reccomendations for gaming rig

ally_uk

Hey Guys Early next year I will be in the process of putting together a gaming rig.

I currently have a Akasa Eclipse Case to shove all my goodies in I have to say this has to be the best case I have ever owned. Airflow and ease of build and maneuverability is superb it's a spacious desgin with plenty of room to utilize for goodies and cooling and the finish is excellent.

Anyways enough of the Case rants.

With the impending release of the Phenom and intel chips I am actually thinking to go with a socket AM2 until the Phenom's come down a bit I was tempted to get a core 2 infact I am still tempted to get a Core 2 ahhh damm i'm confused Intel or Amd? what are the benefits first question and what is a good reccomendation for a Chip should I hang around for the Phenom and the new Intel chips?

I have heard excellent things about the E6600 and E7000 in Intel's current range


Power Supply wise I am looking at a 500w Tagan

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/ProductInfo.asp?WebProductID=543131

500W's enough?

GPU I wan't a card that is capable of handling Crysis and Call of Duty 4 something high end but I don't want it to cost to much as I really only want it to tide me over until the Geforce9 series drops

Hdd I'm looking at 2 500gb Samsung Spinpoint SATA's

Memory hmmmm it will be DDR2 but how much will I need ? Do I really need 4 gigs to get the best out of my PC will any games address 4 gigs and make the most out of 4 gigs?

M/B i'm not sure recommend me a cheap board that will get the job done!

networker050184

Check out this excellent post by JD http://www.techexams.net/forums/viewtopic.php?t=28751

Mishra

I will be buying a crysis gaming rig soon too... I haven't upgraded my PC in about 4-5 years. But building it all depends on your budget. I'm not too sure how much I would be willing to spend on my gaming PC but my dreams are around this.

Old PC:
AMD 2100 Athlon XP
1 gig of RAM
ATI Radeon 9600 256 mb of ram

New PC:
Intel Quad Core
2 gig of RAM
Geforce 8800 GTX



People are mostly buying Nvidia and Intel chipsets. The PSU depends on what kind of video card you get. Your PSU basically has to be compatible with your video card now-a-days.

Pash

My xmas bonus better be good, need a new rig now and I wan't a good one. Overclockers UK have some good deals on atm, normally I would build my own, but to save time for the sake of maybe £150 extra, I know what im gonna do

JDMurray

Crysis is causing me to consider DirectX 10.1 graphics cards myself. I won't be moving to Vista anytime soon, but the $300+ graphics card I buy today one day might.

Cessation

I know few can afford it but did anyone see the 40 Core Workstation?

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/tyanpsc-600,news-22804.html

07:31 - Wednesday 15 November 2006 by THG Reporting Team
Source: Tom's Hardware – Keywords: tyanpsc, 600


Tampa Bay (FL) - TyanPSC announced what likely could be considered the ultimate multi-core desktop computer system that money can buy today. The new Typhoon 600 combines ten Intel quad-core processors for a maximum performance of 256 GFlops.

Multithreaded applications are still a rare site in the consumer space and still largely limited to professional multimedia and enterprise calculations. But if your software is already capable of dividing tasks into multiple threads and raw computing power on your desktop is critical, then TyanPSC could have your new dream machine.

Systems of the new Typhoon 600 series are equipped with a total of ten Intel Xeon (2.33 processors with the "Clovertown" quad-core. Tyan's specsheet for the T-650QX model indicates the use of Xeon 5310 (1.6 GHz) models, which are rated at a maximum power consumption of 80 watts each.

The base configuration of the system will come with 10 processors, 20 GB of FBDIMMs and 1.25 TB of storage space. Pricing has not been announced, but should not be much higher than that oaf similarly configured 20-core Woodcrest LV 5148 system, which currently sells for $18,500.

Tyan will also offer a T-650RX 40 GB memory and 2 TB of hard disk space. Pricing for a 20-core Woodcrest system with the same components is listed at $24,750.

Cluster workstations entered a renaissance about two years ago, when companies such as Orion Multisystems announces desktop computers with supercomputer power. Back then Orion promised to bring to market a 96-processor desktop computer that used Transmeta's now defunct Efficeon processors and promised a sustained performance of about 150 GFlops.

Pash

JDMurray wrote:

Crysis is causing me to consider DirectX 10.1 graphics cards myself. I won't be moving to Vista anytime soon, but the $300+ graphics card I buy today one day might.

