Quote Originally Posted by The Joker View Post
Every now and then you'll see Tom's hardware do pretty much exactly what your asking.
The main issue with doing what your asking is time and hardware availability.

A lot of reviewers actually pay for the hardware, so yeah they may end up getting samples of the GTX780 to review but they still have to cough up for the rest of the rig, so imagine having to do that.
They also have strict dead lines.
But surely if they buy the cpu's or whatever they have those rigs that they are able to use. Basically what I am getting at is it is difficult to ascertain what sort of fps I will get with my rig for a certain game or if something will be a particular bottleneck (right now its becoming my gpu). So I have to start saying ok, that card gets that sort of fps with that type of rig, my rig with gpu is say 25% worse off, I don't play with shadows etc so hmm maybe in the region of I don't know 70% fps that they got with that rig on high details? But with comparing say a top end i3 or low level i5 of the current generation I can get a rough estimate of how my 2400 compares with cpu, ram obviously usually being an overkill (difference between 8 gig and 16 gig barely noticeable and all) and a 5770 comparable to say a "7650" type thing.
hope you guys can understand this.

Quote Originally Posted by Wesley View Post
Take any CPU-intensive game benchmark of the Core i5-3330 or the i5-3470. The Core i3-3225 can reach the same high-end framerates thanks to Hyper-threading, but when the game becomes very taxing and requires more physical cores, your framerate just about drops in half and it acts like a regular dual-core. Dual-cores are becoming a rarity in today's world. AMD only makes two dual-core chips, the rest starts from four cores and scales up.

Intel pretty much bets its entire budget line on dual-cores with strong single-thread performance, but when the crap hits the fan the A8-5600K is still running smoothly, whereas the equally priced i3-3220 will hiccup a bit until it recovers in time for the next intensive scene/battle. That's why Tom's Hardware changed their entry-level recommendations from Intel's Celeron and Pentium chips to a three year-old Athlon X4 and the Phenom II X4 945.

Ideally, no-one should really settle for a dual-core without Hyper-threading these days, its just not worth it. I can understand doing it for budget reasons, but games are really beginning to leave single-thread performance behind in favour of parallelism. That's also why you don't see many benchmarks on it. I mean, Tom's did a Intel performance test comparing chips from the last few generations and the dual-cores, even the Core 2 E8400 (such a nice chip,too), does take an arrow to the knee in games like Crysis 3 and Far Cry 3.

At least League of Legends is playable on older, low-end hardware.



Heh, thanks. I know what a dead tech section is like, its never a nice thing to watch.



I'd recommend the HD7970 as well. Both the bundle and the performance is better than the GTX680 and the Metro: Last Light bundle. Nvidia doesn't really care because Kepler is earning them so much profit, funny enough.