Are you referring to programmable microchips? There's quite a few of them that range from very little, to having a few megabytes of storage.

Often chips have a specific task to do, and there's a LOT you can do with 8 or 12bit instructions. you'd be amazed what you can do with 1k. Tiny by today's standards assumes you're using huge instruction sets and lots of memory. I'm recalling that some of the 32 bit AMD chips were refused by cell phone manufacturers due to space worries for the OS and code, so they made a mini 16bit transition instruction set which heavily cut down the size of how much it took to store/execute instructions.

You might look into the Demo scene. There are 4k, 32k, 64k game and demo examples of amazing work.

Maybe you'll get some inspiration here?

Here's a build I keep sitting around for stuff like this (it's based on parametric filters which means it always grabs the best price for a part within certain parameters):

http://pcpartpicker.com/user/ThePilot/saved/kk6xFT

That'll run just about any game on max settings at 1080p. Parts to upgrade in order would be: Adding an SSD (~$100), Adding more ram (~$50), and upgrading to a 980 (~$200).

If you do all of that, you're still only looking at like $1100-$1300.


If you'd like, I can take the time to create a specific build for you. Just let me know.

Erm... Windows Update will likely bog it down regardless of what CPU you have. Do keep in mind though that parts designed for battery-powered devices (laptops) may have differences to ones designed for mains-powered devices (desktop/tower), with laptop ones generally preferring low energy use while paying for that with lower performance.

EDIT: Disclaimer: Of course, nowadays, more and more pre-built desktop machines that are not built to be powerhouses, but instead for common office use, are using laptop parts.

Just drop the other 500 and get something good. And get someone else to build it. Yes, I said it bitches.

There's something to be said for the warranties, and simply opening the box, plugging it in, and playing around right away. But building one yourself can be fun, too. Not sure how much money you save these days going DIY...

How much money do you save? I had mine built and I priced it out at around $400 for the labor and 1 year warranty. It's great if you want to build yourself, but I think it's bound to be more common to have it built. it's simply worth the price imo.

new nVidia Pascal videocards:
GTX 1080 - $599 Founders Edition - $699 GTX 1070 - $379 Founders Edition - $449 1080 = May 27th 1070 = June 10th

You may want to check these "Best PC Builds" series out:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/best-pc-builds,4390.html

I would be genuinely interested to know why people here are suggesting going as high as 16GB RAM when the vast majority of games are 32 bit applications.

It is a serious question as I may well be upgrading soon myself. I have previously assumed 8 is ample.

Wtf? FX CPU is performance-wise equal to Intel 1366-socket era (i7 9xx) CPUs in single thread, and new Intel 2011-socket era (Ivy and up) in multithreading. I linked the benchmarks, its very competitive and it supports ECC ram on desktop motherboards.

However, AMD did not keep updating the FX range, meaning they now lag behind. You can still build a competent , reaonably priced system based on FX 6350 or FX 8350, but their 125 W TDP makes them difficult to recommend to someone who's not used to build his/her own computer. FX8370E is more resonable in that sense. FX9xxx are an unreasonable way to generate a massive amount of heat.

The best solution AMD offers is actually for lower end systems. an Athlon 880K , coupled with a good mid range graphic card ( AMD R7 370 for instance, or R9 390 ) is not bad at all.

FX8370E gains energy efficiency by lower base clock and slower reclock. On common scenarios it performs worse in both single and multithread loads.

Athlon 880K is a black horse, kinda like athlon II series or intel pentium 6xxx series. It achieves performance by using very low amount of cores and cache, thus able to clock much faster in same thermal room. But once the load increases fast several processes/threads, it quickly looses to more functional regular FX 4xxx (also 4 modules aka 2 cores, but good amount of cache). The process reduction from 32nm to 28nm is not really worth the option to upgrade to very common AM3+ socket to very specific FM2+.

Here

The only Intel advantage is really lower power usage thanks to lower manufacturing process and better single thread performance, where if modern application is singlethreaded and performance-oriented, thats really a problem of application, not of CPU. The modern high-spec Intel CPUs are monsters in singlethread, but they also cost monster money.

Bright example - kerbal space program. In 1.0.5 version, it used Unity 4 engine, which is bottlenecked to just one thread/process for both physics and rendering. Intel is currently WAY better performant at single thread/process loads, average difference being somewhere between 30% and 200% faster - so everyone was upgrading to Intel CPUs. However, there is certain barrier, after which single thread maxes out - so the difference between AMD and Intel in 1.0.5 KSP was topmost 30 vs 60 fps. But as soon as 1.1 KSP came out using Unity 5 engine, it was no longer single thread/process bottlenecked, suddenly AMD is performing just as good as Intel.

AMD advantage are really much lower CPU+MB price and support for ECC in this package.

most games are single thread biased? even ones that are multicore are only wide to 4 cores?

most games like more float than more integer?

benchmarks have time and again shown piledriver to be a not insignificant hurdle in modern games.

but again this is why I said "if you know what you are doing". if he wants nehalem for twice the peak juice of Intel's current stuff, with a platform that has no comprehension of usb 3, sata express, m.2, then that's fine. there are scenarios for piledriver. if you're doing some kind of production work like video or CAD, then the high core count for multithread-aware production software and ECC memory look real good. but if you're looking for games, these cpus don't look as good. I'm not saying they're bad, but there are a few nasty surprises for somebody who doesn't know what they're doing. there is little reason not to get skylake for games.