AtomicMew wrote on Jul 31^st, 2012 at 11:47pm:


Fuck that. I'm not completely up to speed (haven't built a machine since late last year), but Intel has been tops in CPU performance for years now. Even if you're supposedly "spending money on an iGPU that won't be used" Intel CPUs still kick AMD's ass unless AMD somehow massively caught up in the past few months.

Also, I haven't seen anything about crossfiring with the new AMD desktop CPUs, but it's almost certainly going to lock you in to a very narrow selection of graphics cards. Haven't seen anything about whether the crossfire performance beats Intel either.

And ultimately, if all you're playing is DDO you don't really care about 3D performance - at this stage you could probably run DDO just fine on an Intel iGPU alone.

AtomicMew wrote on Jul 28^th, 2012 at 9:08am:


HP Blows Goats.

Roldon wrote on Jul 31^st, 2012 at 9:48pm:


Wrong.

If you are set on Dell scrounge the Dell Outlet, where they resell returns.  The machines are in perfect repaired condition and carry a full warrentee.  You get a nice discount because the machine was shipped once and had to be returned so it can't be sold as new again.

Eladiun wrote on Aug 1^st, 2012 at 11:57am:

that is like recommending a ford F450 for a vehicle to comute to work.  SURE it will get you there, but damn sight of overkill for the job & ends up costing you more than you should be paying for it....

If you get a quad core A-6 or A-8 with 8 gigs of ram it will run any game on the market today, depending on the resolution at high to low graphics.  But it will run.  Add a $125 video card & that goes up to ultra high to mid.  Depending your budget it can be anywhere from $500-$900 with warrenty from one of the online retailers.

Eladiun wrote on Aug 1^st, 2012 at 12:09pm:


best place by far.  We buy work machines, I bought my xps for the house, for my parents all from there.  I no longer want to do support so it was easy and cheep to get from there, with 3 year onsite warranties, etc.

Outlet.dell.com is the site, then even send coupons for extra money off.  If you buy a refurb monitor with the system, the systems warranty covers it.

hmm, alienwares are currently an extra 25% off with the coupon, you can also save on the inspiron.

cdr wrote on Aug 1^st, 2012 at 11:49am:


I have a i5 trinity, and the iGPU isn't enough to play DDO at anything I would consider reasonable.  Of course intel has better CPU than AMD, so in the high end gaming market AMD doesn't compete. 

But according the laptop benchmarks, the A10 alone is as good as a mid-range GPU and a crossfired A10 is about equivalent with a GT 650M with a much cheaper GPU, so it's obvious that the A10 has the best value at that price range. 

Eladiun wrote on Aug 1^st, 2012 at 12:09pm:


Good idea, forgot about the Dell Outlet. The only problem/s, is that you need to check the outlet site often to get the PC with the configuration you want, not great if you're on a deadline, and do they do financing on the machines from there? I think that was a consideration for the OP.

Lol.. just had a look through the US outlet site.. all those overpriced Alienware boxes being returned.

IMO it basically comes down to this: the A10 will be behind on processing power in the future even if you add in a discrete GPU, the intel i5 scales better with improvements to your GPU but is more expensive overall, either one will play DDO decently, most likely on a decently high setting, just not on max. Pay less now and upgrade again in a shorter timeframe, or pay more now and not upgrade for a bit longer.

the A10 might be able to keep pace with upgrades in the future, i don't know, and it's probable years of shitbox integrated graphics are biasing me. But till i see a direct comparison of A10 IGP vs discrete, i'll always steer clear of IGP, especially since generally IGP doesn't have it's own dedicated RAM.