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A little practice session/exercise in terms of building a console-level budget PC
Good day gents,
Just finished up reading this article off IGN: http://www.gamespot.com/articles/can-we-build-a-gaming-pc-on-a-console-budget/1100-6418829/ after having a chat with my brother on the virtues and merits of gaming laptops on the budget end.
Now given a budget of 500-550 euros throw together the best rig possible which includes a keyboard and speaker system ( OS optional but useful obviously, prefer windows 7 though will tolerate 8 if it is a package deal).
Limitations:
1) The budget includes shipping and the location is Austria so traditional go to solutions (such as those seen in the gamespot article) for deals may actually end up costing more (transport + taxes).
2) Performance should be, as in the article, better than the PS4 and Xbox One (preferably by a considerable margin).
Purpose of the exercise: Build an idea of the kind of budget required for a near future PC (current laptop is getting more and more knackered by newer gen games) and get new perspectives/opinions in regards to part price/power ratios ( have a strong bias towards Sapphire tweaked AMD GPUs and general disregard AMD CPUs as valid options so yeah could use some opposing opinions backed up by benchmarks if possible ).
Hope to see some replies by people interested in this exercise ^^.
Comments
If you want some builds with budgets, it might be good to provide some sites you prefer to buy from. A lot of the people who know what they're doing and post here are from the U.S. and don't know where to buy computer parts in Europe.
From what I understand, the new generation of consoles are basically using modified versions of AMD's A-core APU. It wouldn't be hard to build a system for $350 USD that has equal performance by using an AMD APU. Adding a graphics card can improve performance while bringing the cost up by $150. Adding an Intel CPU can bring the cost up $50, depending on what you get.
Also, keyboards and speakers are a matter of preference. You can spend $10 on each, or $100 on the keyboard and more than that on the speakers. It is best to keep a budget for the system separate from the budget for the peripherals.
Yea I can't do s**t outside the US.
Give us some acceptable sites and it's a different story. In US we search for anything related to Austrailia we get 500 pages of Platypus pictures.
No preference, the budget dictates how and where not me.
The budget is 550 euros max, roughly 750 USD.
Speakers and keyboard again no preference, build quality is important, extraneous functionality optional (gaming keyboards or speaker systems above 2.1 being classed as having such).
Austria =/= Australia (Austria is sandwiched between Germany, Italy, Hungary and Switzerland to mention the more known countries).
Consoles are specifically designed for the task at hand and run on parts that are mass purchased. Its pretty much impossible to build a PC that will outperform a console in the same price range right after the console releases. Its going to be about a year before that happens.
PS4 uses 8 cores with a GPU that is mid-range last gen and GDDR5 memory. Its just not going to happen under $800.
PS4 cores run at 2ghz or so and are much weaker than standard PC cores.
Go look up Jaguar core benchmarks on the new AM1 platform.
It's possible.
Gamespot already did it both with AMD CPU/GPU and Intel CPU /Nvidia GPU, check the link in my OP.
Ok to help people out I will provide some obvious potential part sources for the EU zone:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/ (check for parts available in the EU using the UK site and to cut costs even more then look for the same part on the german amazon, amazon.de).
http://www.ebay.co.uk/ (select the EU only option in search results to cut down on them if required)
http://www.ditech.at/landingpage.do?node=53855529 (if you can manage german that's a local shop in my area)
http://www.actron.at/loaded.asp?UniqueID=922B-7702B19E-AF62 (another austrian option, a few more follow)
http://shop.ba-computer.at/hardware/komponenten-zubehor.html?cat=1243
http://www.e-tec.at/frame1/indexshop.php?shopart= (use the search function)
These are just a few options (2-3 of em I got by searching "PC parts Austria" via google ).
I think the big problem with matching a console is that the software running on the console is written for that console and is going to squeeze a lot more performance out of the hardware than software running on a PC. If you match the hardware, you're going to fall behind quickly because of the bloat associated with having to write software that works on a dozen or more different configurations.
Which brings me to my second point, or question. Why would you want to simply match a console's performance? They don't seem to be turning in stellar numbers. They seem to be more in the "acceptable" range.
**
Ah, budget. Never mind my mindless ramblings then.
The only advice I have is to stick with AMD for the CPU, as you will save money, and get an acceptable level of performance. Maybe even consider one of their APU parts, and then save up money to buy a video card later since the APU has a built in video component that, while not great, might be "good enough".
