The Gaming PC Building/Upgrade Thread

[Twistedpixel]

Garcian Smith said:

Mobos and graphics cards are not nearly as manufacturer-dependant as power supplies. The best PSU manufacturers will place a 5-year warranty on their PSUs because they know they're making a quality product. The worst will only provide a one-year death sentence warranty. This is a well-documented fact.

Graphics cards, on the other hand, are built to manufacturer (and that means ATI and NVidia's) specs. The only difference is the cooling unit and the number of video-out ports.

I don't recommend cheap cases with multiple 80mm fans because cheap 80mm fans are WAY more likely to be noisy than cheap 120mm fans. It's not devastating, but it can make a lot of difference.

As for the 5750: A quick Google search led me to some benchmarks that rate it at 20.6 average FPS on Stalker: Call of Pripyat at 1680x1050 w/4x AA and an average of 32.7 FPS on DIRT 2 at 1680x1050 with no AA (turning on AA, it's assumed, would drop it from "just playable" into unplayable framerates.) That's two out of the three currently released DirectX 11 games out there. While it's true that DX11 games probably won't be fully optimized for the standard for another year or more, that's all the more reason to just buy DX10 now and upgrade later down the line.

As for the rest of your points...

RAM: Even a 256-bit card like the 4850 does not have enough bandwidth to fully access 1 GB of GDDR3 memory most of the time. The 5750 is only a 128-bit card, but its GDDR5 memory means that it can better utilize that extra 512. (Not that you can find a 512MB 5750 anymore in the first place) Either way, the extra 512 doesn't matter for a 4850.

Fan Noise: This chart shows that there's no significant difference in noise between any of ATI's video cards (scroll down the page a bit).

Power consumption: Unless you have special needs, this doesn't matter.

Overclocking: Both do so extremely well. You might be able to get a little more juice out of the 5750 with stock cooling, though.

That's not to say that the 5750 is a bad card, of course. In fact, it's a very good one for 1680x1050 and lower resolutions. It just doesn't capture the price:performance "sweet spot" nearly as well as the 4850 does.

Graphics cards quality do definately depend on how they are made. They are hot products and it really does make a difference in terms of fan noise because typically a GPU fan on a low end card will use a two wire single speed fan. The board I gave as an example was a referrence boardwhich means it was manufactured by Saphire and then had another companies label slapped on it.

You can see significant differences in quality between motherboards too. The number of DOA or DSA (dead soon after) motherboards are significantly higher. Just read the Newegg reviews for boards which have low ratings. ECS is in this group.

That PSU+Case example had 5 stars on Newegg. If there was a reliability problem it would have been rated down to 4-3 stars as people generally do come back to the same review after the fact to report their problems. Since it has excellent reviews over a couple of years its pretty safe to say its not a bad design. The PSU you gave as an example a 350W PSU with no feedback was a risk, more so than the PSU+Case example. He can take out the 80mm fans if he doesn't like them. He does have to have a screw-driver to build the computer in the first place. That would leave two 120mm fans which is perfectly fine.

He will not be using the card above 1440 by 900 resolution. Since the monitor he chose was this resolution. The HD 5750 would have to push 27% fewer pixels at that resolution which does make a significant difference and would allow both games which are more efficient under the DX11 path and games which offer more I.Q. to run on the DX11 path.

As for RAM. The Xbox 360 has no trouble using 512MB of RAM with 25GB/S memory bandwidth, so I see no reason why this card couldn't use 1GB of RAM, especially with 3* the memory bandwidth. Since 1GB of ram is defaulting as the typical enthusiast ram quantity, I wouldn't suggest anyone get anything less. In addition he can get the card for $135 from saphire with a different cooler design. Thats only a $30 difference in that case.