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Thread ID: 132331	2013-05-14 04:13:00	Are these good specs for money/gaming quality?	Daniel78 (17080)	Press F1

Post ID	Timestamp	Content	User
1341300	2013-05-17 12:44:00	gpus are usually cpu bound. Lolwut?!	Chilling_Silence (9)
1341301	2013-05-17 13:43:00	We've veered off into a pointless argument. You're convinced low end hardware is good for gaming, us serious gamers disagree. That's about the gist of the last several posts. A lot depends on the games you play, the resolution you use, and what amount of graphic quality you are happy with. Sure a reasonable dual core and graphics card will play most games pretty well at low settings but no serious gamer would be happy with that quality. Anyone who has experienced the frustration of having a game turn into a slideshow when a lot of action happens at once knows you need good hardware for some games. I play world of warcraft, an old game that people constantly write off as not needing much hardware to play. I have an i5 and a GTX 580 and still the framerate dips below 30 fps fairly often on ultra quality and can go into single figures occasionally in a aoe raid situation. because of this I drop a few settings and compromise on quality a little even on what should be more than enough power for ultra. Generally though I play everything at max quality at smooth framerates - it's what I spent the money for and it's what I want my rig to do. But as I said this is pointless, the thread is about what are good specs for a gaming PC and anyone building or buying a PC expressly for gaming should at a minimum be looking at an i3 or AMD quad core and preferably an i5 and a decent graphics card because anything lower specced than that whether it will play games or not is too old and slow to be a good investment at this stage. Recommending a celeron or pentium for a new gaming rig is like suggesting someone buy a PS2 for console gaming, sure it'll work but it's not a wise choice. As for GPU's being CPU bound - it's a subject that is poorly understood by many. A system will be bound by whatever component is slowest relative to the task required of it for any given application and depends a lot on the game or whatever in question. To Achieve for example 60 fps in a game there will be a certain amount of processing power involved for both the CPU & the GPU and as long as they have at least that much power everything is fine. That load will be spread differently for EVERY game. If we were talking about an old school 2D platformer with no 3d graphics for example then the Graphics card would have almost nothing to do and the CPU would be the limiting factor but the same machine could be GPU bound in a 3d graphics heavy game. Generally though the whole platform should be balanced, a high end graphics card is pointless with a pentium 4 and a high end CPU won't make an entry level graphics card game any better. The HD4850 was an awesome card in it's day and does still play most games surprisingly well. It is starting to be a bit too slow for some of them though. My ex flatmate is still running one with a Phenom 2 x3 and plays games at 1366 x 768 successfully. He had a dual core AMD x 2 and was playing everything ok until RAGE came out but had to buy the phenom to achieve playable framerates with that, so yes on that one game he was CPU bound. On other titles it's the GPU causing the fps limit. On the other hand I had a 4850 also and game @ 1920 x 1080 and it stopped being able to handle new games a couple of years back. I upgrade a lot though, I like to stay ahead of game requirements and not have to upgrade when a new game comes out. Out of interest I tried an experiment along these lines a while back - I repaired a dual core 3Ghz Pentium D that had a HD5450 graphics card in it. WoW played ok at low setting but not great. I swapped in a 9600Gt that I had laying around, still an old card but quite a bit more powerful than a 5450, result? no change at all - a pentium D just can't give high framerates in wow. Put the same two graphics cards in a modern PC and the difference between them is huge.	dugimodo (138)
1341302	2013-05-17 13:55:00	overclocked celerons have long been popular for gaming. tell me 22nm ivybridge is bad for gaming. you cant tell if im trolling (which im not) and i can't tell if you're an elitist snob (good sir id not want to defame you) A BETTER PSU, more ram, bigger/better SSD, a 4ghz overclock and a half decent gpu (her case is limited to single slot, hd7750 is good enough for most people) and my mum's computer would be a sweet gaming pc. ( not to mention a $150 copy of windows NT6) a better cpu cooler would probably come in handy. sure it wouldn't win any benchmarks but it would sure hold its own. WHERE IS METLA???A celeron wouldnt even hold its own against an i3 they didnt even hold their own against a P4. They have never been good for gaming, or popular with gamers, they were, are and will always be a lame cpu even over clocked (which due to their architecture just made them unstable). Why on earth would you want or buy a copy of NT6 (which is just the internal name for MS Vista) when there is a much better OS available? That along with other things you have said suggests to me you are either way out of touch with technology or have no idea what you are talking about.	Iantech (16386)
