and HD58xx on the way) where PCI-E 2.0 x8,x8 won't be cutting it anymore. That means a intel person needs x58 chipset which costs a lot more than a $120 AM2+.

How is SSD performance on the AMD side? If their southbridge doesn't cut it then you aren't saving any money if you want to go down that path in the future.

I definitely want SSD for the Future. (actually I am looking forward to that as my best upgrade when Windows 7 reasonably matures)

Will getting a AMD motherboard affect the performance of that?

 

[taltamir]

a problematic southbridge can CAP the performance... i have not heard anything about that being the case with anyone right now.

 

[Fayd]

Originally posted by: Just learning
http://www.bit-tech.net/news/h...of-money-says-nvidia/1


Wow. This is pretty amazing coming from a company that is competing with AMD (ie, ATI).

well, if you noticed, they didnt mention ATI once in that article. despite the fact that ATI is competitive with C2D and C2Q, they treated the only possible options as I7 and C2D/C2Q.

whatever. it is hilarious to see nvidia smack intel.

 

[Leyawiin]

Originally posted by: dguy6789

Originally posted by: coreyb
It is a waste if you're looking for gaming performance. The 285 will get you that, the i7 will not.

The i7 can get you gaming performance, just not very cost effective when it comes to price vs performance. Exactly the same deal with the GTX285. It's a little more extreme with the GTX285 though since there are as fast or faster cards than it that are available for a lower price.

Nvidia simply can not accuse Intel of making high end products that aren't worth the cost when they do the exact same thing only worse in the GPU market.

He's talking about a $1,000 CPU. Not a barely over $300 GPU. You can get very nearly the same result in gaming with a less than $300 CPU paired with the same GPU. The most you'll save and not compromise performance much on the GPU front is $50 for an HD 4890 or GTX 275. Hmm...$700 vs. $50. Your analogy isn't even close.

 

[mmnno]

Originally posted by: taltamir
a problematic southbridge can CAP the performance... i have not heard anything about that being the case with anyone right now.

It was the case with P35 and P45, but not X48/X58. Or maybe it was just P35 that was inadequate, and everything after that was fine. In any case, I never heard anything about AMD boards, good or bad, and I don't remember seeing any SSD reviews that used them.

 

[Idontcare]

Originally posted by: SickBeast
NV is waging quite a PR battle against intel lately. :Q

It beats the alternative, AMD stood nearly silent in the shadows of Intel's advertising and PR for a decade while all of us monday morning chief marketing executives decried how silly it was for AMD to have no advertising budget.

NV is going the exact opposite and raising a ruckus every opportunity they get. It's all free advertising. Just look at how much air-time this crap gets here on the forums. It's not viral when its blatant, and we just eat this stuff right up and come back begging for more. Somewhere a NV bonus check just got cashed.

 

[BFG10K]

Originally posted by: dguy6789

No kidding. The Core i7 is no more a waste of money than the GTX 285 is.

Uh no, not even close. Any rig with a half decent CPU will see a far larger performance gain overall in modern titles by getting a GTX285 than any CPU upgrade.

The ironic part is that high-end quad-core CPUs often cost much more than a high-end GPU like a GTX285, and to rub salt in the wound, half of the cores sit unused in 99% of games.

This is one area where I completely agree with nVidia: CPU bottlenecking is completely overhyped. Most newer titles are massively GPU limited and benefit far more from GPU upgrades that any CPU upgrade.

Even if you?re CPU limited, you can still get benefits from a GPU upgrade by allowing free eye candy such as a higher resolution and/or AA level. But if you?re GPU limited you can upgrade your CPU until you?re blue in the face but you won?t get any benefit. Not unless you drop to a 1980s VGA resolution like 640x480.

 

[glugglug]

I'm curious, has anyone done game benchmarking on the i7 with hyperthreading turned OFF?

Intuitively, I'd expect hyperthreading to actually hinder game performance as there aren't any games using more than 4 threads, and if you get 2 threads scheduled to virtual cores on the same real core they slow each other down.

 

[dguy6789]

Upgrading to a GTX285 from what, upgrading to a Core i7 from what? It's all relative. If you have an E2000 series at stock and a Radeon 4850, you would get a much bigger increase in gaming performance going to an i7 than you would from going to a GTX 285. I'm not saying CPUs are better upgrades for gamers than GPUs, they aren't and probably never will be most of the time. I am saying that there is a time and place for each upgrade being worth the money. Just blanket stating that the Core i7 is a waste of money all around is incorrect. Going from a Pentium 4 to a Core i7 is an astonishing performance improvement that anyone would be happy with. Going from a Core 2 Quad Yorkfield to a Core i7 probably isn't worth it from a gaming performance standpoint alone. It's exceedingly obvious that this article is not about being truthful or helpful, it's about bashing Intel and promoting Nvidia.

CPU limitation isn't really exaggerated either. Unreal Tournament 3 runs poorly on a 2.8Ghz Core 2 Duo. That isn't exactly "slow" by today's standards either, that's a pretty moderate processor and it can't run Unreal Tournament 3 properly. Grand Theft Auto 4 is another example of a game that demands massive CPU power. What about Flight Simulator X? All three of these use quad core by the way.

Try running any modern game on a low to mid range CPU with a fancy new GTX 285 and see how well it goes. Suddenly those little advantages it had over other slower video cards goes right out the window. CPUs are essential to gaming.

You say that a quad core's extra cores sit idle most of the time, implying that they are a waste of money. Maybe in older games this is true. However, older games aren't the only thing you can do on a quad core. Nvidia likes to advertise that their newest GPUs are useful for much more than games. They try to make this a huge selling point. The fact of the matter is that a quad core is orders of magnitude more useful to pretty much anyone for non gaming applications than anything an Nvidia GPU has ever been able to do so far.

