Don't you have to buy from the canadian newegg (newegg.ca)? Or am I thinking of someone else?
The extra money from that would be better spent on an i5 2500 unless you think you'll have the money to upgrade to ivy bridge next year (in that case go for the z68). Also I thought your budget was now enough for an i5 2400 + H61 + GTX 550 TI since you're buying the ram yourself. If that was the case the $40-50 you would save would be enough for both the motherboard upgrade and an i5 2500.
(10-24-2011, 04:20 AM)NaturalViolence Wrote: [ -> ]Don't you have to buy from the canadian newegg (newegg.ca)? Or am I thinking of someone else?
The extra money from that would be better spent on an i5 2500 unless you think you'll have the money to upgrade to ivy bridge next year (in that case go for the z68). Also I thought your budget was now enough for an i5 2400 + H61 + GTX 550 TI since you're buying the ram yourself. If that was the case the $40-50 you would save would be enough for both the motherboard upgrade and an i5 2500.
Nope, I live in the United States.
Thanks for the advice!
Not really. That GTX 260 is a heavily neutered version with 192 stream processors instead of the normal 216 and much lower clock rates than reference (500 and 1000 instead of 600 and 1250). Normally a GTX 260 would be significantly faster than a GTS 450 but that model will actually be slightly slower than a GTS 450. So you might as well spend the extra $20 to get a card that is slightly faster, supports dx11, supports audio bitstreaming over HDMI and other nifty features, has a built in HDMI port, is much smaller, consumes far less power, has a quiter air cooler, [insert additional advantages here] and so on.
The GTX 260 will still have a significantly higher memory bandwidth and texture fillrate and slightly higher pixel fillrate but modern PC games tend to be completely influenced by shader throughput alone. Dolphin on the other hand might actually run faster on the GTX 260. Then again both cards are good enough for 4x IR which is already well beyond what you need.
Quote:Dude, NV ALREADY said that hwcompare is unreliable.
Quote:See? Told ya.
Thanks for the help NV.
Lol, not that I don't appreciate the faith you seem to have in my opinions but try not to sound quite so harsh.
Edit: Just did the math. The peak shader throughput on that particular GTX 260 comes out to about 601 GFLOP/s while the GTS 450 comes out to 576 GFLOP/s. So the GTX 260 still has a slight advantage in MAXIMUM throughput. However as we all know maximum throughput does not reflect real world performance since you also have to take utilization into account and these are two different chip architectures that we are comparing, therefore it makes more sense to use PC game benchmarks to compare them. A reference GTX 260 C216 beats a reference GTS 450 in PC game benchmarks by about 25% on average and that GTX 260 should be 32% slower than a reference GTX 260 so you could expect similar performance from both in PC games (within 7% of each other). The GTX 260 should show a significant advantage at extremely high internal resolutions and MSAA sample counts though due to its memory bandwidth. Since I have a reference GTX 260 C216 myself I feel I'm fully qualified to say the following, if it were me I would get the GTS 450 instead because the GTX 260 is a very large/loud/power hogging inefficient monster compared to a GTS 450. Plus dx11 and audio bitstreaming are the future.
ExtremeDude2 does have a point about the reference GTX 260 being faster, but he didn't realize that this isn't a reference model, it's well below the reference specifications. And even then the GTX 260 does have some advantages over the GTS 450.
(10-26-2011, 12:33 PM)NaturalViolence Wrote: [ -> ]Not really. That GTX 260 is a heavily neutered version with 192 stream processors instead of the normal 216 and much lower clock rates than reference (500 and 1000 instead of 600 and 1250). Normally a GTX 260 would be significantly faster than a GTS 450 but that model will actually be slightly slower than a GTS 450. So you might as well spend the extra $20 to get a card that is slightly faster, supports dx11, supports audio bitstreaming over HDMI and other nifty features, has a built in HDMI port, is much smaller, consumes far less power, has a quiter air cooler, [insert additional advantages here] and so on.
See? Told ya.
Thanks for the help NV.
Hey, what could I max out at 1360 x 768 with a GTS 450?
How is it compared to 1280 x 1024? (In terms of demand.)
What kind of Dolphin settings and scaling could I use?
If it weren't for you, I'd be stuck with an i3 and HD 3000.
Still can't thank you enough.
I see no point in spending extra money on an H67 (H61 + i3 2300 still costs significantly less than that combo).
Quote:How would an i5 2300 @ 2.8 compare to a phenom 2 x4 955 @ 3.8 ghz?
That depends on what you're running (more on this later).
[quote='NaturalViolence' pid='178423' dateline='1320633650']
I see no point in spending extra money on an H67 (H61 + i3 2300 still costs significantly less than that combo).
Regardless,
the IDE support on that motherboard is a bonus as is the usb 3.0 and 4 RAM slots.
Plus, I own an IDE DVD burner.
