
Power-saving features are typically left on for each round of benchmarking. Only the overclocked $650 system didn't benefit from them. When it came to tuning the FX-6300's clock rates, I jumped into the firmware and disabled any setting that might negatively affect stability or performance consistency.

Sporting an efficient Haswell-based Core i3 processor and powered by an 80 PLUS Gold-rated power supply, my most recent effort sips power at idle and under host processing load. There's an overclocked, voltage-bumped GeForce GTX 770 in there, but still, peak draw from the wall remains under 300 W. You most certainly don't need the 600 W power supply recommended by Zotac. Our 450 W PSU has oodles of output in reserve.

Low power means that this quarter's PC is also the coolest-running in today's competition. Notice that CPU and GPU temperatures drop after applying an overclock. Simply, the CPU is left alone, and airflow increases by speeding up the cooling fans through Asus' firmware (from the Standard setting to Turbo). I also disabled control over the rear case fan by simply running it at 100% duty cycle. Finally, Zotac's thermal solution was quiet, so I created a custom fan profile to blow more air over the card and its components.
Of course, faster fans generate more noise. While this is by no means a quiet PC, it wouldn’t take much to pull its output down to a whisper. Surprisingly, overclocking didn't really add much noise since the 120 mm intake fan up front is the loudest. It doesn't vibrate, and is by no means obnoxious. But there is an unquestionable sound of rushing air. Needless to say, my fondness of the Line-M enclosure certainly diminishes when its bundled fans are running all-out.
- A More Affordable Gaming Alternative
- CPU And Cooler
- Motherboard And Memory
- Graphics Card And Hard Drive
- Case, Power Supply, And Optical Drive
- Assembling My Gaming Box
- Improving High-Res Gaming By Overclocking Graphics
- Test System Configuration And Benchmarks
- Results: Synthetics
- Results: Audio And Video
- Results: Adobe Creative Suite
- Results: Productivity
- Results: Compression
- Results: Battlefield 4 And Battlefield 3
- Results: F1 2012, Grid 2, and Arma 3
- Results: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim And Far Cry 3
- Power Consumption And Temperatures
- Summarizing The Performance Of Three Gaming Builds
- Did I Achieve My Goals, Or Is This A Failure?
When I first saw the parts list for this build, I expected myself to be in full agreement with you. I mean, can you imagine someone suggesting paring a GTX 680 with an I3? Ludicrous. They'd be laughed out the forums. However, looking at the benchmarks for the highest settings in 1920x1080 and 4800x900, I found there were 2 types of results
1. Those where the I3 and the GTX 770 build beat, or were within a few FPS of the I5 and R9-280X build:
Battlefield 3
Battlefield 4
Arma 3
Far Cry 3
2. Those where the I5 and R9-280X beat the I3 and GTX 770 build by a significant margin, but where all frame rates were well above 60FPS:
F1 2012
Grid 2
Skyrim
So, while overall performance percentage charts might put the I3 and GTX 770 behind the I5 and R9-280X behind in certain games, in a real-life setting, it seems that the I3 and GTX 770 is an equally good build. Which is really not what I was expecting.
Citations desperately needed. The XBOX 360 had 3 hyper-threaded CPUs and the PS3 had a 7-core cell CPU, but this didn't push PC games during this period beyond dual cores. Indeed, as late as January 2012, Tom's hardware was finding it impossible to recommend any Quad-core AMD processors over intel Dual-core processors and as late as December 2012, dual-core Intel pentiums were taking the low-end recommendations, as they were still better at gaming at this point than 4-core AMD processors. Indeed, it wasn't until February 2013 that they reversed this recommendation, so any assumption that consoles having more cores will result in P.C. games using more cores doesn't really stand up to scrutiny, I'm afraid.
As explained on page 1, the whole idea here with this build was to spend less on the platform, more-than covering the premiums on graphics, RAM, and ODD vs. our last purchase.
Sure we'd go i5 if priced the same. But the -3330 is $60 more @ $190, just like the -3470 used last quarter. The -3350P saves $10 off that. H61 doesn't save much, starting $5-10 below H81, and then we'd give up capitalizing on the i5's limited overclocking.
I was surprised to see i3 didn't yield any meaningful drop in minimum fps, at all! In fact, minimums often appeared GPU-bound, and the new GTX 770 rig won out, especially OC'ed. System bound at 70+ fps and up full-time in Skyrim or F1 2012 is hardly a loss, but an extra 3-8 fps consistently down low in ARMA III and Far Cry 3 could come in handy.
Well, not really. While I favored keeping Skyrim around this long for popularity, truth is it and F1 2012 (both out and both CPU/system limited) were now a bit long in the tooth and unable to challenge our cheapest rigs for a while now. I expected ARMA III to be more processor bound than it is.
Considering we do average in all resolutions, I think CPU-muscle is more than getting it's fair share of attention. What we lack I guess is a super-strenuous new CPU-bound game sequence able to exploit a weak CPU. Parts of Tomb Raider can do that actually, but not the in-game benchmark or our normal GPU-bound save-game. The TR test I use for CPUs is a bit tedious for SBM use. (EDIT: And actually some of the games we use like FC3 do exploit a WEAK CPU, it's just Core-i3 isn't weak.)
Hey we are always open to suggestions though, but for SBMs have to scale back to four easily comparable & repeatable games. Unfortunately this typically rules out MP testing.
SBMs we just can't pull off more than four games, ( I have tried.
Like I said, we are always open to benchmark suggestions. They'll need to be newer than the Witcher 2 though. =)
CPU: Intel Core i5-3350P 3.1GHz Quad-Core Processor ($179.99 @ Newegg)
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-H61M-S1 Micro ATX LGA1155 Motherboard ($34.99 @ Newegg)
Memory: Kingston HyperX Blu 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3-1333 Memory ($64.99 @ Newegg)
Storage: Seagate Barracuda ES 1TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive
Video Card: MSI GeForce GTX 770 2GB Video Card ($339.99 @ Newegg)
Case: Corsair 200R ATX Mid Tower Case ($39.99 @ Newegg)
Power Supply: Corsair Builder 500W 80+ Bronze Certified ATX Power Supply ($59.99 @ Newegg)
Optical Drive: Samsung SH-224DB/BEBE DVD/CD Writer ($15.99 @ Newegg)
Total: $735.93
(Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available.)
(Generated by PCPartPicker 2014-03-26 07:50 EDT-0400)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811139018
the msi gfx card is $20 more than paul's selected zotac now.
and... non modular, cwt-built, 80+ bronze (not even silver) cx500 is a better choice than superflower-built rosewill capstone.. how?
The one thing these charts don't reveal, however, is the real impact of some of the productivity activities. Many of the single-threaded apps really don't take that long, so the overall impact of a lower performing CPU in that case is felt less by the user.
Contrast that to some of the multi-threaded apps. Try transcoding a 2 hour blu-ray movie or 7zipping a backup of a 20GB Skyrim Data folder. The difference in wait times between the i3 and i5 for the Skyrim Data folder zip would be over 13 minutes and for the blu-ray transcoding can take as much as an hour longer. These time differences have serious impact, and more cores/threads will definitely be appreciated in these situations.
So overall I agree with the results. The i3 is a great budget-build CPU, and this article shows you can stretch that all the way up to a GTX 770 - nice! But it's also easy to lose sight of the impacts some of the other activities can have on the time away from gaming.