Revisiting the Desktop: Part 3 - 50K

The last two posts I wrote here and here focused on achieving a balance between price and performance. This post focuses on building the best gaming rig in 50K. Now that is a LOT of money to pay for a desktop. For the AMD fanboys (mainly Kulbir Saini), we finally have a competitive AMD rig. Apart from the CPU, Motherboard and Memory all the other components are the same. First, lets have a look at the platforms.

Intel Platform
The newly launched Intel Core i5 750 CPU and the Intel DP 55WB motherboard bring the performance of the Core i7 series to mainstream prices. The processor sets you back by about a Rs.10,150 and the motherboard would cost about Rs, 6090. A minor issue with this setup is that you would need to use DDR3 memory and that is almost 70% more expensive than DDR2. A 2GB DDR stick costs Rs.1,800 as compared to a 2GB DDR3 stick that costs Rs.2,450. The cost of the platform i.e. the CPU + Mobo + RAM = Rs. 18,690. You can read the reviews of the Core i5 here. You can purchase the CPU here and the motherboard here


AMD Platform
We are on a bit of a sticky wicket here. I am going to recommend a Phenom II x4 940BE CPU. The CPU costs 10,350 and the Gigabyte MA78GM-US2H would set you back by another Rs. 4,775.Add to that another 1,800 for 2GB of DDR2 RAM. The platform costs Rs. 16,925. That's a saving of Rs. 1,765 over the Intel Platform.



Comparing the two Platforms
The 940BE is a slightly old and is outperformed by the Core i5 in almost all applications. Expect to have a performance difference of anywhere between 5~10% in most applications except for high def gaming where the GPU is the limiting factor. Add to that the improved performance of DDR3 memory with the Core i5 and the wonderful new Turbo mode that comes along with it. The question is "Is all this worth Rs.2,000 ? I personally feel the answer is NO and only an AMD fanboy would want to go for the 940BE. However if you feel that the 1.7K savings are important or you would like to spend them elsewhere, the 940BE based setup won't suck for sure !!

The other stuff is common to both builds. Let's take a look at the components selected.


1. GPU: PowerColor ATI Radeon 4890 - Rs.12,198
The Radeon 4890 is the best single GPU card that AMD has to offer in the 4xxx series. There are a whole slew of 4890's available in the market that range from 12K to 17K. This was the best bet. The benchmarks for the 4890 can be read here and here. Any higher GPU power would mean buying a Radeon 5850 for 19K for about 10% extra performance or a crossfire solution that would really bump up the price of the motherboard. Unfortunately there were no Nvidia cards that were competitive at INR prices. Sad for the green team. You can buy the card here.

2. Monitor: Samsung 2233 SW - Rs.8,871
The samsung 2233sw is one of the best monitors rupee for rupee. It has a 16:9 aspect ratio and has a diagonal of 21.5 inches. It is the cheapest full HD monitor, and performs better than any other monitor in the either the same price range or resolution range. The monitor has a clean look. Reviews of this monitor can be read here. Some people may be inclined to purchase a larger monitor. The Samsung P2350 or the BenQ G2412 are excellent 23.5 Inch options but would cost between Rs.2800 and Rs.3000 extra and was out of bounds of the 50K machine. The monitor can be purchased here.


3. Chassis: Cooler Master Elite 335 - Rs. 2,150
A Radeon 4890 and our choice of processors are likely to produce a lot of heat. The CM chassis is spacious, well ventilated and more importantly large enough to accommodate all components without creating any clutter. You do have the option of buying other cases like those from Zebronics or I-ball, but the CM chassis has excellent build quality and comes with a 3 year warranty. There are 2 front side USB ports, audio connectors and a e-sata port. The case can be purchased here.


4. SMPS: iBall Sprinter 600W - Rs.2,877
The Radeon 4890 needs 2 PCIe Power connectors and requires about 200W of power. A high end system running possibly overclocked processors and a few fans would push the system power consumption to about 400W. This would necessitate at least a 550W power supply. My experience tells me to never be a cheapskate when it comes to power supplies. The SMPS can be purchased here


5. HDD: Seagate Barracuda 500GB 7200RPM - Rs. 2,371
These days a 500 GB disk is par for the course. Despite what people say, all Hdd's are pretty much the same and come with standard warranties. This was the cheapest Hdd I could find and helped me shave off a few hundred rupees to invest in other places.


6. Optical Drive: Samsung DVDRW SATA - Rs. 1,100
Optical Drives are pretty much the same story as HDD's. Any of the major brands ought to do the job. We picked up the cheapest DVD writer from Samsung. It supports all DVD formats and doesn't raise the decibel level too high.



7. Keyboard + Mouse: Microsoft MMKB + Optical - Rs.700
The Microsoft Combo is pretty good to use with it's ergonomic design and pretty well built too, just in case you decide to take out your gaming frustrations on the controls. Logitech offers a similar combo for the same price. So you can take your pick.



