Tom's Hardware posted a new guide:
It's interesting to see what can be done with $625 dollars, but this isn't a system I would ever consider buying, as it would quickly be a $600+ dollar obsolete waste! From the article's conclusions: "The E5200 failed to keep up with the HD 4870 in two of our games, and in World in Conflict, the frame rates made the title unplayable. In Crysis and Supreme Commander, performance jumped quite a bit, but it still took overclocking to approach playable frame rates.". If I am reading the article correctly, even with overclocking, this system would not play games that are nearly a full year old with full eye-candy enabled. What's the point?
My non-scientific conclusion is that the cheapest price point for a gaming system that I would be happy with it still somewhere between $1,250 and $1,700, a conclusion that hasn't changed since early 2007. I expect at least 2 to 3 years out of any system that I build, and I want to be able to play any new game that comes out during that time period without upgrading. I don't have $600+ to waste. Why not buy a Wii AND and an XBox360 and stick to your old system for surfing the web and running office apps?
I'll pass on this one, Tom and Co. Of course, Tom would call me names and remind me that the point of the article is squeezing as much GPU power as possible out of just over $600.