The general feeling im getting from everyyone is "lets wait for 2nd service pack for Vista before shifting". Im gonna move to Vista this xmas at home, simply because I wanna do my gaming on dx10 with all the bells and whistles. That said, if nothing works Ill probably shoot straight back to XP pro quicker than you can say bluebottle.

ally_uk

When is Service Pack estimated to be released?

If only Linux had better gaming support I'm sick of using Shitty Microsoft products to play games sorry to say but I really can't stand Microsofts approach when they are using the three E's

JDMurray

ally_uk wrote:

If only Linux had better gaming support

Linux has excellent support for OpenGL games. Linux (and Mono) is insufficient if you want to play the high-end DirectX games (which I do).

Mishra

JDMurray wrote:

Crysis is causing me to consider DirectX 10.1 graphics cards myself. I won't be moving to Vista anytime soon, but the $300+ graphics card I buy today one day might.

The difference between DX10 on Vista and DX10 on XP on Crysis (very high settings) is not noticeable at all.

They did some test on tomshardware or gamespot. Don't remember which site.

dynamik

I'd check out these as far as graphics go:

http://enthusiast.hardocp.com/article.html?art=MTQxOSwxLCxoZW50aHVzaWFzdA==

http://www.techreport.com/articles.x/13479

Those seem to have the most bang for you buck. Get a mobo with at least two pci-e 16x slots (there's talks of having a triple setup in the near future), so you can sli/crossfire later on. That way you can double (or at least come close) your performance cheaply later on.

A good core2duo will carry you for awhile. By the time games really take advantage of quad-core cpus, it'll be a fairly inexpensive upgrade.

JDMurray

Mishra wrote:

The difference between DX10 on Vista and DX10 on XP on Crysis (very high settings) is not noticeable at all.

This is because DirectX 10 is not supported on Windows XP, nor will it ever be: Will DirectX 10 be available for Windows XP?

Mishra

JDMurray wrote:

Mishra wrote:

The difference between DX10 on Vista and DX10 on XP on Crysis (very high settings) is not noticeable at all.

This is because DirectX 10 is not supported on Windows XP, nor will it ever be: Will DirectX 10 be available for Windows XP?

I meant direct x 9 on windows. sorrrry. Direct X 10 won't be for XP.

Mishra

Alright this looks like the best deal I can find.

http://www.shopblt.com/cgi-bin/shop/shop.cgi?action=enter&thispage=0110040015014_BN94726P.shtml&order_id=!ORDERID!

I think I want to buy 2 8800 GTs 256mb for 450 dollars. I just can't seem to come to swallow 550 dollars for 8800 GTs 512 mb on newegg but I think I can do 450 dollars. I really don't think the memory difference between 256 and 512 is really going to matter because I'm going to get great performance anyways.

What do you think? I'm also curious about the website. Anyone know if this is a safe website?

royal

Wait for the new GeForce graphic card. It's rumored it will be 3x as powerful than the 8800GTX but very doubtful. It's supposed to be an awesome card though.

Also, the new quad core cpus that come out in January will have 12MB of L2 cache. The new CPUs that come out in 2nd half of 2008 are supposed to be the biggest architectural upgrades since Pentium. They include a Math Co-processor directly on-die as well as many other enhancements.

So if I were you, I'd wait for at least the new January chips and the new Geforce GPU if you can wait.

Mishra

Hey your back. Where did you go?

Ahriakin

SLI is not well supported so don't buy 2 cards thinking it will always give you a performance boost, and even on those it does work on it's usually about 50% max. Also most high end games these days are becoming more and more reliant on Video ram, a number of process saving techniques used in titles like Crysis and UT3 involve multiple textures in place of real time calculations so 512/640+ MB cards are finally showing their worth. If it was me I'd go with a single high mem card over 2 lower mem cards right now.

Lee H

Hi

What about quad-sli, if i had the money i would build one of those no problem

Intel quad core
4 X 512MB Graphics
4 Gig OCZ Ram
4 X 19" TFT
4 X 500Gig hard drives

4 of everything sounds sweet

Lee H

JDMurray

Lee H wrote:

4 Gig OCZ Ram

4 of everything sounds sweet

If you ran a 64-bit OS, you could have more than 4GB of RAM. How about base-2 of everything?