Need Help From The Glorious PC Gaming Master Race

[TSTR]

R9 280X > GTX 760

[Cronozilla]

The GTX 760 is a very good card. It'll get you playing most 1080p games at high settings. You're not going to max them all out, though, and they're not going to usually be near 60fps, stable.

Here's something to think about:
The price of the i5 4670k ($234.99) and the GTX 760 ($244.99) together is $479.98

Where as an FX 8320 ($139.99) and the R9 280X ($309.99) together are $449.98

The 280X is going to perform the 760 anywhere by 5-10fps, minimum, and in many cases 20fps. And the 280X can even get into 1440p resolution territory. It's pretty similarly speced to the GTX 770, but it's $30-$40 less than that card. (For a frame of reference: It's the difference between 25 fps and 38 fps)

The CPU isn't going to limit this performance very much (Though in combination with an i5 4670K it would perform slightly better, somewhere around 10-13fps higher). To be clear, I'm not saying this AMD chip outperforms that Intel chip. It absolutely doesn't (and it shouldn't, it's $95 less). But the Intel chips don't, generally, cost a reasonable amount more for budget building, and in the case of gaming, the CPU in either case isn't going to be the delimiting factor. The GPU is. By getting a significantly cheaper AMD CPU compared to Intel's "budget" CPU you can easily get more performance for your budget by investing in the parts that will actually improve your performance.

No matter what CPU you choose, you're going to get something that will do everything you need it to, and do it very well. There's no "stinker" to be had here, unless you start going sub $100 and expecting current Athlons to perform well for games.

But, if you just want programs to run well, games to run fast at 1080P, and you want to stick to a smaller budget, then it's kind of a no brainer.

Notes to keep in mind:

In this comparison you're looking at a ~$750 machine that's gonna run all games in 1080P @ 50-70+ FPS maxed vs a ~$780 machine that's going to run games in 1080P @ 20-55 FPS, in most situations. (And doing a combination of the R9 280X with the Intel chip is would be around $850)

In addition to that, since games do not take advantage of the second half of AMD's 8 cores, you could actually put in a FX6300 and for current games experience identical performance to the FX 8320. And that would cut another $40 off that price tag, making it something like $710.

You can check out the 280X here

It is definitely a hefty priced GPU compared to the range you were looking at, but it is actually cheaper than the competition and within 2fps, on average.

Also, I haven't actually pieced together the machine, so the prices of full builds is a informed guess based on the prices we've looked up so far.

If you're aiming at a lower budget than whats here (or more similar to what was discussed earlier in the thread), just keep in mind, gaming on something like a GTX 750 isn't going to be particularly enjoyable, it's just going to get the job done and probably not at the resolution you want. The R9 270X is about as close to the GTX 760 in performance as the 280X is to the 770 and the 270X is only $40 more than the GTX 750 on Amazon. And we discussed the R9 270 before as well, it's the exact same price as the GTX 750, and performs almost as well as the 270X and GTX 760. The GTX 750 really doesn't seem worth the cash unless you can get one for much less than $150.

[oxymoron]

So 280x is better then a GF 760? I saw one on there for $220 refurbed. I could definitely do that. I can't go to $750. I started at $500 then $550 then $600 and so on until I got to $700.


http://pcpartpicker.com/parts/partlist/

[Cronozilla]

Yeah it's like the next jump up.

You can see an example of some benchmarks here for raw card comparison. They use a reference 760.
http://www.techspot.com/review/841-rade ... page8.html

Refurbished huh? I'm gonna say, that'd really have to be up to you. Most refurbishing is covered for like 90 days. And, with a component like a graphics card, my concern would be that's an unreasonably short amount of time.

I understand if you gotta save the cash. That was my entire argument, after all. But, no warranty on a GPU would, personally, bother me. It's just, if the card fails, for any reason, you're pretty much SOL. You would either need to buy a new card, or you could contact the manufacturer and pay for out of refurbished warranty repair ... which most claim is on a "case by case basis". Probably cheaper to buy a new card.

