The "REAL" price difference between a Phenom 2 and I7 System - Page 5

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Hey!!
I forgot to mention endless hours of debating in forums!!!

And the best part:

The "Time is money" justification for a faster home CPU is ridiculous to people REGARDLESS of the brand of CPU they own!

In fact I see people that own AMD agreeing with people that own Intel and visa versa on this thread! OH the travesty! We can't be having that... STOP NOW.


EDIT: I didn't really mean literally STOP NOW. It was sarcasm. Carry on... carry on...

UF - I really did consider the OC scenario but I figured:

1) I don't know what I'm doing and would prob blow it up.

2) I still couldn't figure out how to put a system together for any less than the Dell. The Blu Ray burner is what got me - couldn't find one of those for under $199.99... And I was almost ready to buy a BD set top anyways so I felt like I got a twofer... :-)

I didn't tell you to buy anything... just that the "REAL" price difference has less to do with dollars than it does with time. I don't care what you buy.

KTM - I'm doing a home project now where I am "ripping" (not sure if that is the right term - is "ripping" just for audio??) about 1,000 DVD's to H.264. In this case I think I will get done significantly sooner with the i7. At least according to my calcs. So I think the time analysis was significant and worthwhile.

And I'm glad you are not SERIOUSLY advocating we stop - I'm kinda having fun. And really - AMD, Intel, IBM, Motorola - I don't give 2 $HIT$ - whatever performs best for the $$$$ (OH HERESY!!!)

UF - well... so far so good. Like I said it ran over 6000 CPU Mark last night. Truth be told I was surprised! I kind of expected it to be the dog of the i7 camp (being from Dell and cheap parts and all). The BD drive works great and looks awesome on my Sony Bravia. The wireless N works well, bluetooth working - what else. It's Vista... :-( Ill prob look to upgrade to Win 7 after they get the kinks out but I expect that to be a year away at least. I might pop 2 more GB in there as I have 4GB with 2 open slots. 6GB ought to be enough for me. If i get adventurous I might swap out the Radeon 3650 for something beefier (that was the worst part of the PC Mark of course) but I'll have to research what the PS can support, etc. I'm not a gamer so this isn't super critical for me. I'll start "ripping" my DVD's this weekend and see how that goes. Wish me luck....

Deka - EXCELLENT analysis! Bravo! You've made an excellent time vs. $$$ decision for your situation. Can you really put together a PC in 30 mins?? Seriously I'd be working on it a day or two. I did look briefly at Buy vs. Build but I couldn't even source the parts for under $800. Maybe I didn't look hard enough - I didn't spend long obviously. ;-) Just the BD burner and CPU put me at over $400.00! Add MOBO, case, PS, HD, RAM, DVDRW, wireless, GPU, OS, bluetooth and shipping... Well... YGTP.

Yea, it most certainly did liven-up the party. Just be careful!! Next thing ya know you'll be addicted to Over Clocking!!! LOL

Yep, that's a little extreme for me. Think I'll just stick with air cooling. Hovering around @3.8 is plenty good enough for me, as for everyday use.

I've got to get some things done. I'll be back in here in a few hours. Have fun with the DVDs.

SO.... I'm on MSN tonight and lo and behold! An article that deals with EXACTLY what I'm talking about - the value of your free time!! I swear I'm not making this up... look here:

http://moneycentral.msn.com/person [...] /home.aspx

BTW, here are my results from the calculator:

Weekly leisure time 32.15
Hours you must work to buy one hour of leisure time 1.55
Average number of hours worked each week 49.85
After expenses, your net pay per hour is $32.87
In a typical week, you have about 32.15 hours of leisure time. Each of those hours is purchased, in effect, with 1.55 hours of work time or $50.96. You work an average of 49.85 hours per week, for which you get paid a net $32.87 per hour after expenses.
This calculator assumes that you have enough discretionary income to buy more free time. For example, in deciding whether to paint your house yourself, you might figure that the job would take 200 hours of your weekend time, and each hour is worth $32.87. You could pay a painter up to $6,574.07 to do the job instead, in effect buying time from the painter. The maximum price is determined by what an hour of leisure time is really worth to you.

Post a link to 6 gigs for the i7 not a measley 3! for gods sake man who builds an i7 and doesnt give it 6gigs ?!?!? what a waste! Oh yeah and try posting a link to a 790GX mobo, just as good with the same southbridge but CHEAPER.

Can't deny the numbers (that you havent skewed already).

Why dont you reference some decent data and not the playdo stuff from tom's:

http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=3533

in short: for gaming theres didly-squat difference between core i7 and phenom 2. Hell why dont you add the black edition tri-core to your list of fud.

