Making Sense of CPU and GPU Model Numbers? 555
Posted
by
kdawson
from the drowning-in-a-sea-of-specs dept.
from the drowning-in-a-sea-of-specs dept.
b4dc0d3r writes "How do you make sense of the various model numbers or naming schemes for CPUs, graphics cards, and the related chipsets? All I want is something that will run Oblivion and output full 1080 video to a TV. Last time I built my own computer I just went to Pricewatch, made a few easy choices, and everything came to my door. Do I really have to research the differences among Core i5, Core 2 Duo, Pentium 4, Pentium D, Sempron, Athlon, Phenom ...? And that's just the processor. Is there a reference somewhere? In short, how do you buy a computer these days?"
Set a budget (Score:4, Insightful)
Its extremely simple (Score:5, Insightful)
Even if you know nothing about computers you go look at benchmarks at anandtech and find the one with the biggest bar on the graph that you can reasonably afford.
Anonymous (Score:1, Insightful)
Oblivion is four years old. 1080p is not demanding for any computer.
Buy anything.
Re:It can be confusing... (Score:5, Insightful)
Clear as mud. Thanks for your help!
Steps... (Score:1, Insightful)
1. Set a budget.
2. Define the expected result. E.g. you want to run Oblivion at minimum 30fps with all details maxed out at 1920x1080.
3. Research what components will achieve the expected result.
If you don't want to do the research, then scratch all of the above and spend a ton of money to be sure it will be fast enough for your purposes.
This has not changed much in the 25+ years I've been working with computers. And it's not likely to change, computers are general purpose tools. You need to know what you will use it for and determine the performance required. Based on this you will know what components you need. This is not rocket science, but a little effort will let you save some money while getting the performance you need.
Or just go buy a console. Seriously, why is this posted on slashdot?
Re:It can be confusing... (Score:5, Insightful)
A Core i5 750 costs more than any current AMD desktop processor, so that makes no sense. I can get a quad-core Athlon II for half the price of an i5 750. Sure, it's slower, but it's not slow. Also, it drops straight into my old AM2 motherboard (with a quick BIOS upgrade). Try doing that with Intel.
Re:Its extremely simple (Score:2, Insightful)
The problem is humans are not good at coping with decissions that involve more than three different factors. So in the end the best is to boil it down to the three things that are most important to you and rate the choices on those items. Or you can just ask for a fast one.
Buy a new Mac every 3 years (Score:2, Insightful)
> how do you buy a computer these days?
Every 3 years, just before the warranty expires, I sell my current Mac, get half of what I paid for it (outrageous resale value!) and then I buy the updated version of that same Mac at the Apple Store. 3 years later I do that again. They're always smaller and faster and more rugged.
I know Macs have model numbers and I know they have CPU's which also have model numbers. I don't know any of those numbers.
The numbers I am concerned with all have to do with my work, which is music and art. I'm really happy to leave the I-T numbers to Apple.
For whoever tagged this "notanerd"/"doesntbelong" (Score:5, Insightful)
Remember that this shit completely changes every few years. I used to build PCs for myself and my school as a kid (386/486), then couldn't affort to for a few years, then had to start reading PC magazines when it finally came time to afford a new PC (Pentium 2/AMD equiv). Fast-forward a few years to my next major upgrade, and I'm reading Wikipedia instead of the mags, but I'm still pig-ignorant of the latest tech until I've figured out whether AGP is still current (nope) and which of DDR2/3 will be needed, how many cores are worthwhile, etc etc etc.
Maybe it's easier for those who do hardware support or deal with servers (I mostly deal with routers/switches/firewalls), but I get completely left behind if I ignore the PC components market for more than a few months.
Re:Its extremely simple (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is that this doesn't work when you want to find out if it is worth to upgrade or not, as benchmarks always only compare the newest stuff against the other newest stuff, not against your years old hardware at home. Even worse is the special OEM hardware that you sometimes get (Geforce 7600LE for example), as that doesn't show up in benchmarks at all. And on top of that there are of course also compatibility issues, like will this graphics card work with my old power supply and such.
Long story short: I have basically given, its to much trouble to search for updates, so instead I just run what I have till it breaks.
Re:It can be confusing... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:It can be confusing... (Score:5, Insightful)
The Core i5-750 is only $200. If you're not willing to spend $200 on your CPU, you have no business building a PC instead of buying one.
$200 is too much for a CPU. Unless you're eager to waste money to get more power than you can possibly use, $100 gets you everything you need.
Re:It can be confusing... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Don't buy a Mac (Score:3, Insightful)
You haven't heard of http://www.ifixit.com/ [ifixit.com], eh?
I haven't built a PC in 10 years. I probably won't ever again. Too much effort; too expensive due to getting sucked in to going for higher-end components; too much effort with unreliability; too expensive to buy an OS (no, I don't want to us Linux any more either); and for games, a dedicated console is a better choice.
