| Scisca said: I know the high end APU is going to be expensive, it's going to rival consoles, basicaly try to be the ultimate Steam Machine. I know current APUs aren't anything great, but with Zen cores they will be very interesting and offer great performance per $. And the current ones aren't terrible, just that they aren't for gamers. If you want to build a machine for browsing, office and playing stuff like Candy Crush, or old games, a PC with an APU is absolutely good enough. |
If all you want to do is use Office, Candy Crush or old Games... Intel i3 is a better proposition as those tasks are typically lightly-threaded... And Intel's low-end will beat AMD's best every time in those scenarios.
Plus Intel is more energy efficient.
With that said... For things like that, you could get away with an Atom X7 8300 - 8700.
| Scisca said: Freesync is free, so it can be included even in the cheapest monitors. It is becoming more popular and I can't see any reason why it shouldn't. Every company introduces Freesync monitors at different price points. When I was choosing my monitor, I was picking only between Freesync ones, the more people do like me and buy these monitors, the more there will be manufactured, since there is no reason not to put it into a monitor. |
It may reach a point where it becomes *the* standard, which nVidia will then likely support it anyway.
It's a long way from reaching decent market saturation now or in the immediate future.
| Scisca said: I know Intel has "APUs", but when it comes to (i)GPUs they aren't even close to where AMD is. Just like nVidia isn't anywhere close to AMD when it comes to CPUs. AMD is in the sweetspot, especially once they release Zen. |
Depends. Intel's best IGP with eDRAM is faster than AMD, Intel also has the edge in power consumption.
If a game is CPU heavy, even if AMD has a faster GPU... It still looses to Intel.
See here: http://www.anandtech.com/show/9960/intel-for-mainstream-gamers-our-igps-are-equivalent-to-discrete-gpus
| Johnw1104 said: I find the easiest fix that often drastically improves performance for people with little cost is a RAM upgrade... it's a shame so many people make the inaccurate assumption that they could never understand the innards of a PC, as it really doesn't take much effort. Heck, I built my first PC using a "PC's for Dummies" book lol |
I think it really depends.
If you only use on average 2-3Gb of Ram and you have 4Gb, then dropping in 8Gb or 16Gb is a waste, you are likely to see nothing out of it, sometimes you are just going to be CPU or GPU bound.
The *biggest* bang for buck upgrade is ditching the mechanical hard drive for the OS and getting an SSD.
www.youtube.com/@Pemalite
