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Buying a new gaming computer
Snake
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
About five years ago I bought a computer from CyberPower and I have been (and still am) very happy with the finished product.
When I bought it I had to cut a few corners on it to get it down to my price range.
Now that I've been working for over a year out of college - I'm making enough to really get the computer that I want. I was pumped over BF2 when it was announced but I soon realized that it would be one of the games that would further raise the bar for gaming systems past what I had the capability to run.
I've been looking at the configurator CyberPower have (I used AMD since that's what I've had for years) and I'm wondering a few things:
- What is the difference (performance wise) between an Athlon 64 and an Athlon 64/X2 processor? If I'm wanting near-top-of-the-line which would I want to go for? I'm assuming the X2 is the "new" dual-core processor - what does this equate to on a gaming PC?
- HD RPM speed: they offer 7200 RPM HDs up to 700GB but they offer 10,000 RPM drives only up to about 150 GB or so. I am not a huge downloader/BT'er/etc. so giagntinormous hard drives are not my main concern. I am aware that the RPM speed of a hard drive can improve performance. Is this noticable between the 7200 and 10000 RPM hard drives?
- When it comes to a power supply is there such a thing as too much wattage? Electricity bill aside of course. I was looking at the Thermaltake W0131 ToughPower 850W nVidia GTX 8800 certified power supply.
- When it comes to a video card I was looking at two options. One is the nVidia 8800 GTX 768MB card. The other was the 7950 but only because onboard memory was 1GB. I'm thinking the 8800 will have more overall "oomph" despite the memory difference.
Now that that's over with, I think it's safe to say I'm out of practice when it comes to discussing hardware/etc.
If there's anything important I left out please say so.
Thanks.
When I bought it I had to cut a few corners on it to get it down to my price range.
Now that I've been working for over a year out of college - I'm making enough to really get the computer that I want. I was pumped over BF2 when it was announced but I soon realized that it would be one of the games that would further raise the bar for gaming systems past what I had the capability to run.
I've been looking at the configurator CyberPower have (I used AMD since that's what I've had for years) and I'm wondering a few things:
- What is the difference (performance wise) between an Athlon 64 and an Athlon 64/X2 processor? If I'm wanting near-top-of-the-line which would I want to go for? I'm assuming the X2 is the "new" dual-core processor - what does this equate to on a gaming PC?
- HD RPM speed: they offer 7200 RPM HDs up to 700GB but they offer 10,000 RPM drives only up to about 150 GB or so. I am not a huge downloader/BT'er/etc. so giagntinormous hard drives are not my main concern. I am aware that the RPM speed of a hard drive can improve performance. Is this noticable between the 7200 and 10000 RPM hard drives?
- When it comes to a power supply is there such a thing as too much wattage? Electricity bill aside of course. I was looking at the Thermaltake W0131 ToughPower 850W nVidia GTX 8800 certified power supply.
- When it comes to a video card I was looking at two options. One is the nVidia 8800 GTX 768MB card. The other was the 7950 but only because onboard memory was 1GB. I'm thinking the 8800 will have more overall "oomph" despite the memory difference.
Now that that's over with, I think it's safe to say I'm out of practice when it comes to discussing hardware/etc.
If there's anything important I left out please say so.
Thanks.
Snake on
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Posts
As for hard drives, I'm fairly certain you're referring to Western Digital's Raptor line. It does reduce loading times noticably, especially the initial boot to Windows, but actual game performance is practically none.
You can't have "too much wattage" when using a PSU, because it only uses what the components attached to it draw. The problem with buying a Thermaltake 850W PSU is that Thermaltake is generally garbage. Stick to Seasonic, Antec and Enermax. I highly recommend anything made by Seasonic.
Go for the 8800 GTX. There is a world of difference in terms of performance. You should be able to see this very obviously in reviews.
The 10 000 rpm drives are faster, but the difference is fairly small in practice. The 150GB Raptor is much better value than the smaller one, but at the same time you could get a pretty good 320GB drive for half its price...
Don't bother with the extremely powerful PSUs if you aren't going to use it - their price "per Watt" tends to be much higher than normal PSUs. If you aren't going to use SLI then the system is unlikely to need more than a good ~500W unit.
If you are going to use SLI or just want a retarded PSU anyway then there are better brands than Thermaltake - SeaSonic, Corsair, Tagan, OCZ would be some of them.
The 7950 you've seen is probably the the SLI-on-a-single-card and as such it only has 512MB of usable memory (each GPU needs its own copy of the data). The 8800GTX is the best card presently available, but there are rumours of nVIDIA releasing a newer revision of the cards in the near future (month or two?), and ATI should be releasing its DX10 cards at end of march/beginning of april.
At night, the ice weasels come."
nVIDIA has a whole site dedicated to SLI...
edit: they have a "marketplace" there, in case you want to sell your card, and 7800GTXes aren't expensive (IIRC newegg had some at ~$120?)
At night, the ice weasels come."
