Gaming Buyer's Guide - November 2004

Intel Mid-Range Gaming System

Unlike in the value sector, there really isn't much benefit to selecting an Intel system for the Mid-Range. They cost more and offer less performance. How much of a difference is there? Well, the price is about $75 more, which isn't too bad, but the performance of the CPU in games is going to be 10% to 20% slower in CPU-limited situations. With the powerful video cards that we're using, the CPU will definitely play more of a factor than in the budget range. You can refer to the gaming benchmarks in our Athlon FX-55 article for a better look at this. The graphics card used was the X800 XT in both PCIe and AGP versions, and the Athlon 64 3500+ would sit between the 3200+ and 3800+ 939 chips in performance.

Mid-Range Intel Pentium 4 System
Hardware	Recommended Component	Price
Processor	Pentium 4 550 3.4 GHz 1MB Cache	277
Motherboard	Abit AG8 i915P Chipset	129
Memory	Mushkin Dual Pack 2x512 PC3200 2.5-3-3	159
Video Card	ATI X800 Pro PCI Express VIVO	449
Hard Drive	Seagate 160GB SATA 7200RPM 8MB Model ST3160023AS	93
Optical Drive	NEC DVD+/-RW Drive Model 3500A	72
Case and Power Supply	Antec SLK3700-BQE with 350W	91
Display	Samsung SyncMaster 997DF 19 CRT	234
Speakers	Logitech Z-640 5.1	52
Keyboard	Logitech Internet Keyboard	17
Mouse	Microsoft IntelliMouse Optical	24
Bottom Line		1597

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Due to the current scarcity of high-end PCI Express graphics cards, we have selected the X800 Pro for the Intel Mid-Range System. This particular model includes VIVO functionality. 6800GT PCIe cards are also available at a similar price point, but it is difficult at best to find them. One option is the eVGA 6800GT, but that's about the only NVIDIA PCIe 6800 series card we've seen that doesn't cost $600 or more. Hopefully that will change when the NForce 4 motherboards start shipping.

Other than that and the motherboard and processor, our selections remain the same. You might notice that we have stayed with DDR1 RAM instead of DDR2, and the reason for this is that DDR1 almost always outperforms equivalently priced DDR2 RAM, not to mention that you can get inexpensive DDR1 for about $100 less than similar DDR2 RAM. If you are considering an Intel platform, there is little benefit in purchasing a DDR2 configuration. Integrated graphics can use the additional bandwidth that DDR2 offers, but we're obviously not going to recommend an integrated graphics solution for a gaming system.

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As far as features go, there is little advantage to either system. Both include Firewire, native SATA, RAID, etc. AMD chips still have the 64-bit potential while Intel chips have HTT as we mentioned before, but here, the AMD system clearly wins out in performance and PCI Express is more of a liability than a help in this price bracket. You'll still get very good performance from either system, and if you're very pro-Intel, this is probably the best that the platform has to offer in terms of price/performance. We won't be providing an Intel configuration in the High-End Gaming segment, as the best Intel is too far outclassed by the AMD offerings.

Going back to the AMD side of things, we expect that the first shipping PCI Express motherboards are going to cost somewhat more than currently available 939 boards, and as with this Intel system, the selection of PCI Express graphics cards other than the X700 Pro and 6600GT is limited and rather expensive. Unless you plan on keeping your next video card through several system upgrades, or if you're looking into NVIDIA's SLI functionality, we are more than happy with the price/performance of the AGP cards. SLI is not yet an option on Intel systems either, as the only motherboards supporting dual PCIe X16 slots are workstation boards costing over $300. We are awaiting the release of motherboards using competing chipsets from the likes of VIA and ATI to get dual X16 slots at a reasonable price.