Building a gaming PC, need advice from you hardware experts

[Viper1]

Captain_Tom said:

CGI-Quality said:

Captain_Tom said:

Amen!  It astonishes me that an $80 Phenom II x4 965 from 5 years ago can still run most games maxed out.  That is insane!

Really? Wow! Never would have imagined that!

My brother was forced to switch from an i7-920 @ 3.2 GHz to a Phenom II x4 @ 4.0 GHz (Long Story).  He got slightly better performance.

If that's the only difference (i7-920@3.2Ghz and PhenomIIX4965@4.0Ghz), then I'm going to have to call it into serious question.  Applications that are heavily, and I mean very heavily, dependant on clock speed or memory bandwidth may see an edge with the AMD CPU.  Otherwise, the 920 wins most battles.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/phenom-x4-965,2389.html
http://www.anandtech.com/show/2819/2

By the way, the Phenom II X4 965 launched at $245, not $80.