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Thread: Reviews - £600-£700 to spend on a base unit? MESH and ARBICO battle for top honours

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    Reviews - £600-£700 to spend on a base unit? MESH and ARBICO battle for top honours

    An overclocked Core 2 Quad vs. AMD Phenom II. Find out which is best.
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    Banhammer in peace PeterB kalniel's Avatar
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    Re: Reviews - £600-£700 to spend on a base unit? MESH and ARBICO battle for top honou

    Your gaming tests seem very heavily weighed towards nVidia cards - you pick a rare openGL-based game and also use the 3dmark Vantage test which nVidia cards 'cheat' on by using the full GPU to aid the CPU score (an unrealistic scenario given that while playing games you'd expect the GPU to be spending some time actually drawing things).

    I'd be interested to see either the graphics score on its own from the Vantage test, or prevention of this 'cheat' by disabling hardware physX acceleration.

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    Re: Reviews - £600-£700 to spend on a base unit? MESH and ARBICO battle for top honou

    I'd expect an i7 system for £700.

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    Re: Reviews - £600-£700 to spend on a base unit? MESH and ARBICO battle for top honou

    Quote Originally Posted by Terbinator View Post
    I'd expect an i7 system for £700.
    I doubt it, i7 920's are still £200+, and the lowest priced mobo is still about £150 - so if you add in all the essentials (including the OS), it'd still cost more.

    920 ~ £210
    X58 Mobo ~ £150
    6GB DDR 3 ~ £80
    Vista Home Basic (64bit) ~ £65
    GTX 260 ~ £110
    500GB HDD ~ £40
    Optical Disk (DVD-RW) ~ £20
    Case (Antec 300) ~ £46
    600W PSU (Corsair 650W)~ £70

    = £791, or about £800

    You could go cheaper with some components, but to be honest I doubt think you could chop an extra £100 no matter how cheap you go.

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    Re: Reviews - £600-£700 to spend on a base unit? MESH and ARBICO battle for top honou

    As you said you could go cheaper, but even so when you factor in the £50-100 difference give or take the i7 is a lot more bang for the buck.

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    Re: Reviews - £600-£700 to spend on a base unit? MESH and ARBICO battle for top honou

    Quote Originally Posted by kalniel View Post
    Your gaming tests seem very heavily weighed towards nVidia cards - you pick a rare openGL-based game and also use the 3dmark Vantage test which nVidia cards 'cheat' on by using the full GPU to aid the CPU score (an unrealistic scenario given that while playing games you'd expect the GPU to be spending some time actually drawing things).

    I'd be interested to see either the graphics score on its own from the Vantage test, or prevention of this 'cheat' by disabling hardware physX acceleration.
    Vantage is Direct3D so we've added an OGL title to balance things up. Historically, results from ET:QW have tallied up well with the HEXUS.bang4buck. CoH, for example, gives NVIDIA a much higher comparative score.

    The complete test is used so that Joe Average can get quick idea on their own comparative performance, but we'll publish the GPU score in subsequent reviews. I'll add them to this one too.

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    Re: Reviews - £600-£700 to spend on a base unit? MESH and ARBICO battle for top honou

    Quote Originally Posted by Terbinator View Post
    As you said you could go cheaper, but even so when you factor in the £50-100 difference give or take the i7 is a lot more bang for the buck.
    That quote for the i7 system is still not including the profit these companies need to make from each PC. They don't do it for free.

    Mesh do sell a i7 system for £799 but the specs are much much lower then the one quoted above.

    One of similar spec (Ati 4890) is £999.

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    Re: Reviews - £600-£700 to spend on a base unit? MESH and ARBICO battle for top honou

    Hmm both have nice cable jobs

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    Re: Reviews - £600-£700 to spend on a base unit? MESH and ARBICO battle for top honou

    Quote Originally Posted by Tarinder View Post
    Vantage is Direct3D so we've added an OGL title to balance things up.
    But there's a known problem with Vantage though, as below:

    The complete test is used so that Joe Average can get quick idea on their own comparative performance,
    But unless you disable hardware physX it's not comparative between ATI and nVidia so using it to compare systems with different graphics card manufacturers gives misleading results if you're trying for a quick idea.

    But thanks for getting back to us about the points.

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    Re: Reviews - £600-£700 to spend on a base unit? MESH and ARBICO battle for top honou

    Quote Originally Posted by Merson View Post
    That quote for the i7 system is still not including the profit these companies need to make from each PC. They don't do it for free.

    Mesh do sell a i7 system for £799 but the specs are much much lower then the one quoted above.

    One of similar spec (Ati 4890) is £999.
    But i wouldn't be buying my £700-799 from a company id build it myself, and so id expect me to get an i7 rig in that price bracket.

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    Re: Reviews - £600-£700 to spend on a base unit? MESH and ARBICO battle for top honou

    Quote Originally Posted by Terbinator View Post
    But i wouldn't be buying my £700-799 from a company id build it myself, and so id expect me to get an i7 rig in that price bracket.
    So in what way is that relevant to an article reviewing computers you can buy from two companies? Unless you also provide computers for sale where you don't charge anything on top of the BoM

    I guess any article talking about anything pre-built always gets at least one 'you can do it cheaper yourself' reply
    Last edited by kalniel; 20-07-2009 at 04:15 PM.

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    Re: Reviews - £600-£700 to spend on a base unit? MESH and ARBICO battle for top honou

    Quote Originally Posted by kalniel View Post
    I guess any article talking about anything pre-built always gets at least one 'you can do it cheaper yourself' reply
    Yes and no

    What i mean is that think i could put an i7 in that bracket so why they can't i don't know, after all im sure they would get there components for a lower price than me. And yeah, build your own Im sure if you know what to look for on a custom pc site you can put to gether your own rig, its only like matching pieces of LEGO.

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    Re: Reviews - £600-£700 to spend on a base unit? MESH and ARBICO battle for top honou

    But it's not. You can easily say that when you have been doing it for years like 99% of us on here have. For a complete novice its a mine field, for example that MESH site was showing core i7's with 4/8GB of RAM. When we all know you get Tri-kits of 3/6/12GB. There's plenty of things that those sites never delve into. There's the different buses available different cable connections, even installing an OS, the list goes on.

    The customize part of those sites are for people who know what they want but either lack the knowledge to do it themselves or just don't want the hassle. For those who do decide to customize without knowledge everything is set out in a manner that is easy for anyone to understand. Add money for better equipments and subtract for not so good. I bet 60% plus of there orders are from people who select from the pre-made options without any customizations at all.

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    Re: Reviews - £600-£700 to spend on a base unit? MESH and ARBICO battle for top honou

    Quote Originally Posted by Terbinator View Post
    As you said you could go cheaper, but even so when you factor in the £50-100 difference give or take the i7 is a lot more bang for the buck.
    personally i would rather go with the phenom ii in that price range as you could get a top line mobo for a good 20 quid cheaper than the worst i7 mobo, then youve still got a load of cash spare to spend on gpu or cooler etc

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