Building a balanced PC for gaming - Tom's Harware test

[al Roumi]

"Perhaps you’re an enthusiast who already knows his or her stuff. After all, you’ve done your research. You thrive on the latest hardware reviews and have long been building your own machines, allotting the proper portions of budget to the components that will best suit the system's intended purpose." ..and are without much sense of self irony perhaps too?

Thought this may be of interest...

This is a long running test, part 1 of which was posted back in October/November 09.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/build-balanced-platform,2469.html

The part 2 update was posted a couple of weeks ago:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/balanced-gaming-pc,2477.html

[Lemur]

Hmm, no discussion of the i5 chips, and it must have been written just before the 58XX series videocards came out. Strange that it's only two and a half months old, and it feels so dated.

-edit-

Okay, now I see why you linked to it. Yes, the idea of measuring combined CPG/GPU performance is very cool, and very helpful. I hope they start a trend.

[Joh]

More recent updates from Tom's hardware including i5 and i7

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/system-Builder-Gaming-PC,2509.html

[al Roumi]

-edit-

Okay, now I see why you linked to it. Yes, the idea of measuring combined CPG/GPU performance is very cool, and very helpful. I hope they start a trend.

I almost exclusively use my PC for games and don't really follow the tech & price developments until I come to update my system every 3-4 years. I also like to build my own system so without that background knowledge of the performance & price landscape, it's not always easy to build something that is balanced or even suited to what I will do with it.