DIY 4 GHz Dual Core Gaming Rig For $720

Tom's Hardware has posted the detailed results of their recent quest to build a beefy gaming rig without a visit to the poorhouse. The trick it seems is to find a processor with 'cores designed for a much faster clock than their nominal rating at a speed of up to 4 GHz without problems.' They provide shopping lists for both a 'budget version' and a 'top flight version'.

Already outdated

[Hrodvitnir]

Before you even get past the first component they mention that you can't get it at the price they got it anymore.

"we purchased a stock processor at the prevailing retail price. Since then, demand for this CPU has spiked, and prices have also gone up."

I always see these "Build a super system for no money!" articles, but when *I* try to price the components, it never seems to add up.

The $710 dollar one was not the overclocked one

[wpmegee]

Okay, notice on the first page, there are 2 systems, a cheap one and a $1200 one. The $1200 one was what they actually built and OC'd. Several things here will limit their OC. First, cheap "550W" power supply that puts out ~350w at the most and likely has unstable rails. All power supplies that come with cases are shit unless they're Antec Enlight Enermax or Fortron. Second, noname motherboard. Bad, bad, bad idea if you want a anywhere near stable system. For the more expensive system,who in their right mind would pick Gigabyte for an overclocking mobo? DFI, Asus, or MSI would all be far better choices.

Next, that X1300 is godawful. Lastly, I disagree with water cooling. A thermalright XP-120 with a ~80 CFM fan and decent thermal grease would provide very similar thermal performance, albeit louder.

Re:Okay.... stop reading diggvsdot before posting

[P3NIS_CLEAVER]

Maybe you should stop reading dig? Are you telling me that /. editors should monitor dig and not post stories found there? What if the story is not highly rated? What if it comes up on google news? What criteria should they use? Pretty dumb idea IMHO.

Yeah, sure, only $720 for the machine...

[koreth]

but if you read their article on overclocking the Intel chip in question, you'll see that the thing draws over half a kilowatt at full load, and around 300W idle. Yikes! You will get a bargain on the machine and pay through the nose on your electricity bills over the subsequent months.

Stable Power Supply: 400 Watts Is Plenty?

[Bill Dimm]

The table of contents has an entry Stable Power Supply: 400 Watts Is Plenty [tomshardware.com], but the page says "...which is why we chose a 550-Watt unit." Huh?

Quality Quantity

[foamrotreturns]

4GHz means virtually nothing to me these days. All it says is that the CPU is cycling at 4 billion times per second, but it doesn't say how much work is being done per cycle. Comparing GHz is apples and oranges. Real life testing is where it's at. Give me hard data.

Re:Okay.... stop reading diggvsdot before posting

[greg1104]

You're so right; slashdot should change all of their editorial and submission policies based around the news sites you read.

Give me a break. I don't read digg because the site annoys me on several levels. When this site's charter changes to "News for Nerds Who Also Read Digg", then everyone should get right on making your life easier. Until then, if the dupes bother you so much, hack together something in RSS that listens to both sites and presents an unduped, merged view of things that are important to yourself.

Re:Already outdated

[iamplupp]

Sounds strange since its $118 including shipping at newegg.com
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82 E16819116001 [newegg.com]
First google hit on "computer parts" btw so its probably even cheaper somewhere else.

Re:$720 and an ATI X1300 != 'beefy'

[hattig]

The article seemed to be written from the point of view of

"how cheap can we make a rig that is based around the Pentium D 805"

rather than

"what is the best rig we can specify for ~$700"

When a huge amount is spent on exotic cooling (plus a 12" fan on the case, lol) because the processor gets so hot when overclocked and you want to still hear the gameplay, and sucks down nearly half a kiloWatt of juice, you know something isn't right. The video card is the obvious casualty in this situation, nullifying the entire worth and purpose of the article.

It's a typical THG article, written with a certain bent that almost seems as if it is sponsored, rather than having any real use to the reader.

Re:Tomshardware is a joke

[geekoid]

The onboard sound chip on my motherboard rocks. The technology of those chips is a great deal better now then it was 5 years ago.

Horrible

[mobby_6kl]

What a horrible article (on itself, and it being here on slashdot).

• Slashdotted
  
• Ludicrous number of pages
  
• Same for ads
  
• $120 wasted on watercooling
  
• 2x160GB drives in RAID0?
  
• A gaming rig with an X1300?!?
  

My $800 system from 3.5 years ago would beat this in most games with justa a $100 video card upgrade.

Re:Quality Quantity

[rjmars97]

Well obviously the system was different and will provide different performance, however the results of the tests are what is more important. The overclocked CPU was able to ouperform processors 4 times more expensive with everything else being the same (the key part is everything else being the same). He wanted data on the CPU, which this gives, as the other hardware remains the same. Thats the whole point of the benchmarks, to see how performance will vary as the CPU changes.

One of the conclusions that you can draw from the benchmarks is that if you build the $720 system and test different CPU's in the motherboard, the overclocked Pentium will outperform most other CPU's for that setup.

You need to be able to interpret what the data means and apply it to the setup in question, which you aparently did not do.

overclocking a false economy

[GunFodder]

I used to overclock my processor, and while I was doing that I was also reading the various hardware boards. One thing I learned is that overclocking is a false economy. Very few people get the results of THW, because when Joe Random buys a processor they don't get a hand-selected golden sample. The same goes for motherboards and memory. Modest overclocking gains are often wiped out by system freezes and reboots. And even the best overclockers end up spending a small fortune buying cooling systems and replacing burnt out components. Overclocking is a fun way to learn about your computer, but it is not a practical way to economically improve the performance of your computer.

Re:How do new gaming consoles compete?

[TheDreadSlashdotterD]

Those numbers were a surge ahead when the specs were announced. At the time of launch they were equal with pc tech and quickly became defunct. The fact is that a console is a dedicated game machine. That is the primary focus. All this BS by Sony is just stupid. I don't even feel comfortable with the Wii potentially having Opera for web browsing (unless it is how they will make the online story for the virtual console).

Of course, I could be wrong. It might be nice to have an upgradable game machine. Oh, that's right, I already do, and since most of the parts conform to some "standard" they are fairly inexpensive. Do you really think that Sony or Microsoft or even Nintendo won't gouge people on the prices of those "upgrades"? It's their hardware, so they can do what they want and people will buy since they want to play that "Ultra Super Console Fragfest XVIII".

Re:Tomshardware is a joke

[buswolley]

Tom didn't pick an AMD? Tom loves AMD.

Hey, but at least we aren't accusing Tom of being biased for AMD's like /.ers usually do.

Is Dual Core Gaming Actually Viable Yet?

[mowph]

First of all, a few comments about the article itself... The article mentions that the $720 rig is "sufficient for non-gamers". I think they're considering it more for high-end video editing... this also explains the choice of RAID 0. I'm somewhat puzzled with their choice of using 3G/s discs on a 1.5 G/s SATA board, however. I suppose this could be for economic reasons -- those Samsungs could be about the cheapest disc on the market at the moment.

Moreover, since when is Dual Core really a gaming solution to begin with? Sure, if you want to make big downloads or burn CDs in the background while gaming, there might be some benefit. Other than that, we have a handful of games that actually support dual core. I guess it makes sense to include dual core for the sake of future releases, but what's the point of installing something that's basically bleeding edge (as far as gaming is concerned) on a budget system? It seems to me that your other components are going to be horribly dated well before most game releases are really supporting dual cores.

Am I wrong here? Have games started secretly taking advantage of two physical cores while I wasn't looking? Are we in the future yet?