Thank you for quoting sources, anandtechs (craptastic admittidly) results are here. http://www.anandtech.com/show/3871/the-sandy-bridge-preview-three-wins-in-a-row/11 Turbo mode is not enabled on the CPUs. They picked some weird games, but I don't see any reason that they would favor the new i5-2400, I believed they were picked as the games were in their test suite. >Edit Honestly that looked like a win for sandy, the only game there was a significant differance in, the CPU bound starcraft 2 it won by a large margin. Both processers seemed like overkill for most games. Reading more now. I swear to god I'm not trying to be purposely diffucult here, but I see games that are only a few frames apart as GPU bound, meaning both CPUs are overkill. I think you can take from this waiting for the sandy bridge i7 isn't that important though, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't get the less powerful i5 if you're only worried about practical results. >Edit2 Nothing on the i5-2500k except IGP performance then? Hmm... that's the one I'm excited about. I still do believe this is by far the best option as it is FAR cheaper then current solutions and anandtech claims it delivers no worse performance.
If the savings are going to be around $100 vs an i7-950 (CPU price is around $220 for the i5-2500k, and $300 i7-950, while mobo prices will be cheaper for LGA1155 then they will be for LGA-1156. Mind you I could be wrong here, do mobo manufacturers inflate prices for new sockets short term?) for what preliminary benchmarks say is just as good as a nehalem, and you only have to wait two weeks... Well I think it's worth seeing if anandtech was right :). I'm not made of money and cannot afford to potentially spend $100 to get a computer two weeks faster.
Thanks for the help, I think I'll just lay off GTA4 until I get my brand new PC that I'll be buying custom made (which'll cost about 3300) I already have it on console so I see no point in really getting it on PC aside from better customization and mods.
brawnoverblood
Why would you get a $3300 rig? If you have a 3300+ now, you really cannot care as much about graphics as you think you do. I see so many people buy top end rigs, and keep them for seven years eventually playing everything at low settings, and I always wonder why they do this. You can get a basic phenom x2/GTS450 rig that will work fine, or a phenom x4/GTX 460 rig that will run great (1080p max settings) for a quarter of that.
This thread is full of blasted lies. The i7 is indeed a great processer, and will continue to be. But the i5-2400 was benched on anandtech to beat every i7 in gaming performance but the i7-980x and costs significantly LESS then any i7 processer. If you stacked the new i7-2600k, in gaming it would beat every processer on the market (the i7-980x should still be used in some professional applications). If you were asking to go from the i7-950 to the i7-2600k, maybe I would say it's a bad idea. But waiting two weeks for either a big discount in price or a big increase in performance, definitely worth it.
I'm used to playing games with up to 8xMSAA on the computer, honestly, when I look at epic mickey I see jaggies EVERYWHERE upscaling to 1080p. When my sister went to a steamboat mickey level (I was only half paying attention) the jaggies in the steamboats windows were quite jarring to say the least. >_> You guys are lucky you don't see them... They haunt my dreams... I found SMG REALLY good at hiding jaggies myself.
I preferred SMG1, it was actually my favorite game, a title that's stood since SMB3. By the time I played SMG2, I lost the novelty of the first game, and didn't enjoy it at all oddly enough. Technically, it's a very good game, but I wish I saw more of a creative spark. Feels more like an expansion pack, a very good expansion pack mind you, then a new game.
A phenom x2 + GTS450 will give you solid framerates at ultra settings, and is the minimum I would suggest on a budget SC2 ULTRA build (I tried athlon x2/GTS450. Doesn't work. after overclocking an athlon x2 from 2.9ghz to 3.8ghz, something that your normal user won't do, my framerates jumped 7fps so yeah quite the bottleneck). Triple/quad cores aren't very relevant in SC2, the most important part of the processer is how fast the first two cores go. The 2 core i3 actually outpaces the 4 core phenom in starcraft 2, mind you that the reverse is true in 95% of games. The GPU in that computer lacks horribly behind, and is not recommended unless you are ok with low settings in games. Most prebuilt computers are like this.
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