Building a gaming PC, need advice from you hardware experts

[Captain_Tom]

Viper1 said:

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.

-My point was  the Phenom and i7 traded blows.  However the Phenom was $245 while the i7 was $305, used less energy, had far cheaper motherboards, and can still be used today in modern AM3+ Mobo's that have USB 3.0 and SATA 6GB/s.

-The phenom is $80 now.  I never said it was at launch.  But even now a 5 year old processer is still beating the latet i3's while offering full 16/16 SLI options.  It was a beast!