SteveGrabowski

Wow, a $2300 system with a GTX 750 Ti and an $1800 system with a GTX 750? The author of this article should be shot.

That's a terrible deal even if it was brand new with the full two year warranty, as the reference cooler is complete crap on the 290 and 290x. The GPU goes straight to 94C and the card is constantly throttling under that woefully inadequate cooler. By contrast, this R9 290x is much better and comes with GTA V: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814202079&cm_re=sapphire_tri_x_r9_290x-_-14-202-079-_-Product The cooler keeps temps in the 70s even though the GPU is putting out the same amount of heat. Newegg also has a similar hot deal on the Sapphire Tri-X R9 290.

Eurogamer is the only site I have seen test this; everyone else just tests video cards in combination with i7s. GameGPU occasionally does CPU benchmarks with Radeon cards, but most recent games they do them with GTX 980, GTX 980 SLI, Titan X, etc. GameGPU's i3 benchmark looks pretty reasonable for COD AW. This is very surprising though, since the COD AW performance article Eurogamer did was where they first discovered problems with the i3 and R9 280 combination. It's pretty disturbing here seeing the i3-4130 + R9 280 combination lagging significantly behind the i3-4130 + GTX 750 Ti combo for the entire city driving section of the GTA V benchmark.

Eurogamer's review of the GTX 960 shows AMD cards performing really badly when paired with i3s. http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2015-nvidia-geforce-gtx-960-review

You should buy an Nvidia GPU with an i3. The AMD DirectX11 driver crashes and burns with an i3 or lower when there is a lot of stuff on the screen. An R9 280 is overkill anyways for 768p. I'd go for a GTX 750 Ti, or perhaps a GTX 660.

The 290 hasn't been anywhere close to that price since November.

1. I got a Pentium G3258 and an H81 board for $75 last summer. I don't use the Pentium now, but still, a $70 CPU and a $50 board brand new for $75? 2. My Antec Neo Eco 620C power supply (Seasonic OEM) was $23 on a Shell Shocker deal from newegg. 3. My Antec GX500 case was a $25 Shell Shocker deal from newegg. Cable management kind of sucks but the cooling is outstanding.

I gotta echo what George Carlin said, that I'd rather have my 10 year old watch two people have sex rather than have him see two people kill each other.

I'd definitely pick the GTA V bundle if I didn't own the game already. Witcher 3 looks great, but GTA V is such an unbelievably fun game with tons of replay value.

Why are people surprised games are written for the lowest common denominator? They always have been. Game development is expensive as hell and producers put tremendous pressure on development houses to meet deadlines. We all know PC AAA gaming is all about getting better results than consoles by brute force, not by optimizations for us.

The 4790k does 4.2 GHz on all cores at stock speed, or 4.4 GHz on dual core or single core workloads . On the downside though you really shouldn't consider using the stock cooler with the i7-4790k even at stock speed. You'll definitely want an aftermarket cooler. Those graphics I showed are some of the best case scenarios right now with the i7 though. I know Witcher 3 is recommending an i7-3770 or better, but so did Shadows of Mordor, which runs every bit as well with an i3 from 2011 (the 2nd and 4th generation i3, i5, and i7 are all at 100 FPS locked on the GameGPU benchmark for Middle Earth). But I like the thought of having 8 threads to simulate the 8 cores in the consoles. There is a big thread here with everyone complaining about Witcher 3 being dumbed down to the lowest common denominator (XB1), but that's something we all have to expect when playing console ports. The money is in the console releases, and the consoles are 8 very weak cores versus the 4 very strong cores in an i5. I'm not sure I trust studios to optimize their games for those four strong cores now.

So anyone who was going to buy GTA V anyways, this works out to basically a sub $200 R9 290. And arguably the best R9 290 on the market.

Yeah, you're right

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814202143 Also comes with GTA V and Dirt Rally

It's like gamer religion that i7 offers no benefit over i5 for gaming, and it's repeated over and over again in this forum. That and it's always said that games don't use hyperthreading. Both are dead wrong. 2013 and before it was exceedingly rare to see games use the 8 threads of say an i7-2600k, but 2014 to present most games can use all 8 threads. There is a CPU benchmark of all major 2014 AAA games on GameGPU.ru which shows the thread usage for either the i7-2600k or i7-4770k (I forget which), and all 8 threads are used in each game. This wasn't the case 2013 and before when the same site's benchmarks show most games using only 4 hardware threads of an i7, occasionally 5, but 8 only in Battlefield 4. However, those 8 threads typically don't offer much better or even better at all performance than just using 1 thread per core on an i5. Sometimes you'll even get slightly lesser performance using an i7 over an i5. But there are definitely games that can squeeze more performance out using the extra 4 threads of an i7, just like there are games that can make usage of higher clockspeeds of an overclocked 4690k/4790k. You just can't make a blanket statement which is most important for gaming: hyperthreading or clockspeed? Which is why I like the 4790k, because it offers both. Here's their benchmark for DAI: And Crysis 3: