
This quarter, I set out to build a more affordable gaming equivalent to my previous $800 PC, which, in three months, rose in cost by an astounding $137. Unfortunately for me in this piece, but good for gamers as a community, Radeon R9 280X prices aren't as bad as they were a month ago. It'd be great to see them back down at $300, though the cheapest models as of this writing sell for $350 on Newegg.

We recently introduced some new tests to the System Builder Marathon benchmark suite, and those were the current build's target apps. In them, my current effort serves up 90% of the $800 machine’s average frame rates. That number jumps to 94% once its GeForce GTX 770 is overclocked. Interestingly, I get the same exact totals for stock and overclocked performance in our previously-tested games. Of the titles we used to run, only Far Cry 3 carries over.

But my comparison doesn't end there. In fact, I need a few more charts to keep telling this story. The games we just added are unquestionably less processor-bound. As a result, sporting similarly-quick graphics hardware, the new $750 system competes readily at the most interesting resolutions against my old build, going so far as to beat it once I overclock them both.

The gains seen at high resolutions help this quarter's PC pick up a few percentage points of overall performance, too.

Spending more on the case, power supply, memory, and graphics card prevents the Q1 2014 build from matching the as-purchased value of my $800 machine. However, when I adjust both systems to reflect today's pricing and isolate the performance-oriented parts, my $750 box scores a victory in its stock form. Here's the thing, though: once I overclock the Core i5 in last quarter's machine, value evens out again.

If all you care about is gaming at 1920x1080 or higher, today's cheaper PC is just as capable as the last one I built for more money. Your only concern should be running out of graphics memory at Surround resolutions, which might not be playable anyway, depending on the settings you're using.
Of course, the averages don't give us the whole story, so we turn to the individual games. My $750 machine leads in Far Cry 3, Battlefield 3, and Arma 3, while the $800 PC scores big in Grid 2, F1 2012, and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Both rigs trade blows in Battlefield 4, which either favors the Core i5 processor or Radeon R9 280X more than its predecessor. In a blind test, I'm willing to bet that you couldn't tell the difference, though.
The good news for me is that, despite lofty prices on some components, this most recent machine is a success. The competition is a fundamental tie, and I'd need to test more games to try pinpointing a winner. Intel’s Core i3-4130 again proves itself to be a capable value-oriented gaming processor able to keep up with Nvidia's GeForce GTX 770 in the seven titles we tested. At the same time, I don't have anything bad to say about the previous gaming builds either. As prices drop, AMD’s Radeon R9 280X re-joins the GeForce GTX 760, Core i5-3470, and FX-6300 as worthy options for your next gaming PC.
- 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.