Is this offer worth the money?

[Deleted]

So I made a post the other day complaining about my potato pc and only having a budget of £200 to either buy a new one or upgrade my potato, as it turned out £200 is too little to buy a new desktop and its not worth upgrading my potato since its so old and the only thing I could upgrade is the RAM....

So after talking to a friend of mine it turned he knows somebody who is selling their old pc for £250, their pc spec is as follows:

2 x AMD Radeon 6900 (2048MB each) crossfire for a total of 4097MB

AMD FX 8150 eight core processor

ACPI x64 motherboard

16GB RAM

so I have 3 questions

1. Is it worth the money?

2. How well will it run wow?

3. Is there potential to upgrade it later on?

[Marinai]

I'd personally go for the MSI R9 380 Gaming 4GB, or the 8GB, because they're cheaper and also possible to be in crossfire.

[Deleted]

I'd personally go for the MSI R9 380 Gaming 4GB, or the 8GB, because they're cheaper and also possible to be in crossfire.

Well this is something I could think about in the future when I want to upgrade parts BUT didn't really answer my questions..

[Marinai]

Actually, I changed my mind: I'd personally wait until the end of the month, or beginning of next month, for the AMD Radeon RX 480, they're cheaper and also possible to be in crossfire.

- - - Updated - - -

Well this is something I could think about in the future when I want to upgrade parts BUT didn't really answer my questions..

Sorry, just saw the card and figured.. It's the only thing I'm currently missing for my machine lol

[SoulForge]

To correctly answer I'd need to know what your current potato is like to determine if this potato is an upgrade.

[Bahm]

2 x AMD Radeon 6900 (2048MB each) crossfire for a total of 4097MB

Two 2048mb cards come to a grand total of 2048mb of vram. Both cards have to process the image, you don't add the vram together.

[Elim Garak]

2 x AMD Radeon 6900 (2048MB each) crossfire for a total of 4097MB

That's not how it works, it still will be 2gb

[Deleted]

This is just my opinion, hope it helps:

1. Is it worth the money?

Its an OK(ish) build for the money. Could do with a few more details like motherboard Model, PSU, HDD or SSD

2. How well will it run wow?

At a guess it would be able to run wow at about medium settings, (not sure on how the graphic changes in legion will play for older systems yet).

3. Is there potential to upgrade it later on?

The things you have potential to upgrade is to a higher model of the FX 8000 series e.g. FX8350, increase RAM amount but not much point in this and you can swap out the GPU to a RX or 1000 series.

[Mythbredor]

I'd personally go for the MSI R9 380 Gaming 4GB, or the 8GB, because they're cheaper and also possible to be in crossfire.

He's not asking to change the build he's asking if it's worth the money to buy his friend's friend's PC.

[Lathais]

I wouldn't buy it because it's an AMD system. WoW would run better on a intel Pentium G3258 than that AMD CPU due to IPC. It has no real upgrade path either.

From his other post:

Thank you for the comments so far, sorry for the slow reply but i have been at work all day.

The spec of my potato is as follows:

Packard Bell UTOW-SFR E4500

Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo CPU E4500 @ 2.20GHz 2.20GHz
RAM: 2GB (2x1GB)
Graphics Card: Nvidia GF8400

[Mythbredor]

I wouldn't buy it because it's an AMD system. WoW would run better on a intel Pentium G3258 than that AMD CPU due to IPC. It has no real upgrade path either.

From his other post:

Do you have any actual proof of that or are you just amd hating?

[Lathais]

Do you have any actual proof of that or are you just amd hating?

It's pretty common knowledge. Can't find anything directly comparing the G3258 to the 8350, but here's one comparing the 4690k, 4330, G3258 OC, G3258 Stock and a AMD Athlon X4 750K:
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/pentiu...-32974-10.html

As you can see, for WoW, there is virtually no difference between the OCed G3258 and the 4690K. This is because due to WoWs nature it is still primarily run on a single thread that can not be split so IPC is all that matters. It's pretty well known that each individual core on an intel CPU is stronger than the individual cores on AMD chips. Since individual core performance is all that matters to WoW, the weakest intel CPUs beat out the best AMD CPUs, for WoW.

We see similar results in some other games, like BF4:
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/pentiu...w-32974-5.html
Virtually no difference between the G3258 and the 4690k.

