Looking to get a new computer and was hoping the massive braintrust of CP would be able to help.
My question is will I see a difference between an intel i7-3770 and an AMD FX -8120 for average usage? There is about $200 difference between the two, I have always gone intel in the past but I don't know if it's worth the extra money for a minimal gain in performance. I see all the reviews and benchmarks show the i7 as ahead I just wonder if it will be noticeable to me. I plan on running AutoCAD and CADWorx on this system if that helps, other than that not much for new games, maybe some Starcraft 2, team fortress, a bit of WOW and watching a lot of videos.
A little googling is the best idea for these types of things.
Personally, in the last few years, AMD has really dragged their rear ends up and down the road when it comes to improvement on their processors. Yes, they have gotten faster, but not by leaps and bounds.
Intel is definintly the reigning champion right now, and their i7 processors are screaming fast and the Xeons are even faster. I have the i7-2600k, and I would never trade it for anything with AMD on it.
From the look of that page the AMD is slightly faster, but the Intel processor has so much more built in technology.
Plus, if you overclock AMD wrong *POOF* goes your processor. You overclock a Intel wrong, and it just grinds to a halt and says FIX ME!
Definintely spend the extra buck, and get a better product in the Intel.
I'd take the $200 and put it towards a SSD boot drive or a faster video card. Synthetic benchmarks are nice, but you can buy more real world performance for $200 in places other than the CPU socket.
Heck, I'd even consider using the $200 to buy a better quality screen than just raw CPU numbers on a benchmark.
I don't see this config very often outside of crazy boutique machines, but it makes sense to me theoretically. how much better is this in real world, and how much possible stability are you giving up?
Depends on the kind of RAID. Some kinds of RAID increase redundancy by putting the data in 2 or more different drives so if one drive fails the other will still have it. Other kinds increase speed by putting your data on 2 or more different drives, so if you need to get a file and half is on one drive and half is on the other it can get that file twice as fast (not really twice, but that's the idea). Other forms of RAID try to combine the two things (redundancy and speed) in various ways to improve both to varying degrees.
In the case above they're doing RAID 0 which splits the data between 2 or more drives to increase the speed by using multiple drives simultaneously.
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could someone quickly tell me what exactly running in RAID is and does?
Using two drives as an example:
RAID-0 is striping - the first block of data goes on drive 1, then the next block goes on drive 2, then the third block on drive 1, etc, alternating. So your read and write performance is roughly doubled, since you aren't waiting on the drive to issue the next read or write command, and you are using two data channels simultaneously.
RAID-1 is mirroring - the same data gets written to both drives. Reads can come from either drive. So when writing, your performance is about the same as a single drive (or a little bit slower), but if a drive fails you can continue to run on the surviving drive. Reads are roughly twice as fast - since you can read the same data from either drive, the system alternates reads from each drive without having to wait.
There are other forms of RAID, but those are the two common ones in a desktop scenario. RAID-1 isn't as valuable using SSD drives, since the odds of drive failure are much lower to start with, and absolute system uptime is rarely a requirement. But RAID-0 flies, and since you are addressing the absolute slowest part of any machine build (disk I/O), it's a bigger upgrade than any amount of RAM, CPU, or video card will make (within reason of course - the video card is obviously highly important to gamers looking for framerates)
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