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
The Gamespot link did not post the results of the next gen consoles which makes it difficult to gauge where their rigs perform compared to those budget PCs.
They may be 2.0 Ghz but there are still 8 of them. The GPU is still a HD 7850. The PS4 also has access to more memory bandwidth than is currently possible in PCs. Realistically, you are in the $800 range with this theoretical performance.
Actually you are wrong (not least of all because of that CPU comparison because precious few games use more than one cpu core and most of those are PC bound by what I know) :
http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/162612-ps4-vs-xbox-one-performance-compared-using-representative-pc-hardware (note CPU is equalized for comparing the GPUs on those rigs)
http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/pc-vs-ps4-xbox-one-how-to-upgrade-pc/#!E9pel (more valid comparison between the three)
http://gamingbolt.com/new-benchmark-results-show-ps4s-gpu-is-faster-than-xbox-one-can-play-4k-video-frames-faster (a comparison in terms of power/loading speed using bink)
http://guardianlv.com/2013/12/xbox-one-and-playstation-4-beat-by-pc/ (less useful but worth including)
Basically the goal post should be: Able to run current generation (PS4 and Xbox One games) at 40-50 FPS at medium to high settings (comparable graphics quality to the consoles at 5-10 fps more on average basically). 4K functionality is not required (that can always be added in later with a GPU upgrade to be honest). Those are the minimums in terms of preformance.
I like Novatech a lot, i admit it, but its in the UK, and may be doable in terms of distance etc. But here is what i came up with.
http://www.novatech.co.uk/products/barebones/bb-63008b.html
and to that throw in a GPU;
http://www.novatech.co.uk/products/components/nvidiageforcegraphicscards/nvidiagtx760series/n760tf2gd5oc.html
and a HD;
http://www.novatech.co.uk/products/components/harddrives-internal/sata1tbto1.5tb/st1000dm003.html
No OS installed on it, but price for that comes to just under £500, and performance wise completely blows consoles out of the water. That only took a few minutes, and tbh, there should be a 'novatech' equivalent in or nearer Austria
You are around 40 euros over the maximum budget... and pre-builts usually are more expensive than buying the parts yourself and I know how to put a PC together so buying parts to put them together is not an issue for me (observation: no mention of what DDR3s those are which may imply it is one of the parts they skimped out on to increase profits).
Edit: The GPU does not have to be the best possible, that can be upgraded later again but the CPU, power source, the motherboard and the ram cards generally do not get changed often (more costs involved, RAM usually gets another set put in, rarely replaced on the same rig) due to cost considerations so plan that way. Blowing the consoles out of the water is ideal but not realistic for 550 euro.
When you have a fixed, static environment like the console, developers tend to use everything that is available. They may not use it efficiently at first, but the hardware never changes.
There are 8 cores today. There will still only be 8 cores 5 years from now. Games written for the consoles tend to use all available cores. Console games tend to multithread fairly well, because they know exactly how many cores they have available to execute on, and you can highly optimize for that.
PCs are a different story. It's entirely possible you could be running on an 8-core machine, or a 4 core machine with 4 additional virtual cores that behave totally differently than a real core, or a single core, or 12+ cores. You have no idea, and it becomes extremely difficult to optimize for something to just scale, as opposed to optimizing for some generic baseline case. Most games recently have just optimized for 2 or 3 cores; a few have branched up to 4. Very, very few games scale well beyond that on the PC, because there are not many PC's available (in relation to PC units that games are getting played on, not SKU's available to purchase) that have 8 full, real cores available.
So, yes, you can find hardware comparisons that show how the Jaguar cores in the consoles behave, and you can even make some excellent comparisons with that information. But if you have ~similar~ hardware configurations, the console version will perform better because it's been optimized for that specific hardware configuration, where as the PC version won't quite perform as well, because it's been optimized for some baseline PC case.
That doesn't mean the PC is inferior; just that when develop a title, and particularly when you port a title, that you have to consider a broad range of compute power, and that forces you to optimize for some low level baseline case (the minimum system requirements), and then add some fancy features that don't meaningfully impact gameplay and can be disabled on top of that.