1341303	2013-05-17 13:58:00	gpus are usually cpu bound.I think you are wrong. A game or programme is either CPU or GPU bound (or balanced) but a GPU bound to a CPU??? Sorry, I dont think so.	Iantech (16386)
1341304	2013-05-18 06:37:00	A celeron wouldnt even hold its own against an i3 they didnt even hold their own against a P4. They have never been good for gaming, or popular with gamers, they were, are and will always be a lame cpu even over clocked (which due to their architecture just made them unstable). Why on earth would you want or buy a copy of NT6 (which is just the internal name for MS Vista) when there is a much better OS available? That along with other things you have said suggests to me you are either way out of touch with technology or have no idea what you are talking about. I remember a Compaq laptop Celeron was at 50% load on windows vista. It was absolutely terrible! Never even heard of Celeron's ever being good for gaming. Recently It's been the i5's and i7's not a Celeron.	ChazTheGeek (16619)
1341305	2013-05-18 07:50:00	To be fair celerons were in fact very popular for gaming - in the pentium 3 era when they first arrived. Back then they weren't much more than a pentium 3 with reduced cache and a lower price tag and some of them were amazing overclockers. These days though they are extremely low end and not something a gamer would use.	dugimodo (138)
1341306	2013-05-18 09:22:00	To be fair celerons were in fact very popular for gaming - in the pentium 3 era when they first arrived. Back then they weren't much more than a pentium 3 with reduced cache and a lower price tag and some of them were amazing overclockers. These days though they are extremely low end and not something a gamer would use.Well, I wrote a reply, and then it all disappeared lol, so not going to do it again. But lets just say, I agree with your last sentance and thats about it - maybe they were popular with solitare gamers in the office. IMO based on my experience and the research I was doing back then, celerons were not popular for gamers, nor were they good overclockers (thats not saying it wasnt done sucessfully, but for the average user, motherboards and cpus only supported a limited amount of overclocking). If anything, back then, AMD were king in the gaming community. Anyway, its all way off topic.	Iantech (16386)
1341307	2013-05-18 15:28:00	Seriously, gamers loved them. AMD were not king until the x2 came along. When Quake 3 and Unreal tournament were new people were buying celeron 300A's and gaming on them very well. Based not on research but on actual gaming I myself and several friends were doing. Right up until pentium 4 started taking over and then AMD trumped it all with the x2 family Celerons were the king of budget gaming. I also built a AMD K6 2-500 based machine and it was terrible, needed a 3D now patch to run games smoothly and without it couldn't cope. I've been building gaming machines since 386 days for the original wolfenstein and always had a tight budget back then. Here's a snippet for you from wikipedia Overclockers soon discovered that, given a high-end motherboard, the Celeron 300A could run reliably at 450 MHz. This was achieved by simply increasing the Front-side bus (FSB) clock rate from the stock 66 MHz to the 100 MHz clock of the Pentium II. At this frequency, the Mendocino Celeron rivaled the fastest x86 processors available. maybe you need better research or maybe you weren't gaming back then like I was :) How many modern CPUs can handle a 150% overclock on stock cooling ? - just to be honest here - I used a pentium 3 600 and not a celeron, I built the celeron machines for a couple of friends. The only differnece we noticed was for some reason the celeron couldn't play the intro movie smoothly for quake 3 but in game framerates were comparable. Yes it's way off topic but I think the original question has been well answered and the OP hasn't posted in a while.	dugimodo (138)
1341308	2013-05-18 18:11:00	22nm ivybridge celerons are not your grandpappy's celeron	Mirddes (10)
1341309	2013-05-19 00:23:00	maybe you need better research or maybe you weren't gaming back then like I was :) Yes, I was around then, I had been setting up Heritic, Doom, Wolfenstein and others on 286 and 386 before the celeron was released (still got some CPUs, RAM and Co-Processors somewhere). Granted, the 300a could clock up, but I would say that the exception rather than the norm and because one model was popular, it does not make the whole range popular. From your same source... Celeron processors can run all IA-32 computer programs, but their performance is often significantly lower when compared to similar CPUs with higher-priced Intel CPU brands. For example, the Celeron brand will often have less cache memory, or have advanced features purposely disabled. These missing features can have a variable impact on performance, but is often very substantial. While a few of the Celeron designs have achieved surprising performance, most of the Celeron line has exhibited noticeably degraded performance. This has been the primary justification for the higher cost of other Intel CPU brands versus the Celeron range. Which is exactly as I have found, generally, they lacked then, they lack now and will always lack performance. With the exception of the 300a maybe, they didnt, wont and will never be a gaming cpu. There is a good reason they are lower priced!! End of story.	Iantech (16386)
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