I agree on AMD for price, alough you cant look past Intel on performance.
I moved from socket 939 x2 4200+ @ 3.1Ghz over to Intel Core2Duo cause AMD just cant keep with anymore, any move to intel over AMD these days is worth it, look at the AMD x6 they cant even keep with the Intels lower Quad range, forgetting that cause its not really a selling point on this.
If you want a PC to get you by the next year or 2, AMD systems are perfectly fine, slightly cheaper to build, slightly lower in performance but by no means not worth it, AMD systems are solid, also up untill lately ran RAM a lot better than Intel systems due to the onboard memory controller which intel now adopted. Regardless a good money saving soloution.
Intel on the other hand by going i3 your proofed for another year ontop of AMD i would say, Dual cores are only gonna last so long now we are moving onto HEX core and such, but with the i3 you will have 2 solid cores and 2 synthetic cores if you like to put it that way, not sure how effective that is in the i3 but ive read that the base i3 chips are on par or slightly slower than the E8400/E8500 but are a lot better multi tasking and such, personally ive never needed more than a dual core yet so i havent bothered to keep one, used a Q6600 @ 3.6 Ghz for 6months, sold it and swapped out for my E8400 @ 4Ghz. Q6600 gave better scores in benchmarks but in the the real world i got an extra 10frames from the faster clock+overclock setup with my E8400 and not a drop in normal performance.
You gotta remember the chip is just the base, you need a good motherboard, decent ram and a good GFX card, GFX is vital really, you have a good enough chip to run the power out the GFX your onto a winner. I have a friend still using a socket AM2 Athlon x2 6000+with a ATI 4870x2 2GB and 4Gb Corsair Dominator and it plays everything you throw at still today at ultra settings without a glitch simply because his GFX is powerfull enough and the CPU still has enough power to give it what it needs to play smooth, so anything you build on the newer AMD/Intel platforms with a more up to date card with newer DDR3 ram should in fact run pretty much anything you want it to.
Going onto GFX, your choices out there just now are vast, you have chosen well tho, the newer nvidia range packs a lot for the price, the GTX460 is mainly on par in most benchmarks with my 4890 and is comparible to a 5830(£130+), which my card also beats in most benchmarks minus the lower power consumption and heat(if that bothers you) and only beat by a 5850(£160+) but the 5770 cant touch it and the 4870 isnt worth looking at anymore. If on the other hand you want to throw a little more into it, you cant look past the new ATI range with the 6850/6870 the 6850 is a slightly more and on par with the 460 but for around £170 you could have the 6870, it wipes the floor with the 460/465 and gives you some headroom.
So the GTX460 should be able to play pretty much all games at max settings on that i3 setup, so i would deffo go with that, its pretty much the best your gonna get for your money at the moment.
I moved from socket 939 x2 4200+ @ 3.1Ghz over to Intel Core2Duo cause AMD just cant keep with anymore, any move to intel over AMD these days is worth it, look at the AMD x6 they cant even keep with the Intels lower Quad range, forgetting that cause its not really a selling point on this.
If you want a PC to get you by the next year or 2, AMD systems are perfectly fine, slightly cheaper to build, slightly lower in performance but by no means not worth it, AMD systems are solid, also up untill lately ran RAM a lot better than Intel systems due to the onboard memory controller which intel now adopted. Regardless a good money saving soloution.
Intel on the other hand by going i3 your proofed for another year ontop of AMD i would say, Dual cores are only gonna last so long now we are moving onto HEX core and such, but with the i3 you will have 2 solid cores and 2 synthetic cores if you like to put it that way, not sure how effective that is in the i3 but ive read that the base i3 chips are on par or slightly slower than the E8400/E8500 but are a lot better multi tasking and such, personally ive never needed more than a dual core yet so i havent bothered to keep one, used a Q6600 @ 3.6 Ghz for 6months, sold it and swapped out for my E8400 @ 4Ghz. Q6600 gave better scores in benchmarks but in the the real world i got an extra 10frames from the faster clock+overclock setup with my E8400 and not a drop in normal performance.
You gotta remember the chip is just the base, you need a good motherboard, decent ram and a good GFX card, GFX is vital really, you have a good enough chip to run the power out the GFX your onto a winner. I have a friend still using a socket AM2 Athlon x2 6000+with a ATI 4870x2 2GB and 4Gb Corsair Dominator and it plays everything you throw at still today at ultra settings without a glitch simply because his GFX is powerfull enough and the CPU still has enough power to give it what it needs to play smooth, so anything you build on the newer AMD/Intel platforms with a more up to date card with newer DDR3 ram should in fact run pretty much anything you want it to.
Going onto GFX, your choices out there just now are vast, you have chosen well tho, the newer nvidia range packs a lot for the price, the GTX460 is mainly on par in most benchmarks with my 4890 and is comparible to a 5830(£130+), which my card also beats in most benchmarks minus the lower power consumption and heat(if that bothers you) and only beat by a 5850(£160+) but the 5770 cant touch it and the 4870 isnt worth looking at anymore. If on the other hand you want to throw a little more into it, you cant look past the new ATI range with the 6850/6870 the 6850 is a slightly more and on par with the 460 but for around £170 you could have the 6870, it wipes the floor with the 460/465 and gives you some headroom.
So the GTX460 should be able to play pretty much all games at max settings on that i3 setup, so i would deffo go with that, its pretty much the best your gonna get for your money at the moment.