In that vein - look at all the graphical options and features you have available on most PC titles, as opposed to console titles. Consoles, generally you have a brightness control, and maybe one or two other miscellaneous options you can choose, and that's it -- because they get so tightly optimized, there's little room to be able to do much else. PC game options can span pages and pages, as the hardware runs in a massive range of available compute power, even if you only consider the current generation of hardware available.
So, to TL;DR in laymens terms -- you do need a bit more powerful hardware on a PC to emulate the same performance as a console, because there is "bloat". I don't think it's all necessarily software bloat, modern OSes do a pretty good job of being fairly transparent and out of the way with their default installation for gaming, but there is some there. And the biggest case is just in optimization. Optimizing for one static set of hardware is very easy; optimizing for a broad range forces you to pick a low level baseline.
Ok, to hopefully get some comments I threw together something myself:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/AMD-FX6300-Edition-4-1GHz-Socket/dp/B009O7YORK/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1398089898&sr=8-1-fkmr0&keywords=FX-6300+bundle+Asrock
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Sabertooth-990FX-R2-0-Motherboard-Multi-GPU/dp/B008RPYAS8/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1398091435&sr=8-1&keywords=ASUS+SABERTOOTH+990FX+R2.0
http://www.amazon.co.uk/EVGA-1176MHz-1255MHz-5400MHz-Graphics/dp/B00IGQ4Z3S/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1398091806&sr=8-4&keywords=750ti
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Mushkin-Blackline-PC3-12800-Memory-240-Pin/dp/B006DN2WEU/ref=sr_1_12?ie=UTF8&qid=1398091922&sr=8-12&keywords=Mushkin+ram
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Corsair-Builder-Series-Modular-Certified/dp/B00ALK1GFC/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1398092033&sr=8-4&keywords=corsair+psu
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Thermaltake-Black-Edition-Chassis-Window/dp/B002Q2M8KK/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1398092218&sr=8-5&keywords=Computer+case+thermaltake#productDetails
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Thermaltake-Black-Edition-Chassis-Window/dp/B002Q2M8KK/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1398092218&sr=8-5&keywords=Computer+case+thermaltake#productDetails x2
That comes out to around 805 euros before transport (another 80ish euros) and the peripherals (100-200 euros) so... advice on cutting that initial price (805) down ? (different CPU, GPU, MB, etc,etc, the HDD storage capacity I'd ideally want 1.5 Tb in 2 distinct HDDs as I tend to tax the hdd quite badly with video editing and so want to keep one just for that to have a redundancy in place).
Well, the first thing I would recommend is dropping that HDD storage. It's not an original priority in the original post.
Nice to have is nice, but a budget is a budget, and nice is the first thing to get cut over necessary.
That being said, why aren't you just looking at an APU in the first place? That would bring the price down by a good margin right there. The top-end APU GPU isn't quite a 7850, but it's close for essentially no extra money.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/AMD-AD785KXBJABOX-Edition-Radeon-Series/dp/B00H7Z7YMI/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1398093583&sr=8-1&keywords=A10-7850K
The CPU is quite a ways weaker on a per core basis, not speaking 4vs6 but raw power, though thus it kinda defeats the purpose and slashing a hard drive (keeping the 1 Tb one) will save around 50 GBP.
A halfway solution would be:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/AMD-FX-4130-4-Core-Processor/dp/B0093HDM3I/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1398097048&sr=8-2&keywords=AMD+4+core
with
http://www.amazon.co.uk/EVGA-1176MHz-1255MHz-5400MHz-Graphics/dp/B00IGQ4Z3S/ref%3Dsr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1398091806&sr=8-4&keywords=750ti
Around 20 pounds cheaper than my initial choices but still around 40 pounds more than the APU ( that CPU is really gimped by what reviews I can find on it to the point it is almost on par with laptop's i5 with 2 physical cores).
One way to further decrease costs (to match the APU) would be a cheaper GPU, I have no clue which ones of the newest generation would be best in this regard, I'd go if I was gonna go cheaper than the 750ti with:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Sapphire-Express-260X-Graphics-GDDR5/dp/B00GI2F036/ref=sr_1_8?ie=UTF8&qid=1398097671&sr=8-8&keywords=R7-260X
Which takes the overall GPU down another 20 GBP bringing it within the acceptable range as an alternative to the APU with a potential bonus of using Mantle on it though I do not know if the FX-4130 is compatible with it.
1st mistake: going with a Haswell vs a Ivy Bridge (the Haswell architecture is barely marginally better in terms of processing power and a comparable Ivy Bridge can be got cheaper) .
