Graphics Card: Sapphire 100314-3L Radeon HD 6870 1 GB
Radeon HD 6870 prices hadn’t budged in three months. Meanwhile, Radeon HD 6850 models were getting cheaper by the day. So, I was a bit torn when it came time to choose a video card for this quarter. In the end, I squelched my bargain-hunting tendencies and decided we needed to maintain the level of graphics performance seen last time around. The same Sapphire card we used back then offers reference core and memory clocks, along with familiar output connectivity.
Read Customer Reviews of Sapphire's Radeon HD 6870 1 GB
The bundle includes a DVI-to-VGA adapter, two PCIe Molex power adapters (one of which we need to use), and a DiRT 3 game coupon. Unfortunately, there's no bundled Crossfire bridge.
Hard Drive: Seagate Barracuda ST3500413AS 500 GB
The Seagate Barracuda ST3500413AS was used back in June 2011’s system, and it's basically identical to the drive used in September's gaming PC. It offers 500 GB of capacity, a 7200 RPM spindle, a SATA 6Gb/s interface, and 16 MB of cache. As mentioned earlier, we've seen this drive's price skyrocket somewhere between $90 and $115 recently!
Read Customer Reviews of Seagate's Barracuda ST3500413AS 500 GB
- Profiting From A Pricier Processor
- CPU And Cooler
- Motherboard And Memory
- Graphics Card And Hard Drive
- Case, Power Supply, And Optical Drive
- Assembly And Overclocking
- Test System Configuration And Benchmarks
- Benchmark Results: Crysis And Just Cause 2
- Benchmark Results: F1 2010 And Metro 2033
- Benchmark Results: Audio And Video
- Benchmark Results: Productivity
- Benchmark Results: Synthetics
- Power Consumption And Temperatures
- Can Core i5-2400 Justify Its Higher Cost?


Definitely a kick-ass machine, but imo this line is simply wrong and misleading.
If you factor out today's and September's cpu and motherboard, the difference between the rest of the parts is a mere 8$. Furthermore, with only 2 dimms and no overclocking capability whatsoever I really can't see how you can call this MSI board a more "feature-rich" than September's ASRock.
The way I see it, today's and September's machines are in two different price segments, and at this low budget, pouring an extra ~90$ can actually give you a lot. For example, given today's system, if we take out the cpu, motherboard and gpu, we will be able to fit inside a Phenom II x4 960T (125$), some 60$-70$ motheboard, an hd6950 1gb gpu, and probably still have room for a 20$ HSF. Talk about value.
I'm not trying to defend amd here or anything, It's just that a lot of times people come to me asking for advice on what computer to get, and I can fairly confidently say that when someone wants a 4 core sandy bridge at this budget, I'll say to him that I won't help and tell him to go find a deal somewhere because in my eyes, getting a cpu that's 1/3 of your budget only to be able to get an extra minute or two in every benchmark or getting high fps in low resolutions, is too much of a compromise in every other component.
For the price, the 2500K + a P67 or Z68 is unbeatable and certainly worth breaking the budget over. But for SBM, I can see why going the 2400 plus H61 route makes sense.
Personally, I would have preferred to see a cheaper motherboard and CPU config with an SSD (instead of the mechanical storage). It wouldn't have scored as well, but I can't get by without an SSD as easily as I could a slower processor.
I wanted the $500 build to get bumped up to $600, but that was to add a SSD so that each SBM machine could have some solid state action.
The chart seems to indicate that the current machine did beat the former... though perhaps not by alot.
So would a 6950 + i3 give better performance in games @ 1080x1920 than this build?
Definitely a kick-ass machine, but imo this line is simply wrong and misleading.
If you factor out today's and September's cpu and motherboard, the difference between the rest of the parts is a mere 8$. Furthermore, with only 2 dimms and no overclocking capability whatsoever I really can't see how you can call this MSI board a more "feature-rich" than September's ASRock.
The way I see it, today's and September's machines are in two different price segments, and at this low budget, pouring an extra ~90$ can actually give you a lot. For example, given today's system, if we take out the cpu, motherboard and gpu, we will be able to fit inside a Phenom II x4 960T (125$), some 60$-70$ motheboard, an hd6950 1gb gpu, and probably still have room for a 20$ HSF. Talk about value.
I'm not trying to defend amd here or anything, It's just that a lot of times people come to me asking for advice on what computer to get, and I can fairly confidently say that when someone wants a 4 core sandy bridge at this budget, I'll say to him that I won't help and tell him to go find a deal somewhere because in my eyes, getting a cpu that's 1/3 of your budget only to be able to get an extra minute or two in every benchmark or getting high fps in low resolutions, is too much of a compromise in every other component.
... Then less people would buy i5, so why should they?
If AMD had offered a similarly compelling alternative to i5 then Intel might have done so.
That should have read, (unlike Crysis or JC2 @ low settings), the current STOCK pc, was unable to beat the OVERCLOCKED September PC because of the GPU demands at 8xAA + Max. But you are right, both stock or both overclocked the current PC was a bit ahead.