8. Speakers: Creative SBS A500 5.1 Speakers - Rs. 2,800
Since the system is intended for gaming and multimedia and HD content, a 5.1 system is a must. The entry level creative system is a decent performer. Admittedly, better speakers could have been included, but we wanted to spend our money elsewhere.






Final Costs:

Intel System : Rs. 51,757
AMD System: Rs. 49,992

These Prices are from websites that sell stuff online(excluding shipping). Odds are that you will find this a bit more expensive in Hyderabad as dealers are pretty much dicks.

I really don't advocate spending any more money on a Desktop. If your needs are slightly different, i.e. you are a casual gamer and still have 50K to throw on a desktop, you could save 4K on the GPU by getting a Radeon 4870, another 1K on the SMPS by getting a zebronics 500W and use the extra 5K to upgrade to a 24" monitor and get some extra HDD space.

Revisiting the Desktop: Part 2 - 40K

The last post convered building a Gaming oriented desktop for 30K. This post bumps up that budget by another 10K. Lets see what that extra money brings to the table.

1. Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 - Rs.8,800
2. Motherboard: Gigabyte Intel G31-ES3G - Rs.3,550
3. Video Card: Sapphire ATI Radeon 4870 - Rs.8,800
4. Memory: 4 GB DDR2 - Rs.2,400
5. Hard Drive: 500 GB Sata - Rs.2,700
6. Case: Cooler Master Elite 355 - Rs.2,150
7. SMPS: Zebronics 500W Platinum - Rs.1,850
8. Optical Drive: Sony DVD-RW SATA - Rs.1,100
9. Keyboard+Mouse: Logitech Black - Rs.700
10. Monitor : Samsung 2033 SW - Rs.7,500
11. Speakers : Creative SBS 5.1 - Rs.2,800

Grand Total : Rs.42,350

As you can see, I have crossed the 40K limit by 2.3K. The alternatives were to buy a cheaper CPU that would surely bottleneck the ATI 4870 or buy a cheaper GPU. The best GPU in terms of performance below the 4870 is another ATI card the 4850. The price difference is about 2K but the performance differnece is about 40%. No Processor bottleneck is going to reduce that much of a gap. If you do wish to remain below the 40K mark, you can use the E7400 used in the previous build along with a good CPU cooler. BUt as it stands the combo of a E8400 and ATI 4870 is great.

This is a system that has parts that can all be overclocked very nicely. This made it important to buy a Motherboard capable of handling overclocks. A good feature of the Gigabyte board is a redundant bios just in case you scramble the original one.

There is a major upgrade to the chassis and SMPS. The CM elite 355 is spacious and has ample circulation. The ATI 4870 needs two 6-pin power connectors and so it's best to play safe and hence the dedicated 500W SMPS. The rest of the system remains the same as our previous build. Some people would be upset to not have a full HD monitor at the 40K mark. Another 2.5 should upgrade you to the Samsung 2233SW.

So how does this system perform ? Well the GPU is pretty damn awesome. The 4870 can run every game at max settings @1600x900 at 60+ fps provided you ditch the anti aliasing. With this setup you have pretty much bettered every gaming console out there. This is also the last price point where you would have option of buying an additional netbook for mobility. Both of these machines put together would total about 60K. That is perhaps the maximum amount of money you should spend on computers while in college. Next up is part 3 where I push the budget to 50K. AMD fanboys might want to read that one.

Revisiting the Desktop: Part 1 - 30K

Almost 3 months ago I wrote a post on how much better you could spend your money on a desktop rather than a laptop. Well, if you that was good, wait till you see whats happened to the markets in these 3 months. I will be writing multiple posts on buying desktops at various price points. 30K, 40K, 50K, 60K and finally 70K. These desktops are meant for two things: Gaming and watching movies, coz that's pretty much what we do in IIIT :) Today's post is about building a gaming rig for 30k. Here is what we put in.

1. Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo E7500 @2.8GHz - Rs.5,675
2. Motherboard: Asus G31-PK5PL-CM - Rs.2,525
3. Graphics: Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 4670 - Rs.4,300
4. Memory: Kingston 2GB 800MHz DDR2 - Rs.1,850
5. Hard Drive: Western Digital 500GB - Rs.2,700
6. Case + SMPS: Zebronics 400W - Rs.1,500
7.Optical Drive: Sony DVD-RW - Rs.1,100
8.Keyboard+Mouse: Logitech USB KB+Optical Mouse - Rs.700
9.Monitor: Samsung 2033 SW - Rs.7,500
10.Speakers: Creative SBS 5.1 - Rs.2,800

Grand Total : Rs.30,600

In some ways building a PC like this is the hardest thing to do. Most components have to be entry level yet at the same time they shouldn't introduce bottlenecks anywhere into the setup. Lets have a look at some of the components chosen. The processor is a mid range dual core processor. At this price range there isn't much more any processor can get significantly get out of any of the other components. The motherboard is a very bare-bones platform. At this price range motherboards aren't expected to have great overclocking potential or anything. The Asus board has decent expansion options as well as good integrated 8 channel sound.

