I want you guys to help me with future reviews.

[Josh Weston]

Hey there,

Those of you who've been around for a little bit will know the basics of my history here at OC3D. I'm certainly not an 'old time' member, as i've only been here since February of last year, but things have been moving pretty quickly for me since then, culminating in where I am today.

I've been posting articles to the front page for a little while, and they've been getting some pretty good feedback which has been fantastic. Moving on from posting articles, I'll soon be doing my very own reviews of the lower-end parts and components. This can, but not necessarily will, include Intel's Pentium range, some i3 processors, as well as AMD's APU range and below. Also, the lower end graphics cards such as the AMD R7790, the nVidia 650Ti, as well as the lower end cards from the upcoming generation.

Although I may also be reviewing the lower end cases etc. it's with the CPUs and GPUs that I require your assistance.
My advent into the realm of reviewing shall mean a new set of testing protocols that i'll be using for the future, including benchmarks, gaming scenarios and anything else that you can think of that would be conducive to an informative and relevant test setup.

So then, what do you guys have in mind? Bear in mind that this is not for the blistering i7s that the other reviewers cover, and as such the benchmarks should reflect the real world scenarios that the hardware shall be used in.
Benchmarks such as 3DMark's Ice Storm and Cloud Gate, media encoders such as Handbrake and games such as Sims 3 - these are the kind of things that we're looking for, and we want your direct input.

Post with your offerings and options, but remember that the ones that are 'start and run' are preferred. Games with built in benchmarking options are a lot easier to deal with in when it comes to time management, as well as reliable, repeatable results.

I look forward to seeing what you have in mind!

 

[seumasbeathan]

I would like to see Metro Last light used, I know that as it isn't going to be lightning fast gpu's that obviously the fps would be pretty low, but It would be nice to see how a more budget orientated gpu could handle, at perhaps lower settings, a very gpu intensive game. It could allow potential buyers to see how a more budget orientated card can perform in gpu intensive situations. It also has a built in benchmark to make it easier.

I would also like to say that so far the articles have been great Josh and I really look forward to seeing some reviews form you. Top notch work

 

[SieB]

For low to mid range CPUs, real world stuff is more interesting in my opinion. It's good to see how far you can push the higher end stuff on benchmarks to see how high they can score. But when it comes to the low to mid range CPUs, benchmarks aren't the most impressive thing and don't reflect real world performance.

Showing results of everyday stuff that people do on their PCs would be good, like encoding vids with with Handbrake, converting a folder of music that is in .flac to .mp3, or doing a large batch convert of say .png pictures to .jpg in Photoshop.

With Intel CPUs that have an IGP, an interesting test you could do would be to show how much of a boost you get when using Virtu MVP to use the IGP alongside a GPU and how much of an FPS boost you get with it.

 

[remember300]

i agree with the chaps below, would be nice to see how they handle the lower end demands, i know alot of people that still enjoy games like fallout 3, maybe you could try that (i know its old but still a good looking game, in my opinion with less of the demands).
Sims 3 would be good to see.
and maybe after doing a few lower benches price up machines like small living room systems or basic media editing.

And cant wait for the reviews good luck

 

[Excalabur50]

I have to agree with what has been suggested about real world's uses of components cause lets face it people don't generally purchase a machine to run bench tests they watch and encode movies and stuff and play games and things, I think that's what we need to see more of.

 

[airdeano]

congrats mr. j.

the more median level parts i believe will emerge as the economies of some, if
not all are shrinking as the available amount of spendable budgets seem to
be shrinking which lends some of the genre to move to "lighter" platforms.
the high-end used part market is showing that a lot of "down-sizing" of rigs,
due to cost, over-budget or over-kill. Tom has eluded to some of the
benchmarks when lowered makes some unobtainable goals actually achievable
with simple "playable" settings.

the deck of standard productivity benchmarks for CPU/GPU testing for
day-to-day usage will be helpful.

"yeah I can play BF3 at 80fps, but can't handbrake a 3gb vid under 20min!"
can allow a system to multi-task with the right platform builds. why? not
everyone can afford two builds: one for productivity and one for gaming. and
like all they want it relatively inexpensive. the medium platform can offer
those options and possibly convert some console gamers to upgrade their
current PC to dual-purpose their systems to get full functionality and gaming,
too.

just some insight.. i'm still a productivity geek with some venture into gaming
someday.

