frozentundra123456
Lifer
- Aug 11, 2008
- 10,451
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In a budget gaming rig (average gaming machine is $600-700 in most of the world) an extra $100 towards the video card will always give more performance then an extra $100 in the CPU.
For a $1300-1500 budget sure Intel's higher end CPUs are fine, I keep recommending those on forums. So are expensive cases or even RAM. But this was about the bang for the buck. For gaming in full HD once you have a powerful video card the diff is only some 10-15% between the 2500K and the Ph II X4.
Definitely the Intel is not twice as fast in anything and mostly not in gaming.
There are some 1 billion PCs in the world, the enthusiast market is maybe 5%. Same with the cars. Ferrari, Porsche, Lamborghini, Aston Martin, etc don't sell many cars.
IMO the most interesting part of the Bulldozer line are the budget quads. I would like a quad that is close to the i-3 in single threaded apps and has the benefits of the extra cores.
I wont dispute any of what you say. However, even for a budget system, I dont really see why people are so concerned about 100.00 or even more extra for the CPU. If you game on the computer, that is only equal to a couple of games, or a month of two cell phone bill, or a couple of times to go out to eat, etc. My point being that for most people, we could easily cut expenses this much and use the extra to invest in a better CPU. Maybe if someone is a student or really strapped for cash, this wouldnt apply, but in most cases I think it would.
And if you consider that the extra investment could lengthen the interval between upgrades, I think it could be money well spent, as well as making the computer more proficient in other tasks besides gaming.