I will hopefully be buying a new computer in November. At the moment I’m looking at these specs:
AMD phenom x4 955 @3.2ghz or x6 1055t
4gb RAM 1333mhz
ATI 5750 or 5770
45cm case with lots of fans
My questions are as follows:
Is it worth paying out for the phenom x6 for the extra cores? I know I will benefit from it in rendering but is it any use for anything else because most games only work with 2 cores right? (I won’t be doing hardcore gaming, I don’t need ultra high settings when playing them and resolution will be 1440x900)
Is it worth buying a 5000 series ati card since the 6000 series will start to be released in november/december I believe. Would it be best to try and get better 5000 series card when the prices drop?
Well, I would say go ahead and dish out for the extra two cores, you never know when they’ll integrate something useful into an OS allowing split processing. Plus, just think years from now, do you want something that was top of the line a year ago or top of the line now. As far as the graphics card goes, that’s kind of your decision. (but honestly, you could probably grab a cheap 4000 series and then just upgrade to a 6000 later, my 4970 does just perfect right)
Even if the 6000 series do come out in November, they definitely will be expensive; more expensive than the existing 4000-5000 siblings. I’m on a gfx card hunt too, but with a much lower budget.
I certainly would advice you to go for X6 processors. When you’re about to render, especially using external renderers like Yafray or Lux, you can increase the number of threads to use for rendering. And that increases the performance to an extent. Also, buying an X6 may make you even more future proof. Who knows when games will start to utilize all the 6 cores?
I am with bartic, drop the x6 idea.
The Phenom x6 is a patchwork manycore processor, no hexacore. It got no new development in its architecture and for serious stuff is a joke really. Plain advertising with quantity.
A Ci5-750 outperforms the x6 in many multicore optimized games and rendering engines, simply due to its superior architecture.
The time is over where pure GHz/FLOPS and the amount of cores determined the power of a CPU. And unless AMD´s Bulldozer architecture got something grand and new, they´ll loose further ground against intel.
As for the GPU, get a GTX460 - it is a bargain.
Cheap, very OC-able, you can get it with 2GB vRAM and you are not limited in any way.
If you please you can use CUDA and openCL.
If you followed CUDA news lately, nvidia drips into all niches. The adapted the API and soon x86 processors can utilize cuda, they offer mobile solutions, made parts of the source available…
openCL is sipmply developing too slow and although I prefere open solutions over proprietary ones, you can´t but admit that CUDA is superior to openCL in performance and development speed.
With a nvidia card you keep both doors open.
With an ati card you close one.
Sorry, didnt read any of the posts - so ignore this if it’s irrelevant.
Don’t go for the most expensive and hardcore graphics card if you only want it for blender - all a graphics card does for you is speed up the interface. It doesn’t effect rendering at all…
no wonder a x2 or x4 can compete with a x6 in games when most games are optimized for 2 cores amazing… more cores only shine in rendering rendering and probably some encoding and compression stuff.
i have a x6 1055t and i was able to raise the clock to 3500mhz(2800stock) and even lower the vcore and that gives me some pretty decent performance:O
be aware that the NVIDIA drivers at the moment are really bad with the fermi (4xx) cards and you will have problems handling more than 100k polygones.
my 2 generation old card beats thesh… out of the fermi when it comes to the 3d viewport an high poly counts.
so either you wait till there might be drivers that fix this (if its not a driver feature to make you buy quadros for 3d stuff) or buy a different card.
Thanks for the help so far.
I can afford an i5 760 @2.8ghz so I may go for this. I can’t afford an i7 so your all saying a qaulity intel processor is better than a higher clocked AMD chip.
I will be doing some gaming and know the GPU doesn’t help rendering.
My current choices are ATI 5750, 5770 or Nvida 450.(sorry got confused)
Although I hear Nvida cards are power hungry and get very hot.
I was for a very long time looking into AMD but found that the comment about marketing slogan is right.
More bang for the bug is wrong if you do you own tests. The last one I did in person was an AMD x6 and Intel i7, same price and same Ghz and the AMD was a fraction slower.
This shows that the architecture of AMD is just not what they claim.
I agree here that if you want the x6 go with a high clocked i5 which is cheaper and beats it and use the rest of the money for your system.
Thanks for that.
I’m trying to keep under my budget of £700 and it’s tight at the momment.
Does anyone recommend RAID 1 (mirroring) because I think its a great idea and worth the money but if hard drives are very reliable these days then I won’t bother.
Oh, and can anyone recommed a custom pc building company because its hard to find one that has lots of good reviews and is reasonable. I’m currently looking at Cyber power Pc (http://www.cyberpowersystem.co.uk/)
unless you need it now wait a month. ati is launching the hd6700 near the end of october which should cause a price drop for all current graphics cards. on black friday you might even be able to find a 6700 card as cheap as you would pay for the 5700 now, and the 6000 line is rumored to beast the 5000 line by 30%. i think you’ll save alot on the cpu by waiting till black friday, getting the same card for half the price or twice the card for the same price. just google black friday ads, they should start leaking soon.
