Matthew said:
Not sure how you can say the Phenom X2 555 isn't a great CPU. Take a closer look at the round-up you cite. The Phenom X2 555's performance was practically on par with the Athlon II X4 63x and that's with stock settings. It's slight speed deficit is countered by a lower price. The fact that you can potentially enable an extra two cores and get a speed boost for free is too much to pass up in a budget rig -- whether it's the $500 or $800 bracket.
First of all, like I stated before: I find it irresponsible to advice that CPU because you can unlock the cores. You cannot always unlock those cores, and then you find yourself with an overpriced processor. Perhaps you can recommend it as an option, for the ones who would like to try that, but not everyone is willing to do so.
Looking at the performance from a much bigger database (40 different kind of applications). Of which I put everything in excel, normalized everything. (Athlon II X2 250 = 100%) and then took the average of all normalized scores:
The Phenom II X2 555 ends at 107%
The Athlon II X4 635 ends at 137%
This means that the 555 is only 7% faster than the 255. While the 635 is about 28% faster than the 555. On average. And if you than also count in the factor that quadcores will be used more in the future, so the difference will become even bigger.
Yep, the Radeon HD 5670 is slower than the HD 5750, but it played most games we tested at decent frames with reasonable settings and it's ~50% cheaper at about $80. It would be sufficient for a basic gaming rig and it's cheap enough to be cast aside 1-2 years later for another budget card. However, until a few weeks ago (i.e. one buying guide update period), there really wasn't much wiggle room in the Entry Level Rig's $800 cap. Prices have come down a bit on various components (especially RAM) and the HD 5750 does currently fit into the target price, so I'll swap it tonight. I'll address the cost difference between builds below.
Apparently, the price difference is greater over there, here in Europe, it's more like 80 euro for the HD5670 and 100 euro for the HD5750, while the HD5750 offers 50% better performance. Which gives it a much better bang for buck ratio. Seeing the bigger difference, I now better understand that choice.
The price difference has been addressed a few times, so I'll paste Julio's previous explanation: "There might be instances where this doesn't hold to be true, but I'd say that 95% of the time adding more price points in-between is not going to do any good. Just take the entry level system and slap a faster videocard or mix it up with other components of the enthusiast build and you get a middle priced system with an emphasis where you find it convenient, be it a larger monitor, faster CPU or GPU, etc."
In other words, our picks for a mid-point system (let's say $1,100) wouldn't be any different than the components already selected. To create a $1,100 system, we'd take the Enthusiast's PC and swap parts with the Entry Level rig as necessary to meet the budget. We could do that, except the "as necessary" part varies greatly between users.
Then why not UP the price of the second system, that way you can close the gap without adding an additional system? There is NO mid-range system. The Budget and Entry-level systems are too much alike. Replacing the Entry-level system with a midrange one, would lead to a much better guide.
And secondly: I disagree with the argument that you can "just mix system 2 and 3". What is the purpose of a best buy guide? To help people who DO NOT know enough to do it their selves. If you recommend to people to "just mix them up", they still have to do it on their own, which they are not capable of. The price from system 2 to 3 increases from 560 to 1167 for the system alone.
We recommend monitors, speakers and other peripherals because believe it or not, people do in fact buy them. We include two prices to reflect the core system total, as well as the total with peripherals, so I'm not sure what the issue is.
The issues are:
1. You still start with a total budget, that's pretty clear in the introduction.
2. I'm not arguing that people do not buy peripherals. I'm stating that more and more often people buy the system and the peripherals separately. Definitely when they are looking for something else than a pre-built pc. It would be much more interesting to see A) a system guide AND B) a guide for peripherals separately.
Again, plenty of people buy high-end components and our Luxury guide provides some insight on the premium market. Companies don't manufacture this stuff because nobody wants it haha.
If you want to provide insight into a premium market, write an article about it, this does not, in my opinion, provide sufficient insight into this premium market. And most of those high-end components are for very specific tasks. If you want to address the premium market, write something useful for them, but like I stated, in this high-end market, there are a lot different demands. You CAN NOT tackle them all with one system. That is my main complaint.
You took our comment out of context. We're saying that the average person will probably want to focus on the Entry Level Rig and the Enthusiast's PC as they provide the best value and fit into most people's budgets. I guess I can see how you might take that the wrong way, I'll tweak it (but I won't be adding a new system

). Thanks for the feedback.
Thanks for the answer. And let it be clear, this is just my opinion about things, I've built my own best buy guide (in Dutch), and therefore like discussions like these, because it helps me form an opinion about my own guide as well.