 

[MrKambo]

Josh, firstly well done

Secondly, this is me personally i dont know how this would go for anyone else, when i look at low end stuff, im looking at it for obviously minimal hassle builds for HTPC/General browsing use, when it comes to these types of uses ive found power consumption on load and idle seem to highest on the priority lists as i dont want my HTPC consuming 9000w on load

Maybe you could get one of them Kill-A-Watt meters and measure this, not many reviewers do this on the lower end, it could be the deciding factor between AMD/Intel build, which could be a difference of saving £100 for example.

 

[XaviCampa]

Personally, I think performance-per-dollar and performance-per-watt are values that will be interesting to people buying products in this range. Alternatively, how much one can get out of them, in terms of overclockability, as many advanced but not necesarily wealthy users build their rigs based on low-mid range hardware, trying then to take the most out of it. Just my 2 cents

Congrats and keep the good work!

 

[tinytomlogan]

Power use is a good one mukka, deffo put that on your list

 

[yassarikhan786]

Firstly, congratulations Josh.

The lower-end CPU's are usually synonymous with HTPC's, so it'd be good to see how they handle certain video formats. Although most/all of the lower end CPU's will be able to handle most/if not all of the video formats, it'd be good to see if there are any differences in how they handle playback of different formats.

 

[Xenomorphical]

When i think lower end stuff i think at a rig for my parents for some reason.
And what they do is open up all kinds of programs and leave them running untill they shut down the pc.

So a interesting test might be how they would perform while running alot of things at the same time like:

- winamp /live music stream
- ms word
- youtube in fullscreen in 1080p
- browsing trough pictures
- skype
- emailing

Just an idea

 

[chrismjurd]

Congratulations on the appointment, sounds like a lot of fun.

For the lower tier stuff, like myself currently, its about making the most out of what you have, that means to me, price / performance.

This means for myself a set methodology of what I personally do with my PC, what each possible upgrade would mean to me and whether the result of which is worth said monies.

Personally I would like to see two static Rigs, An AMD one and an Intel one, both full systems, just for example say a total budget of £X but that could be any amount.

Then both systems with they're static parts would run through your benchmarks real and synthetic these results give you your baseline.

then any potential upgrade that you're reviewing, would be immediately comparable to the standard you had initially set.

As for what and how to test the gear, hmm, people on the low end of the scale pretty much still do all the stuff that people rocking eleven cored processors and two titans do, or still try to do or even NEED to do but cant afford a monster PC. so please do not relegate all people at the low end to solely facebook and browser games and basic productivity, its simply not true, and the readership of those reviews would not hold much weight, thats not to say not to test basic tasks though, i'm sure plenty of people buy pc's for these types of tasks.

So games should be in there, bleeding edge ones, new and old ones, optimised or not. FPS matters, load times for HDD, guessing most people in this category wouldn't have racks of SSD so basic mech HDD would be the norm where loading times can be days.

Productivity tests in there, from basic stuffs like having an antivirus running etc to a full on creative packaging suite doing all kinds of crazy beautiful things

Multitasking responsivness, running combo's of games + productivity and maintaining a comfortable level of responsiveness.

Video tests, encoding/streaming etc, people buy low end boxes for this, so could see that being quite informative and useful.

Overclocking, well duh.. headroom, ease of doing it, impact on system cost benefit of doing so.

Part of the problem with PC is, there is an abundance of power about, even the low end systems can do the vast majority of tasks that are required given enough time, its mainly about what level of power is enough/satisfying for the individual, and getting the most bang for your bucks.

I think this type of reference model suits this price bracket of hardware well, it would give the buyer confidence in what they want to buy, giving them the edge in pricing wars or evolution of hardware.

good luck in this, im sure it will be a great ride.

 

[AverageNinja]

For GPUs: the witcher 2 is super demanding!
Also would be interested in seeing Borderlands 2 for the lower end GPUs.

 

[remember300]

another thing i have just thought about, with cards like the 660ti, being a good performer,for its value, what about cards that are not factory overclocked, maybe comparisons on a few BM's and games between cards like 660 and its ti editions and maybe to show if going for a factory overclock is worth the extra bit of cash for a budget system.
just a thought, could also be mentioned with your Wattage tests.

 

[Master&Puppet]

Hey Josh,

I'd like to see benchmarks and program/game settings so that we can compare i3s/low range GPUs to the big boys as per usual. That's for games and other tasks like Vid rendering.

I'd also like to see it in the real world. I.e. you wouldn't be able to run Crysis 3 maxed out on these rigs so it would be nice to see what settings did run smoothly.

On the intel side of things you'll be looking at non K CPUs but that doesn't mean they aren't overclockable so let us know how far mobos will let you take the FSB and good comparisons between i3s and FX4/6xx series CPUs would be good for many people I imagine.

M&P