The difference in responsiveness alone between a dual core and a quad core when you are doing anything demanding CPU power is staggering. How anyone can say there isn't a difference just boggles my mind.

 

[ElBurro]

Intel fanboys calm down! It's not exactly a secret that getting a faster GPU will benefit game frame rates more than a faster CPU. However upgrading the CPU will benefit you in other areas. If your main focus is on gaming than a core 2 duo will do just fine for the foreseeable future. At some point you will have to upgrade the whole system but not right now.

 

[amenx]

Originally posted by: PUN

Originally posted by: solofly
Do any of you actually own an i7 rig? lol

Wait till you get yours and then you'll be signing a different tune.

I am not taking any sides here.
I surf the net, do some spreadsheets/words, photo editing, watch mpeg4 movies, etc
I also game at 1920x1080 high res everything.

Due to recent mishap, i was forced to upgrade from q6600 @ 3.4 to i7 920 @ 3.9ghz-4.1

I see absolutely no difference in any speed between the two system.
I think I fall into the average user/gamer...so unless you do some serious blueray ripping editing, etc...no need to drop the $. You are better off building a nice AMD rig for under $5-600 with hd4890 or GTX260 216.

Personally, i went with the i7 920 platform cuz i have enough money to burn and i can say i have an i7 920 setup

Heh heh.. very poignant post. You may have swayed me a little further away from a future i7 upgrade.

 

[ShawnD1]

Originally posted by: glugglug
I'm curious, has anyone done game benchmarking on the i7 with hyperthreading turned OFF?

I can't remember which site it was, but I do remember seeing this. Turning it off helped a little bit but not much. Seeing frames go from 145 to 150 is small enough to not care about.

Zipzoomfly

Prices after rebate:

Core i7- $265
MSI X58 PRO- $155.89
OCZ OCZ3G1333LV6GK 6GB PC3-10666 - $40 (yes thats right, $40 bucks)

Companies screw around so much with rebates that I don't even bother. Last rebate I sent was a $15 rebate for a hard drive; it took 3 months for them to give me the money. Bunch of bastards.

Anyway, your prices look about right. Newegg has the i7 for $280, cheapest motherboard is $190, cheapest 6gb of memory is $80. It seems like only yesterday that motherboards were $300 and the memory was another $150-200.

 

[SunnyD]

*chuckle*

Nvidia says "Core i7 Sucks for Gamers" (Only because we can't make chipsets for it). Typical Nvidia trolling.

 

[Red Storm]

If the ONLY thing you do on your PC is play games, I can understand the argument being made against i7. However I and many others do much more than just gaming (or else I'd look into consoles), and I welcome the improved performance that i7 provides.

 

[Idontcare]

Originally posted by: SunnyD
*chuckle*

Nvidia says "Core i7 Sucks for Gamers" (Only because we can't make chipsets for it). Typical Nvidia trolling.

It is pretty blatant and transparent, isn't it? What boggles my mind is how many folks are willing to pick up their pitchforks and torches, voluntarily and without compensation, and fight some perceived noble battle on behalf of Nvidia's marketing dept. Its one of the most effective viral marketing campaigns around, the likes of which Steve Jobs would appreciate.

 

[Golgatha]

Originally posted by: Red Storm
If the ONLY thing you do on your PC is play games, I can understand the argument being made against i7. However I and many others do much more than just gaming (or else I'd look into consoles), and I welcome the improved performance that i7 provides.

You betcha. Encoding video never went so fast and my VMware installs love the extra VT bells and whistles.

 

[magreen]

This is the WORST thread I've read in the cpu forum for some time. Geez.

@Megaworks: you misunderstood what OCguy was saying. He was not saying OCing is retarded. Please go back and read it again.

@everybody: it's well known to anybody in the forums with a mediocre level of understanding of what's going on, that at higher resolutions a high end video card affects framerates more than a high end cpu. The only thing interesting in the OP's post to us here on the forums is that back and forth spat between nvidia and intel and what it means to the industry.

Now what's disengenious about nvidia's marketing guy's argument is that everybody knows that buying the extreme edition of a chip you pay a far far disproportionate price premium vs. the performance increase you get compared to the lower down chips in the same line, i.e. i7 940 and 920. He's just milking a marketing point for all it's worth.

 

[ShawnD1]

Originally posted by: Idontcare

Originally posted by: SunnyD
*chuckle*

Nvidia says "Core i7 Sucks for Gamers" (Only because we can't make chipsets for it). Typical Nvidia trolling.

It is pretty blatant and transparent, isn't it? What boggles my mind is how many folks are willing to pick up their pitchforks and torches, voluntarily and without compensation, and fight some perceived noble battle on behalf of Nvidia's marketing dept. Its one of the most effective viral marketing campaigns around, the likes of which Steve Jobs would appreciate.

It is a somewhat noble battle since people were lead to believe that CPU is important when it clearly isn't (for certain tasks). That's the main reason we have retarded Xbox and PS3 fanboys who thought those systems had revolutionary graphics and that the PS3 is some kind of super computer. People praised those systems because both systems have lots of graphics power whereas your home computer with a quad core and integrated graphics has none.

Arguably Nvidia should have been saying this for the past 10 years. ATI dropped the ball too.

Similarly, would you think of Seagate and Western Digital as being a bunch of crybabies if they started telling people that computer boot time and application load time were almost 100% hard drive and the CPU does almost nothing? What if memory companies told people that hard drive thrashing was caused by a lack of memory? Telling the truth, even for personal gain, is always a noble battle.

 

[solofly]

Yes yes, greedy dishonest arrogant nvidia would rather sell you their garbage chipsets i680-790 along with three high end nvidia video cards at a highest price possible. That's the way to do it and you better like it... (ass rape their fanboys)