[Benchmarkreviews.com] Why you shouldn't always buy the fastest, most expensive parts; even if you can afford them.
The Fast Enough Computer
Why you shouldn't always buy the fastest, most expensive parts; even if you can afford them.
While I have not yet (and may never) recover from my addiction to having the Biggest Fastest Most Expensive computer parts I can afford, the experience I've gained writing for this website over the past year or so has hammered home the lesson that most of the time, I'm just wasting my money. And you probably are, too.
What do you need a fast computer for?
Unless you're a professional who needs the power of a high-end workstation, the meanest, cheapest no-name box you can buy is likely more than sufficient for everything you do...except gaming. That's the metric I'm going to use here: frame rates in games, at a decent resolution with good visual effects. Looking at the Steam hardware survey, we can see that the most common gaming resolution is 1680x1050 pixels, so that's what I'll use. The goal is to build a system that will play most modern games at 30fps or better at 1680x1050 with good visual quality (i.e. without having to turn off anti-aliasing or other visual effects) and decent expansion capability for the least amount of money.
Benchmarks don't matter
Most of us will look to benchmark results to determine a computer's performance. It's like taking your car to the local drag strip and seeing how fast it'll do the 1/4 mile run. But much of the time, a benchmark score has about as much relevance to your computer as your car's 1/4 miles time has to its day-to-day driving experience. This is especially true for synthetic benchmarks: while tuning your system to deliver the bestest fastest results in AIDA64 or PassMark can be fun, all that really matters at the end of the day is how many FPS you can spit out in Crysis, Metro 2033, Bad Company, or whatever your favorite game is.
Sure, having a monster system that delivers triple-digit frame rates on a 30" monitor with the latest DX11 games with all the eye candy turned on confers certain bragging rights...and if bragging rights is what you're after, well, go get those three NVIDIA GTX580 cards and start overclocking them. But don't expect it to make any difference in your gaming experience unless you're running a PhysX-heavy game in 3D Vision on a triple monitor system. What, that's not what you're running? Well, then...
Consider this: first, if your system can maintain 30 frames per second or more on a given game, that's Fast Enough. Very few people can discern the visual difference between 30fps and anything faster. I certainly can't. But even if you can, the absolute limit is 60fps, because that's the refresh frequency of your monitor. It physically can't display more than that, and when you do, you get horizontal "tearing" artifacts, which is why most games these days have an option to sync the frame redraws to the monitor's vertical refresh, effectively capping your frame rate at 60fps. Given this, who cares if your system can generate more frames per second? You're not going to see them.
Second, game developers want to produce games that run well on mid-range systems, because people with Intel 980X systems running dual NVIDIA GTX580 cards don't really make up a large part of the market. Sure, Crysis brought even high-end systems to their knees when it was introduced, but do you want to spend hundreds of dollars to run a single game?
So, what do you need to play current modern games at 1680x1050 with good frame rates and decent visual quality? As it turns out, all you need is a computer that's Fast Enough. Here's what I'd suggest...
Source: Benchmarkreviews.com