For games that can actually make use of more cores, yeah, there is a difference:
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/pentiu...w-32974-9.html - Tomb Raider
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/pentiu...w-32974-7.html - Metro: Last Light

But even in these cases, the G3258 is really holding it's own.

However, if we look at the newer G4400 in a more demanding game like The Witcher 3:
http://www.legitreviews.com/intel-pe...lake_179724/10

Once again, the Pentium is performing nearly the same as the i5 from the same gen.


More cores simply don't matter to games as much and a long time ago AMD went the route of more cores and focusing on hyperthreading while intel focuses on stronger individual cores. For things that make use of Hyperthreading, yeah, AMD is awesome. Not as awesome as intel, but far more budget friendly. For things that don't make use of hyperthreading, like gaming, intel is just plain better all around.


Just to clarify also, I do not hate AMD in any way. So no, it's not AMD hate, it's just simple facts. I actually want AMD to do well, to light a fire under intels ass so maybe we see some actual improvements from one generation to the next. It's pretty sad when a 2500K is nearly as good as a 6600K. AMD is even worse though, having seen no major improvements in quite some time as well.

[the boar]

Do you have any actual proof of that or are you just amd hating?

as another person who does not hate amd... yeah sadly it is true that current amd cpu's are wank for wow. hoping zen might change this though.. might lower prices of cpu's if there is actually competition to intel >.<

[Lathais]

as another person who does not hate amd... yeah sadly it is true that current amd cpu's are wank for wow. hoping zen might change this though.. might lower prices of cpu's if there is actually competition to intel >.<

Possibly, I think the current rumors put Zen somewhere close to Haswell. Skylake and whatever is after it will likely be better than Zen, but depending on how expensive Zen is, it will likely be worth it to at least consider.

[Deleted]

quickly looking at ebay those graphics cards are offered for around £50 and the cpu for £55-80. cpu/mobo combos go for over £250 for some reason. so all parts together it's probably cheaper to buy it off a friend then off a stranger, especially if you also factor in postage.

however is you look around at ebay you can also find stuff like http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/FAST-GAMIN...sAAOSwhDdXEO83

i dont really have a clue if thats better or worse, but its just to show you have choices at your budget.

but my pc has a i5 750 and a hd5850 from 2009 and that still runs wow ok on medium settings, i just sometimes have to turn recount off in raids.

[Mythbredor]

as another person who does not hate amd... yeah sadly it is true that current amd cpu's are wank for wow. hoping zen might change this though.. might lower prices of cpu's if there is actually competition to intel >.<

Possibly, I think the current rumors put Zen somewhere close to Haswell. Skylake and whatever is after it will likely be better than Zen, but depending on how expensive Zen is, it will likely be worth it to at least consider.

Ah okay I was just curious because I did some benchmarking on beta and I had WoW using all my cores pretty much equaly besides my 7th core(hyperthreaded core) which was about 10% higher than the others. And my GPU was definitely the bottleneck there. But I'm using a 6700k/GTX970 I do have a AMD platform I could test later but I can't right now.

[Lathais]

Ah okay I was just curious because I did some benchmarking on beta and I had WoW using all my cores pretty much equaly besides my 7th core(hyperthreaded core) which was about 10% higher than the others. And my GPU was definitely the bottleneck there. But I'm using a 6700k/GTX970 I do have a AMD platform I could test later but I can't right now.

There is no way your GPU was a bottleneck for WoW. WoW is funny in a way. It doesn't look like it's maxing out a core, but it is waiting on data from that core. The way the engine is coded, it may not take the entire core to do the work, but it has do do things serially. It has to wait until each draw call finishes before it starts the next one. So it's not maxing out a core, but it's still a serial thread that must be processed in order. The faster the IPC(Instruction per Cycle) the faster it gets to the next draw call and sends that data to the GPU. So therefore, even though the CPU itself is not running at 100%, or even and individual core is not running at 100%, it IS the CPU you are waiting on.

Also in WoW, quite often, the GPU is just sitting there idle waiting for the CPU to finish processing and sending the next draw call. This is why for a while both AMD and nVidia cards were having massive FPS drops in WoW. The GPU was idle half the time, so it would downclock itself and never ramp back up, because it didn't think it needed to. This is why sometimes still, turning graphics settings up in WoW can increase FPS. The further demand on the GPU prevents it from downclocking while waiting on the CPU to tell it what to do next.