Yes and not someone who has 3 gigs. If your going for something as capable as an i7 your looking at max/near max settings all round for gaming (assuming if your ambitious enough to throw in an i7 then a high-end graphics card is par for the course). Now you would see a small benefit in having more than 3 gigs and say 6-12 months down the line you certainly will. Right now at this very moment 3 gigs is right on the line of being 'just' enough especially with a mechanical hard disk and not a solid state one where HD thrashing is masked to an extent through sheer performance, but moving forward its not gonna stay that way for long. Any game that streams content in rather than loading it all in in advance would be capable of displaying some benefit, and that would be (sweeping statement here) the majority of contemporary titles out there now.

I guess the point is that for gaming on a serious system 3 gigs is a bit measley, and it would be an odd setup where something as relatively minor as system ram is skimped upon. Hell even Battlefield 2 with textures and geometries on 'high' (read larger non-citymaps having higher memory usage than Far Cry 2) would feel just about at home inside a 3 gig system).

Sorry to be back on this thoroughly dead horse, but you are correct MOST games, not all, can only access up to 2.5GB of RAM. I would like to point out that my very clean and optimized system requires almost 1.5GB of RAM in the background at all time, regardless of having 2, 4, or 6 GB of RAM. Either way opinions are opinions so let end this discussion, again.

I see a lot of opinions about memory sweet spots.

XP Pro 32 bit - Sweet spot is 2G
XP Pro 64 bit - Sweet spot is 4G
Vista 32bit - doesn't have a sweet spot, it's memory impaired.
Vista 64bit - Sweet spot 16G which thankfully most Mobos can now support.

Sweet spot for RAM is determined by diminishing return in performance method.

You guys are insane.

I can't see any consumer needing more than 8GB of RAM.

So true...

Remeber when Gates said we didn't need more than 640k of RAM... boy, did he bloat...

This thread is so rampant with fanboyism it's disgusting. A comparable i7 system vs. Phenom II would be something like this:

Core i7 920-$230
http://www.microcenter.com/single_ [...] id=0300438
G. Skill 6gb DDR3 1600 $85
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6820231225
Evga X58 $255
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6813188046
vs.
Phenom II 940 $215
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6819103471
G.SKILL 4GB DDR2 1066 $55
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6820231166
ASUS M4A79 Deluxe $190
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6813131361

Difference: $110.

Bottom Line: You pay more, you get more. For some with a tight budget, Phenon II may be more appropriate, for others who desire more performance, Core i7 is for you. That's it.

Hooray!

If you are building a system with over an $800 budget then you should get a quadcore. If not an E5200 @ 3.6-4.2 Ghz or higher is the only real dualcore that is worth the price, and will actually make a large enough difference to justify forgoing the quadcore.

I don't have a sense of brand loyalty. I just buy the least expensive, quality parts that do the job, so this round goes to AMD for me.

Phenom II is a formidable gaming platform, and it will cost me around 30-50% less. If I bought Intel, I'd be paying for more money for performance I won't see in the apps I run.

Last year I bought C2D however, as Intels CPUs were far superior X2's or whatever.

If you are deciding between a prebuilt or custom PC, find out how much your free time is worth per hour!

http://moneycentral.msn.com/person [...] /home.aspx

You don't get it... Yes the PhII will be almost 50% slower than i7 in some apps, but those apps are very specialized and in most uses the PhII will be very close to i7. Take it from me i7 will not give you much of a noticeable difference over any decent quadcore unless you start encoding video or some specialized app. Even the fabled boost i7 gives to multi-GPU setups is minimal in the real world. i7 has its uses and it will squeeze extra performance out of a computer as apposed to other CPUs, but it simply is not a smart buy at this point.

Dood . . . . .


Enthusiasts value that first fresh smell of a PCB directly out of its anti-static bag as invaluable.


If you don't understand that please go away, you are bringing us down ....

As you can see by the calculator you provided, I have plenty of leisure time and with Vinyl-Siding I don't think I'm going to pay any painter $2,803.85 to paint my doors and window trim.

And with that $2803.85 I guess I should start building an I7 to go with my Phenom 940!!

The reason you usually see 3.2-3.5GB is because the OS tries to keep 20% free physical RAM, not because 4GB is a "sweet spot". People with 1GB would rarely see more than 800MB used, but that doesn't make 1GB a sweet spot either. The goal is to avoid the 80% point, thus avoiding paging, especially thrashing which is what dramatically slows a system down.

I'm not saying 4GB is insufficient, I'm just saying that the metric you're using doesn't tell the full story.