I'm quite happy to buy a mid-range Dell if I'm worrying about price... at least everything has been tested, and it's one place to go if something fails. If price isn't an option, or I want something that just works really well, then it's a Mac all the way thanks. I don't have the time to spend pissing around doing the research, then keeping on top of drivers, or fiddling with configuring the OS. Give me something that works out of the box thanks.
AMD's don't confuse (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:It can be confusing... (Score:5, Insightful)
The Core i5-750 is only $200. If you're not willing to spend $200 on your CPU, you have no business building a PC instead of buying one.
B.S.
What the point of wasting $200 on CPU when you can get for >$100 a CPU which performs in real world >5-10% slower?? And most applications (even games) are pretty happy even with half/quarter of the performance???
I'm not per se against the Intel CPUs. Some of their CPUs are cheaper and faster than the AMD ones. But for whatever reason, at least in Europe, the MBs for Intel CPUs are on average 10-25% more expensive than those for AMD CPUs. And upgrade-ability of the AMD systems is magnitudes better: one can get cheap CPU today and upgrade it few years later.
Think about the motherboard (Score:5, Insightful)
AMD capable motherboards tend to be a lot cheaper, that can easily save you enough money on a highly capable gaming system to replace the HD with an SSD, and that will have far more influence on game performance then the Intel chip will. In gaming, AMD performs a lot better. Always make sure to read the entire review of a CPU for the stats that are relevant to you. For instance, if you once in a blue moon use Office and never use a database on your PC, what do you care about how fast/slow your CPU is at them?
how do you buy a computer these days? (Score:3, Insightful)
"how do you buy a computer these days?"
- Set myself a minimum requirement (run this app, boot up in this amount of time, perform so-many I/O operations per second, etc.)
- Look at the specifications available from a range of my usual suppliers. Don't bother to look elsewhere - if you can't buy it, it doesn't exist. If you have to hunt for it, it'll be rare, expensive, not as well supported and probably far too specialist for your needs.
- Narrow things down by a sensible budget.
- Compare the specifications there against each other and, by looking them up on the net if necessary, find out which one is more suitable and best value-for-money for your needs (Is an Atom faster than whatever is in the other machine? Can my game take advantage of a second core?).
Basically, look at the "recommended" spec on those games you want to play, then go on about 10-12 large websites that sell computers to the market you're in (e.g. gaming) and see what they offer. The chances of being able to build anything comparable for the same / lower price are minimal - those days have gone and you're more likely to balls things up if you don't know what processor socket or PSU you need to run things properly.
Seriously, how hard is it? Ignore ALL of the marketing... see what you can afford, see what you need, see where they match (if at all), then do your research on those 2-3 models of machine (including their major components) that are good for you instead of trying to research every component that's currently available in every model that ever existed. I've managed to sort through a hundred models of PC to get to three in a few minutes, and then I just researched those three and actually spent nearly five times as long doing that last bit of thorough research properly.
If you want to know, I do this for a living for mainstream businesses / schools and that means everything from high-end CAD-stations to netbooks. It's *still* cheaper to buy the right thing from a large retailer's website than it is to mess about trying to cobble things together, whether you're buying one or hundreds. I have no idea what "name" processor is in 90% of the desktops I've bought... I can barely remember if they were Intel or AMD. It really doesn't matter at all what the codename is, I have no idea what the latest interfaces, cache sizes, socket-sizes, memory technology etc. even are. I just look it up when I have already narrowed things down to models with those components and make a decision based on what I can easily buy, how much I want to spend and what I *need* the computer to have / do.
You don't *need* to know all that rubbish, it's all just marketing anyway. What you need to do is see what's available and then check how well it's likely to run your games (e.g. benchmarks on similar games for the individual components, whether the processor is multi-core or not and whether the game can benefit). Let the assembly guys at a large company worry about whether the sockets are compatible, whether the memory timings are right, whether the PSU is powerful enough etc. If they mess it up, it costs them money. If you mess it up because you built it yourself or deviated from their normal bundles, it costs you money.
And no, you do *not* end up paying a premium to do things this way. You save money even before the things arrive on your doorstep due to the wonders of bulk-buying (Ever wonder *why* those bundle deals are so cheap? Mass purchasing by ordinary businesses, usually, if you ignore the holiday seasons), let alone the savings in not having to worry about destroying a card or PSU because you ordered a standard bundle and a "Super Duper Turbo Hyper Fighting" graphics card and put them together yourself because you heard it gets 1fps better on some random website.
Set yourself a specification (e.g. dual-core or not, speed in GHz, whether you are worried about the power it saps, X amount of RAM, etc.). Set yourself a budget. Find out how much stuff matches those. If it's a lot, set yourself a st
Re:It has got silly (Score:3, Insightful)
how do you buy a computer these days? (Score:2, Insightful)
By informing yourself. Use search engines, find reviews, read hardware sites. The more time you invest on improving your awareness, the better your system will be for the money and the better use you'll make out of it.
