Gaming Buyer's Guide - November 2004

Intel Budget Gaming System

At the lowest end of the spectrum, AMD doesn't have quite as much of an advantage in performance over Intel, since the CPU is less of a bottleneck, and there is one item that Intel can offer which AMD cannot (yet): PCI Express. Suffice it to say that especially for die-hard Intel fans, they are not a terrible choice, although they do cost slightly more. Here is our best attempt at matching the Budget AMD system's price and performance.

Budget Intel Pentium 4 System
Hardware	Recommended Component	Price
Processor	Pentium 4 520 2.8 GHz 1MB Cache	158
Motherboard	DFI 915P-TAG i915P	118
Memory	1x512MB Mushkin Basic 2.5-4-4	75
Video Card	XFX GeFORCE 6600GT 128 MB	178
Hard Drive	Seagate Barracuda 80GB EIDE model 7200.7	59
Optical Drive	NEC DVD+/-RW Drive Model 3500A	72
Case and Power Supply	Athenatech A602 Black/Silver with 350W PSU	62
Display	Samsung 793DF 17 Black/Silver CRT (1280x1024@75 Hz)	139
Speakers	Logitech Z-640 5.1	52
Keyboard and Mouse	Logitech Optical Desktop Combo	26
Bottom Line		939

Click to enlarge.

Everything remains the same, with the exception of the motherboard and CPU and graphics card. The one trump card Intel currently holds is that they have PCI Express graphics ports. Why are these important? Well, they do have the potential of being used in future systems (some day AGP is going to disappear). That's still a long way off, though, so it's not that important. 6600GT cards can also be used in SLI configurations with the proper motherboard, so that provides some future upgrade potential. With the launch and immediate availability of the 6600GT AGP cards, PCI Express is no longer a huge advantage, but the PCIe 6600GT cards do cost about $40 less than the AGP variants right now.

Click to enlarge.

With the 6600GT bringing performance that's usually at least 10% to 15% faster than the 9800 Pro, the final price of our budget Intel setup comes in between that of the two AMD options. The total difference in price is 8% if you add in speakers, making the Intel platform a viable option. In CPU limited games, however, AMD definitely wins out. Half-Life 2 appears to be more CPU limited than many expected, particularly in the budget category. Still, most CPUs can break the 60 FPS barrier, so it's not that much of a limitation.

Another drawback is that dual-channel RAM helps the Pentium 4 more than it does the Athlon 64, so using only one DIMM is going to cut into that performance boost a bit. If you plan on adding 512MB of RAM in the near future, that's not too big of a problem. Otherwise - and we hesitate to say this as they may not be of much use in future systems - using two 256 MB DIMMs will cost about the same as a single 512 MB DIMM. The extra $70 or so spent on an Intel system could be put into other items like a better graphics card or a faster CPU, and AMD also has the 64-bit factor to consider. This is why we still give AMD our primary recommendation, but it really is a close match-up in this price bracket.

Besides shipping PCI Express support, Intel also has their HyperThreading feature, which can help in certain multi-tasking applications. We have not yet seen any performance benefit to HyperThreading in the gaming realm - quite the reverse, in fact, as most games run a few percent slower with HTT enabled - but that could change in the future. With both AMD and Intel shifting away from increasing clock speeds to multi-core designs, it would make sense that games at some point will need to shift to a multi-threaded programming environment in order to extract the most performance from the processor. HTT ends up being nothing that we are overly concerned with as far as games go, but it's still there and it could come into play in the next year or two.

If you feel that our budget recommendations are almost impractical, just take that as an indication of the difficulty of selecting parts for this price segment. These three platforms are all very capable, however, and none of them is truly a bad choice. If you're the type of person who upgrades parts frequently - i.e. more than twice a year - over the life of your system, the socket 939 and socket 775 platforms will be a better choice. From a pure price standpoint, socket 754 still wins out.