Another nice thing about AMD CPUs is that even consumer models support memory with error correction (ECC). It’s unofficial, but with correct motherboard it works. Consumer CPUs from Intel don’t support ECC, and that makes them unsuitable to many kinds of work.
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The key is living in the past, and choosing the best hardware that 2015 has to offer.
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That’s kind of a dumb point even on its own terms…I’m pretty sure BB doesn’t have a warehouse full of stuff they’re directly selling. When you buy something “from” BB, you’re really buying it from someone else and BB is taking a cut. So it’s still basically an ad.
But even if we assume there’s a difference between an ad and a store page…a store page is still not the same thing as PR disguised as news and/or analysis. So there’s still no irony involved.
Or even 2013 
I’ve just bought used dual Xeon E5-2690 v2 with a server board for about 1000$. It’s still way faster (for multithreaded applications) than most current consumer CPUs, has proper ECC support, and uses cheap DDR3 memory (DDR4 prices are absurd right now).
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Surprise!
Anyone…anyone…Bueller?
I happen to think that buying something from the “boing boing store” is the equivalent of buying from boing boing. Shunting the blame to subcontractors is… also something that is pretty non-boingy.
I’ve bought i think 2 things from the BB store and have no complaints 
I’ve bought something from the store and had no complaint with the experience. Then I noticed that they were starting to get really… weird with what they were selling. The straw that broke my camel was, weirdly, the charcoal tooth whitener. Selling shit with fake scientific claims is what boingboing is supposed to be against… not actively participating in.
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There is quite a bit of junk in there that i really don’t care for, but there’s some good gems hiding in there. I would prefer that there was less crap overall though.
That is typically true for anything in the ‘actually value for money’ zone(excluding real outliers like Atoms paired with screaming GPUs or systems horribly hobbled by a storage or RAM bottleneck or similar); so for benchmarks focused on the CPU you typically turn the resolution down and use as overqualified a GPU as is available so that different CPUs actually deliver meaningfully different numbers.
That part of any CPU benchmark isn’t dishonest for the purposes of comparison (you provide the same conditions to all devices under test, aiming to make sure that even the most powerful among them end up being that bottlenecks the test rig, rather than having a big clump of GPU-limited results at one end of the graph) but they do tend to make CPU benchmarks among the less useful buyers guides: “if you bought a $1000+ GPU to play at 1920x1080 with settings at ‘mediocre’ the i9+++ would give you 359fps; while the i5- would only push 160” is minimally helpful; despite being true.
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I suspect that the window is closed on that. I haven’t heard official concession of defeat from VIA; but I also haven’t seen a board using one of their CPUs in quite a while; and there are a couple of somewhat obscure outfits (Vortex86 anyone?); but it’s hard to get excited about trying to compete on the x86 low end when Intel’s ability to toss out an Atom precisely calibrated to be slightly better than yours without threatening the products they actually like selling looms on one hand; and the fact that any random ARM licensee can undercut you when x86 isn’t required looms on the other.
One of VIA’s subsidiaries was making some noise earlier this year. That being said, I’d prefer a CPU without any undocumented instructions added by China’s MSS.
Possibly legit complaint, just not the same as or even relevant to your initial comment.
<sarcasm/notSarcasm>
The most important thing is making sure your game is running at least at 120 fps at 4K resolution otherwise it’s basically unplayable!
</sarcasm/notSarcasm>
But yeah, since new low end hardware is now good enough for gaming, it’s all about 4k now, which makes current gen hardware inadequate unless your running the latest and greatest.
Point blank…my iMac is deprecated for gaming, but perfectly fine for everything else I do. I don’t want to invest in another iMac just to be able to play games on it. Building a small WIN machine just for gaming is more reasonable and cost effective. In that endeavor everything I have researched essentially says “GPU > CPU > RAM > HDD > Motherboard” (yes I am oversimplifying).
Based on my budget and non desire to be upgrading this thing every 6 months and the over pricing on GPUs currently…I came to the conclusion that building a high end CPU rig and skimping on the GPU will keep the price down and allow it to work for my needs and all I need do is upgrade the GPU down the road.
Depends highly on what kind of gaming is being done. I would say 99% of the time someone really isn’t going to need the kind of hardware that is going to push 4k and super fast FPS… unless that person is doing VR. I haven’t jumped into that myself so i’m also in the same boat as others here where i don’t need the latest and greatest. I did buy a 1080ti but it was mainly driven by me not wanting to have to upgrade the GPU for a long time.
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Yeah, that works.
I’ve been looking into this because I want to build a gaming PC for tachin jr since he’s starting to use mine a lot more for gaming, and I’ve come up with an evil plan to build out a very basic fortnite pc using the upcoming athlon 200ge which works on the AM4 platform, the integrated vega graphics should be enough to to get us started.
Here comes the evil part, I’ll slowly upgrade both PCs. First, I’ll give him my current video card and put a newer one in my PC, next I’ll upgrade his rig by giving him my current computer, swap out the video cards again, take his computer and upgrade the cpu to a more capable Ryzen and everyone’s happy! 
Of course not, the point isn’t that you need it, it’s that you need to feel that what you have is inadequate so you’ll buy new hardware.
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I’d put the mobo higher up in the priority. You don’t want to skimp on that too much. I’ve had reliability problems with budget mobos, and going too basic can cap later upgrades, and building or maintaining a budget box sort of thrives on a planned upgrade cycle (and reusing parts across multiple builds).
Amount of Ram and size of hard drive tends to be more important than getting high end stuff. As ram and drive speeds tend to have minimal impact on games. So significant money can be saved there by going with decent, reliable “budget” brands. Though current ram prices are kind of shooting that in the foot.
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Thanks. That is a good point on the MOBO…but for micro ITX, the choices are limited as is, and prices are super close. So going with the best one available was fairly easy.
The storage is moot in this case as I will use it really just for gaming, so a fast SSD M2 on the MOBO with 500gb of space I think would work perfectly fine. And again because it is ITX…RAM is limited, so a couple of sticks of decent stuff works without breaking the bank.
Its really all about the cost of the CPU and cost of GPU that make or break it.
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