Re:Steps... (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps the point of his question to slashdot....you know, a technical news/information site, with a technically savvy audience...is to get an answer, not to get excoriated for having the question?
You know, your point "3. Research what components will achieve the expected result."
I think his question is valid - it used to be a fairly simple task to equate processor speed with power, to come up with a reasonable expectation of performance for a task. But to everyone (except, apparently, you), it perhaps isn't intuitive that a quad core at a lower speed will or won't perform better than a duo core at a higher speed. (Answer: sometimes it will perform better, sometimes it won't. How is he supposed to know, oh swami of computer tech?)
So you could offer actual advice or click through to the next news article, instead of bitching that someone asked a very valid question.
Re:It can be confusing... (Score:5, Insightful)
But if you're looking at the long term, wouldn't it make even more sense to buy a processor at the optimal price point rather than a high-end one? In a couple of months, there'll be cheaper processors that are just as fast as the i7-860.
Re:Steps... (Score:3, Insightful)
When I bought my first computer, I had a choice of an Intel Pentium, Intel Pentium MMX, AMD K5, Cyrix 686 and the IBM branded version of the Cyrix 686. Within each of those models, I could chose different clock speeds.
Now, I have a choice various types of Atoms, Celerons, Pentium Dual Cores, Core IIs, Core i5s, Core i7s and Xeons, and that's just from Intel. Do we really need that many different product lines from the one company?
Re:Set a budget (Score:3, Insightful)
Dragon Age: Origins?
2006 called and wants its game back.
Re:What about CPU Coolers? (Score:4, Insightful)
Sillier than you know... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's sillier than you realise. Now we can't even RTFA, as it just forwards you straight to pricewatch shopping. What a waste of screenspace ... this is one article Slashdot should just retroactively shitcan (or at least edit out the misleading link).
Re: Go Quad Core, don't listen to him (Score:3, Insightful)
A quad-core isn't necessarily more future-proof than a dual-core. A quad-core is only really better than a dual core when your most CPU-intensive application is multithreaded. Although chances are that the future will bring us a lot more multithreaded applications.
For servers it's easier. There, more cores is practically always going to be better.
Re:It has got silly (Score:3, Insightful)
Unfortunately you are still limited to comparing variations of the same apple, so if you want to see if it's a Xeon, Sempron or i7 you want/need many hardware reviews are just too limited.
Obscurity seems to be the life-line for the manufacturers these days and there is no simple way to compare the devices.
Re:Sillier than you know... (Score:3, Insightful)
Pricewatch wanted to test their servers against brute force attacks. The site's still up, so if it can survive /. it can survive anything.
If you can dodge a slashdotting, you can dodge a DDOS.
Re:Quite Easy (Score:3, Insightful)
It is still advisable to get a high-end PSU with more power than you actually need since they are manufactured better.
The PSU is the unit to fail most often in my experience (and most spectacularly). I don't buy cheap ones anymore.
It's not 800W PSUs that are manufactured better, it's PSUs from quality brands that are manufactured better. Even a high-specced PSU can fail if it's made out of crap.
Another reason not to get an oversized PSU is energy usage. A PSU generally runs at peak efficiency at 50%. So if you have a machine drawing 150W, it will draw more power from the socket if it has an 800W PSU than if it has a 300W PSU. (And if the 800W PSU is so badly manufactured that it's really only a 500W PSU, don't count on that improving the efficiency any.)
And of course wasted energy doesn't mean just a higher electricity bill and higher sea levels, it also means more heat in your PSU, a need for more cooling, and therefore more noise.
So which are the quality brands that you need to get? I know SeaSonic is very good. Corsair too, I think. But from Antec I heard a bit too much bad stuff. I don't know much about the others though. Look for 80+ certification. PSUs that have it are more efficient and probably better manufactured, but there, lying happens too: they only have 80+ efficiency under optimal conditions that never happen in a real PC.
Re:It has got silly (Score:2, Insightful)
Thats like being surprised that a race car driver doesn't know all the models and changes from the big automotive companies.
Do F1 drivers know what changes are being made to 2011 BMW, Toyota, GM, Hyundai/Kia and Fords? Do NASCAR drivers know what is coming out from Mercedes, BMW, Ferrari, Ford?
Can most race car drivers assemble a car motor or can fighter pilots put together a jet engine?
Re:Only 2 components worth researching... (Score:2, Insightful)
but give only about 20 Amps on 12V.
A Western Digital Caviar Green 2TB is specced at drawing 296mA from the 12V rail. Typical fans draw around 200mA. At that rate I could theoretically have 10 fans and 60 hard drives all within 20A. How often is 20A really going to be too little current at 12V? The regulation and ripple of cheap supplies can definitely be a worry, but I don't see the current rating itself as being the issue for most people. 20A at 12V is 240W just for the 12V rail, and most modern PCs idle at around 60W or less total from the wall with the fans running and disk spinning.
Get a quality 80+ power supply, but for the reasons of power regulation quality in preventing damage to other components, and not maximum output current.