Another option is the R9 280 (no X), it performs better than the 760, and is cheaper than it too. It's normally about $225, right now at some places there's a rebate for $20, making $205. At that price it's a pretty good deal, it's performance depends on the game, but it seems to bounce between being ~3-5 fps better than the 760 and ~3-7 fps worse than the 280X. So, it might be a nice compromise if you do want that warranty security. (The rebate is currently not available on Amazon, since Amazon as a seller is out of stock)

You can check that card out here:

That would make the system, prior to a rebate, $700 even, almost. $680 after. You wouldn't be getting 50-60FPS in 1440p ... but you're not gonna be getting 19 either. (Again, if you were really hard nosed about it, you could get it down to $660 prior to rebate by shaving the CPU back even more. You would be giving up general system speed to some degree, but in game performance would be virtually identical for current games.)

It is perfectly possible that the refurbished card could never have any trouble too. But that's really something you'd have to decide for yourself, since there's some inherit risk to it.

If you're not sure, take a look at this guy's videos here https://www.youtube.com/user/AlphaTango ... ion/videos He's got some 1080P FX 8320 and R9 280 combo videos with FPS counter and all that. It'll give you a good idea if that is good enough for what you want to play.

[Frag Mortuus]

The key here is that there are so many competent combinations of equipment that you can get satisfactory results from any combination of builds as long as you pick parts that are capable of doing the job you want.

I have built both AMD and Intel systems and both have served me well. The reason I choose Intel these days is that I feel the return in performance is worth the extra money. I have been using the 1366 platform which is the first gen i7 platform since 2009 and can still run everything I come across, maxed out. So, I anticipate getting another few years out of this CPU/MoBo combo before feeling the need to upgrade again. The PC I had before this one was an AMD build, and believe it or not, I built it using the first consumer dual core CPU when it was brand new. This system was state of the art when I built it and after three years the system couldn't run any modern games at 30fps with lower settings, even after adding more RAM and upgrading my GPU's. So, I feel that game developers catch up to the capabilities of AMD CPU's faster than they do those of Intel. But, there is also a reason why the highest-end Intel CPU's cost $1000 and the highest-end AMD CPU's cost around $250. If you like AMD you should be able to build a high end AMD system for much cheaper and in turn probably more often than with Intel.

[oxymoron]

Is the PC i'm building better than the PS4/XB1?

http://pcpartpicker.com/p/RMpMXL

[TSTR]

Is the PC i'm building better than the PS4/XB1?

http://pcpartpicker.com/p/RMpMXL

You'll be able to run modern games looking nicer than those consoles with that for sure.

[Cronozilla]

Is the PC i'm building better than the PS4/XB1?

http://pcpartpicker.com/p/RMpMXL

Yes, with one caveat.

The PS4 and XB1 use an AMD 8 core CPU, which has the same CPU core architecture as the FX 8320 and 8350, etc.

The only way this system would be hurt by the FX 6300 is if games ported to PC, built for those consoles, utilized that architecture properly. Or if AMD support got worse, but I don't think that'll happen. Even when AMD and Intel introduce their new chips and architectures, support for the previous generation is usually good. And the current FX stuff is second generation already, so support will be pretty widespread.

This build should be good for a few years. In 3 or 4 years you'll see that the settings in games needs to be turned down more often, but it takes a very specific scenario for it to be CPU bound and not GPU bound, when it comes to games.

If there's a big leap in CPUs again, and games take advantage of that, you'd then start to feel it in this machine. But that usually takes a two or three years after the introduction of the new chips to happen.

[isiolia]

The PS4 and XB1 use an AMD 8 core CPU, which has the same CPU core architecture as the FX 8320 and 8350, etc.

PS4 and One have Jaguar core chips, basically from the AM1 socket lineup, which competes more with the Intel Atom series and the like. They're also more of two quad cores squished together than a true 8-core chip. At least at one point, only six cores were accessible for games on the One as well. Could be similar on the PS4.

FX series are Bulldozer/Piledriver/Steamroller, which have much better performance per core.

[Cronozilla]

Interesting. I thought it was a more current CPU architecture.

I suppose that would alleviate some of my concerns.