"When in multi-GPU mode, SLI currently supports one monitor. When in single-GPU mode, users have the ability to use up to four monitors using NVIDIA® nView® multi-display technology and Windows XP Dualview."
I'm really out of the loop when it comes to current computer hardware these days so i have a question. What are the odds this will change anytime soon, and you'll be able to use multiple monitors while in multi-GPU mode? One of the main reasons i would want a multi monitor setup is so i can have my game on one screen while having AIM, IRC, winamp, and maybe firefox open on the others.
Maybe you could get two monitor support that way also?
I'm guessing you could get some used PCI card for a few bucks on eBay, just make sure it supports the resolution you intend to use it in, and at >85Hz if you'll be using a CRT monitor with it.
I don't know an answer to your question.
At night, the ice weasels come."
Are there any advantages to having two video cards installed in the same computer? If not I'm just gonna crack the 7800 in half and toss it out. pisses me off
robaal: Thanks a lot - I'm a huge visual learner. That link really helped. I see the difference and how negligible it is (especially since BF2/BF2142 are the games that I've been dying to play for so long!).
Also, this purchase will probably not be made in the next month or two - more like 3-6. So I'll keep an eye out on that site.
Also, are there any other custom configurator sites similar to Cyber Power PC?
...well you wanted SLI? It works with most PCI-E nVIDIA cards since series 6.
Last time I checked SLI did provide a fairly large boost - IIRC 60-80% in higher resolutions. Two cards will make twice as much noise and use twice the power though, for a 256MB 7800GTX I think that would make it <180W total, mostly from the +12V rail.
A working used 7800GTX is worth about $100...
At night, the ice weasels come."
ibuypower is pretty decent. i got my computer from them with no problems whatsoever.
the 8800GTX is, as robaal said, the best card currently available for gaming. ATi's comparable card, the x2900 series, is apparently going to be a bit better but that's just rumor and speculation at this point considering they've pushed back the launch date three times now. i think it's going to launch in may, but who knows. it'll also most likely be pricier so you would do well to just go with the 8800. although you did say you were going to wait 3-6 months, so the 8900 may be out then.
The difference between my X2 3800 and my friends xp 3200 is astounding in Supreme Commander. I expect multi-core optimization in games will not be uncommon in the near future (ie: this upgrade cycle).
Yes, but your X2 won't be much better than a single-core 3800+. Or so I read.
Of course there aren't really any faster single-core AM2 Athlons than that, but the next X2 is close in price to the cheapest Core 2 Duo, which would be a better choice (performance might be close, but ATM the Intel platform looks more future-proof).
At night, the ice weasels come."
Not in Oblivion, no. SupCom is (afaik) purportedly the first game to make use of multiple cores.
I've also heard the devs note that more cores will show the best performance gains relative to more ram or new video card. It is something specific to that game, but something we should be seeing more of as multi-cores are only gaining popularity and market share.
Unless they meant it in some special way, or were blind until now, that's just not true: Quake 4 and Serious Sam 2 made use of dual-cores 1,5 year ago. Also, if Oblivion would ignore the second core, the X2 3800+ would perform on par with the single-core 3200+, as both of them run at 2GHz (vs. 2,4GHz of the single-core 3800+).
It might be that Supreme Commander somehow benefits more from dual-core CPUs but in that case it's an exception.
Not that it really matters, as by the end of Q2 Core 2 Duos should be available at <$120, which will force AMD to drop prices below that, so there will be little reason to get a single-core chip
At night, the ice weasels come."
That must be the case, because this is honestly the first time I really noticed. The gain is related to speed at higher unit counts. You don't have 500 Cliff Racers trying to hump your face in Oblivion (or any, thank heavens), but everything is much prettier and harder on your graphics card. I'd say the same for the others (relative to SS1 in SS2's case) Maybe the SupCom cpu:gpu loading is much heavier on the cpu side.
Either way, its at least 2 or 3 time scales of difference. If SC is something you want to play on your gaming rig, and is a game you enjoy, dual core is way worth it.
True enough, but then we can argue about 2 vs 4 vs 2x2! Or 2x4! Ah, so much hardware, so little software support.
You can site one or two examples that support that line of argument, but with the exception of Supreme Commander, there are no games that benefit from having multiple cores. Don't expect to see more than one or two games benefitting appreciably from multiple cores until fall at the absolute earliest. Multithreading games is no easy task, even on a closed system like the 360. When you have to get it to run on a multitude of hardware configurations as well, it's just that much more frustration and for what benefit? 90+% of all gaming PCs out there are still single core. The market penetration isn't there yet so to try to take advantage of dual and quad core CPUs is a waste of time. The demand for multithreaded games is negligible, and that's why you won't see more than a couple games that take advantage of multiple cores before next year. The technology has yet to trickle down to the budget market and replace a significant portion of the single core install base. It's the same reason 64-bit processing is taking so long to get going. I'm not advocating him buying a single core processor, as C2D CPUs are still far better for games than anything AMD has to offer. I'm simply stating a fact that current games do not take advantage of multiple cores because they are yet to integrate multithreading.