I wrote “many multicore optimized games”
Hence multicore - not dual or quad or hexa or octa.
High quality multicore code, like Anno1404 which scales linear with the amount of cores and similar titles perform poor on the AMD x6 due to its architecture compared to the Core-i architecture. Its no hexacore its a patchwork of 3 dualcores, which on a machinecode level is a huuuuge difference.
As for rendering.
Phenom2 x6 1055T: Cinebench: 16.205 - 200 Euro
Core i5- 760: Cinebench: 14.384 - 160 Euro
4 Cores, 100% power, 100% price, better performance in games
6 cores, 113% power, 125% price, worse performance in games
And the Ci5 next room runs without changing any voltages with 3.8GHz on aircooling.
But its up to everyone where one sets the price to cost ratio - and prices change daily.
The Phenom2 x6 just is no mature product.
And to compare hexacore with hexacore:
Ci7-980X : cinebench 26.650
Phenom2 x6 1090t: cinebench 18.097
I think there the superiority in the core-i architecture and a real hexacore is obvious.
While the 980X’s price is astronomical
All I say is the Phenom2 x6 in Thuban architecture is the poorest attempt of an CPU since Intel’s Pentium 4 and to skip it, not that hexacores or anything beyond quadcores is bad… Phenom2 x6 is a product to fill the hexacore gap AMD has until they got Bulldozer on the market to have a hexacore product like Intel does.
It is basically what they did with the Phenom 1.
It was 2 dualcores patched together to have a counter to the Core2Quad architecture, which actually was already a native quadcore architecture.
With the Phenom2 AMD had a native Quadcore on the roadmap, just not ready then.
I got a fermi, had no probs so far, but true, high poly openGL performance´s not too great, but I really don´t doubt nvidia driver dev´s to fix that anytime soon.
Broken down its just a matter of what features you need choosing ATI or nvidia.
I needed 3DVision and CUDA for work. Leaves not much room for choise. =)
Get the nvidia
In a truckload of benchmarks, unified and normalized over DX9 and DX10 games (Anno, CoD, Crysis W, MAssEff2, NFS Shift, BC2, CMR, GTA4, Metro 2033, WoW).
In short:
HD5750: 44.8% - 110 Euro
GTS250: 47,7% - 85 Euro
HD5770: 54.3% - 130 Euro
HD5870;: 86.2% - 340 Euro
GTX480: 100% - 400 Euro
The GTS250 is neither a powerhog nor hot and you don´t need to be a scientist to see the price:performance winner.
I had a GTX9800+ which is the very same card just rebranded for years. Ran at ~50°C under full load with non reference cooler and the whole system including heavily OC´d processor and a second graphiccard drew ~280W out the wallsocket.
Thanks for the advice everyone, I think I’m going to wait it out and hopefully make some savings by buying in december because of seasonal sales and hopefully price reductions on the ati cards. (I’m just not sure about Nvida)
I fail to understand how it isn’t what they claim, as every time I’ve looked on newegg, it says their manufacturing tech is 45mm, while intel’s is 30 something, which clearly shows theirs will be faster, yes you can buy SOME intel’s for the same price as amd, but not the top end ones, almost every top end intel is over 1000, if not right at it, which the ‘equivalent’ amd is around 250, I say ‘equivalent’ because we do know that on most very extreme stress tests, the intel will pull ahead.
As far as someone suggesting nvidia, I would honestly shy away from them, unless they just really pull something amazing out, you can always (as far as I’ve noticed) buy an ati that is better for cheaper or same price.
I think ATI cards are in general a bit better then the NVIDIA cards since in
the past time NVIDIA was more then often critizied for not really developing
new cards but rather nearly rebranding old as new models.
Architecture wise I have to agree again with arexma since what he wrote
is basically the same I heard from my tech experts in Germany who work
for the C’t a pretty big and I would say independent hardware technology magazine.
But all might change when new products on the market.
However you can always wait for something better - but if you can wait till sales time
I would do that.
Well, I will never disagree that Intel is better, because it is. Just, AMD is affordably better. It works in the affordable community, I made my quad-core Phenom 3.2 ghz, at the time the processor was I believe 200 dollars, and at that time, to get the equivalent Intel i7, it was 1200 (more than what my full computer build cost me). So, to say Intel is better… YES, most definitely, to say that I’d advise anyone without a 70k per year salary to buy one, definitely not.
Still, if you can afford the respected intel’s ‘match’ to an amd, go for it.
amazing… more cores only shine in rendering rendering and probably some encoding and compression stuff.