The choice of GPU is rather straightforward. The competition is blown away by the ATI 4670. The nearest competition from Nvidia costs a good 2K extra. An additional thing working in favor of the ATI 4670 is it's amazingly low power requirement. It doesn't need any external connectors! Just the PCIe interface power suffices. As the card doesn't need any connectors any decent power supply would do. Zebronics offers a decent combo of a cabinet and a 400W PSU.
Choosing a monitor was a tough tough call.There were lots of good deals from LG, Viewsonic and Acer, but in the end getting a 21.5" LCD with a max resolution of 1600x900 for 7.5K is a great deal. The Samsung 2033SW is a steal at such a price.
The rest of the components are very basic. A 500GB HDD from Seagate, 2Gigs of RAM from Kingston, a DVD writer from Sony, and a basic multimedia keyboard and optical mouse combo from Logitech. An entry level 5.1 speaker system from creative completes the list.

To give you in idea of how such a system performs, I benchmarked some games on my lab machine. This system runs a E7200@2.4 GHz, an Asus G31 board, a powercolor ATI 4670, 1 Gig of ram and a 160GB HDD. Surprisingly a 285W PSU seems to drive the system quite well. The monitor has a max resolution of 1440x900. Essentially it's very close to the machine we built with but with slightly lower specs on each component. This is system can handle any modern game at max settings @1440x900(Crysis included) at 45+ frames/second if you turn off Anti Aliasing, Volumetric effects and Specular occlusion. This things are hardly noticeable but can cut your FPS down to half!! Our 30K system is likely to perform 10~15% better due to a better CPU and loading times would be better due to some more RAM.

So there you have it. A 30K desktop that would perhaps smoke any laptop. If you had a budget of 50K, you could spend 30K on such a desktop and buy a netbook like Dell Inspiron Mini-10 for 18K for the sake of the Oh so hyped "Mobility". Coming up in a day or two is Part-2 where I increase the budget from 30K to 40K.

A Nvidia GeForce GPU reborn

Well I'm talking about my laptop. I have a huge Dell Inspiron 9400 laptop. The bling bling inside it being a spanking GeForce Go 7800 GPU. For the last few weeks I wasn't able to get any sort of performance out of the laptop. Initially I thought there was something wrong with the OS. Following a reinstall the laptop started to suck even more :( Not to mention it was running really hot. Looked up on forums and found out that this has someting to do with dust. I never really bothered about the laptop running hot as my GPU is always OC'ed.

A lot of credit is due to Bharat Sankhlecha of UG4. This guy's knowledge of laptop internals is amazing. After he opened up my laptop and removed a shit load of dirt(it was like a huge fur ball sadly no pics ) my laptop started working properly. Apparently all the crap inside wasn't allowing proper cooling.

My GPU i.e. the Geforce Go 7800 is made from chips rejected from the manufacturing process of Go 7800GTX chips. The GTX has 32 pipelines and is one of the most powerful mobile GPU's out there(Only a 8800 M was ahead of it) . Those chips that don't have all pipelines functioning properly are then "locked" i.e. the number of active pipelines is reduced to 16 by bios locking. So despite pipelines being present on the chip they aren't used. Unlocking is rather dangerous. It involves opening up the laptop, taking out the card and flashing it's bios. Emboldened by opening up my laptop once I opened it up again took out my card and flashed it with the bios of a 7800 GTX.(A heart stopping moment coz a wrong step and your card is fubar) Below is the effective transformation.

Pipeline : 16 to 31 (There was just one bad pipeline!! Yippeeeeee)
Clock core : 250 Mhz to 365 Mhz
Memory clock: 1.3 Ghz to 1.58 Ghz
Fan always at full right from startup
Idle temp 68 to 79

A driver reinstall followed. What better way to see how your card performing then crysis :)
I set the settings to low(the 7800 has got just 256 MB of memory so there is no way I can turn on the pretty stuff!) and the res to 1920x1200! Well I must say crysis looks gorgeous even at low specs at this resolution.


The results: I got a very respectable 27 FPS !!!(min 17- when staring out into the open,max 38- when in rooms or smaller environs, avg 27.6) Wow that is some going for a laptop GPU. Add to that the fact that I am definitely bottlenecked by my processor (I have a 1.7 Ghz core duo OC to 1.9Ghz) and RAM 1 Gb@667, this is quite some going. The load temp has skyrocketed to around 88~90 C. I need a new cooling solution otherwise my card will burn out. There were a few artifacts courtesy the 1 pipeline that is bad. But it was rather limited. This is a mighty performance for a laptop purchased in April 2006.

For those gasping in horror (read Playboi :P) I told you I'd do this someday :P

PS1: DO NOT try this at home. Flashing GPU bios's is not something you want to do!!
PS2: Wow! people who made crysis rock. It is just the most beautiful thing I have seen run on a computer.
PS3: Congratulations and the thanks of a billion people to Anil Kumble
PS4: Not doing any active research for the last 2 weeks :(