2nd mistake: that is a mid-range, not a budget, build and that motherboard is atrocious in terms of RAM upgrade capabilities ( I'd have to get a new paired set of 8gb RAMs if I ever want to go for higher than 8 Gb).
3rd mistake: The 660 OC is at best a marginal upgrade on the 750 Ti for example, performance wise, while costing quite a bit more.
Ok this pretty much the complete form and I reckon it is great for its price range:
ASRock FM2A88M Extreme4+
Sapphire Radeon R7 260X OC, 2GB GDDR5
AMD FX-6300, 6x 3.50GHz
Seagate SV35.5 1TB, SATA 6Gb/s
NZXT SOURCE 210 ELITE Midi-Tower
Corsair CX500 Bronze 500W ATX23
G.Skill D3 8GB 1600-999 Ares LP AO K2 GSK
-470 euros, basic config
Cooler Master Hyper TX3 Evo CPU-Kühler - 92mm
SSD 840 EVO Basic 120 Gb
+100 euros optional upgrades to boost performance (to be done after purchase as funds permit)
+
Iiyama ProLite E2278HSD ~ 128 euros
Acme Standard Keyboard KM03 - 5 euros
Logitech Z200 - 22 euros
I already own a fairly adequate gaming mouse so no point in adding that in so... hmm... a full PC with peripherals for around 625 euros (slightly more if a mouse is required) before upgrades.
If the limiting factor is budget, you should try to get the best computer you can on that budget, not try to match console specs. The first computer linked at the start has an open box video card and a discount copy of Windows off of Ebay that isn't likely to have an unused license key. The second has a case+power supply combo for $30, which basically guarantees you that both are junk and wildly unsuitable for a gaming rig.
Ok and what about the system I cropped together which you see in the post above your first post?
The processor doesn't fit the motherboard, it's not clear whether or not that has two memory modules, the case only comes with one fan, there's no OS, and without an optical drive, a Windows DVD wouldn't do you any good, anyway.
Dang sorry about the CPU, was late and guess I forgot to transfer all the parts to the new list from the old one (some stuff got switched out when I went for the new mobo):
AMD A10-5800
ASRock FM2A88M Extreme4+
Sapphire Radeon R7 260X OC, 2GB GDDR5
Seagate SV35.5 1TB, SATA 6Gb/s
NZXT SOURCE 210 ELITE Midi-Tower
Corsair CX500 Bronze 500W ATX23
G.Skill D3 8GB 1600-999 Ares LP AO K2 GSK
The RAMs are 2x4 Gb ( Größe8 GB : 2 x 4 GB).
Thanks for spotting that fan issue, getting 1x or 2x Noiseblocker NB - eLoop Fan B12 and as for the OS issue I still have an unused copy of Windows 7 Professional, that means unused SN, from my bachelor days and by what I can see it can be installed off a flash drive too: http://pcsupport.about.com/od/windows7/a/install-windows-7-usb.htm
8 GB USB 3,0 DATATRAVELER 100 G (partition it off into two and have one be 5 gb for the install and the other 3 gb with useful programs for a clean install).
In the end 532 euros with the modifications (3 fan config) + 117 euros optional upgrades (now includes an optical drive as well, not a fancy one or speedy one but a robust one with DVDRW capabilities)
+ peripherals as mentioned before:
Iiyama ProLite E2278HSD ~ 128 euros
Acme Standard Keyboard KM03 - 5 euros
Logitech Z200 - 22 euros
Total: 687 euros without transport , without going out of my way to find deals and without upgrades, 804 euros with upgrades.
Austria! Well, then. G'day mate! Let's put another shrimp on the barbie!
The 660 though would require a new power source (600Wish), better air cooling and it is ~100 euros more expensive without being universally a better upgrade (~40%) for nearly twice the price. See the problem?
Probably gonna see how I can use the integrated for some less intensive tasks and save the GPU for gaming if crossfiring doesn't perform well and the APU itself is one of the better ones in its range and is better than equal or cheaper FM2/FM2+ compatible pure CPUs (not by much but enough to warrant the APU over the CPU as I do not plan on OCing it).
Yeah it would be interesting to see upgrades though I am pretty sure you can switch out the 2nd's CPU for an Ivy Bride i5 and get a better GPU later on so it should hold out decently well.