What kind of temperatures are we seeing for the CPU and GPU under load (stress tests or gaming)? You definitely don't need a second cooler for that card; the one you have is more than enough...
If I recall correctly, you had a thread where your Core 2 Quad was hitting temps above the recommended limit—it might be thermal throttling and downclocking to something like 1.3 GHz, which would explain the stuttering.
Which specific cooler from $50 are you talking about? Give the cooler a good cleaning and swap out the thermal paste—check this link
If the minimum requirements call for an AMD Phenom II X4 940, if I recall correctly, then an AMD Phenom II X4 840 or even an AMD Athlon II X4 740 should technically cut it. I don't see any logical reason why it would struggle on one and run fine on the other. Now, the real question is how much those listed requirements actually reflect real-world performance.
As for the GPU, it's pretty much a lost cause. It isn't even listed in the specs, and looking at the benchmarks, running at max settings on a 5850 only nets about 11 fps. You might get something playable on low settings—but honestly, it's hard to say.
Since this is the first true "next-gen" title, I’m mostly focused on CPU benchmarks—specifically, whether things will stay as they are, or if we’re going to see a massive jump in hardware demands and multi-threaded optimization
Which specific keyboard are we talking about here? Usually, you can just pop the keys off to clean them, but if the circuitry inside a membrane keyboard has completely fried, then you're basically looking at a paperweight.
It’s a bottleneck. For instance, pairing a Sandy Bridge Celeron with a gtx 460
I remember back when the 1610/1620 chips were the standard; people used to say an HD7750 or a gtx 650 was about as high as you could go before hitting a massive bottleneck. Of course, that isn't a universal rule for every single title—take Tomb Raider, for example, which doesn't really scale with the CPU, or Alien Isolation link. In those cases, you're seeing less than a 15% performance gap compared to the top-tier CPUs paired with something like a gtx 980 and similar hardware.
It’s a solid setup, basically hitting the bare essentials. Honestly, it all comes down to what game you're running, but you really can't beat the value for that price. If you want a more robust quad-core option—especially with upcoming titles in mind—I'd suggest going with the Athlon II x4 840 + Gigabyte GA-F2A68HM-DS2 + 4gb ram
Sam Murphy said:Is there a massive difference between the Intel Celeron G1840 2.8, 2MB, LGA 1150 and the INTEL Pentium Processor G3220 (3.00GHz, 512KB, 3MB, 54 W, 1150) Box, featuring INTEL HD Graphics?
It really depends on what you're planning to do. If you look at these "relative performance" results from some benchmarks, we're talking about maybe a 7% gap herelink
Looking at the big picture, the Celeron offers a much better value proposition since they sit around $100, whereas the Pentiums are closer to $167 without offering a significant boost in power
On another note, this is currently a pretty interesting deal sitting right around $167
Take that study with a massive grain of salt; there are serious doubts regarding the motives and the actual validity of the research launched by Alvin Cox from Seagate (Western Digital 😬).
Besides, we aren't talking about real-world scenarios here—the idea that an SSD sitting at 30°C for a single year "might" lose data is one thing, but let's not even get started on those other sauna-like conditions they mentioned.
If your idea of multitasking is just juggling a bunch of Office docs and PDFs, then 4GB is actually more than enough. For context, I'm running Windows 7 right now and I've got a browser open with about 30 tabs, 15 different PDFs, and 4 or 5 Word files all at once, yet my RAM usage is only sitting at 1.9GB.
You aren't going to see the full potential of that R7 250 x until you upgrade your CPU and move to a newer platform. Honestly, I wouldn't bother sticking with that setup for more than a few years if you're planning on playing modern games.
- That motherboard isn't even in stock (and honestly, it’s a bad deal at that price point) An ASUS ROG Maximus would be the ideal move, but you can't find that there either + adding a Cooler Master Hyper 212 would put you over budget. Check out Micro Center or Best Buy instead.
That’s essentially just what resolution means—the higher it goes, the sharper and more detailed the picture becomes. I remember playing Call of Duty back in the day, and at lower resolutions, everything looks incredibly blurry because there simply aren't enough pixels to define the image. Personally, I never found that game particularly engaging, though I realize that's entirely subjective and everyone has their own taste.
Try running some tests using the games you currently have; compare how they look at your maximum resolution versus a lower one.
Wait, hold on—are you looking to buy this or sell it? And which specific power supply are we talking about here? The motherboard is, say, a Gigabyte 970A-DS3P or an MSI B450 Tomahawk (not the LE version)
Look, if even the cheapest new model costs $187 (sometimes even exceeding $200), then calling $250-$$100 too generous just doesn't make sense 🤷 Sure, paying retail for this board is a joke since there are much better options out there for around $60, but people who don't know any better seem to get hung up on that "pro" label in the name. It's the exact same story with the AMD FX-8350; if he had just grabbed the 8320 instead, he could have dumped that extra cash into a better motherboard or a beefier cooler, and the whole PC would have been a much more balanced build
Honestly, this Corsair CX series unit is a solid deal at that price point, and picking up 2GB of DDR2 for $43 isn't a bad move either—though you'll see people on various tech forums trying to overcharge $33 for them.