Critique my ultimate gaming rig.

In My Humble Opinion
1

Okay, sorry about the thread but I have read those guides many times.

I recently came into some money and have decided to waste it on an over priced collection of silicon that will lose half of its value in sixth months.

I have a pretty good idea for what I should put into it but I would like to know what you guys think or had any better suggestions.

CPU: Athlon 64 FX 57 Or Athlon 64 X2 4800+ Which would be better for games?

Video: 7800 GTX (that one is a no brainer)

Sound Card: X-Fi Fatal1ty FPS ( another no brainer, or would the X-Fi Elite Pro be better?)

Mother Board: I have no idea except that it will be a nForce SLI, which is the best performer in this category?

Speakers: M-Audio Studiophile LX4 System

Hard Drive: What is the fastest specialized hard drive available? I know that there are some that are incredibly fast yet have very little storage, I would like to get one such drive to store the OS on. Aside from that I will install as many Hitachi 500GB 7K500’s as I can.

RAM: As much unbuffered PC5400 DDR that the mobo will allow. What is the best company? Would it be faster to by 2GB sticks or several 1GB sticks? What is the best brand?

Optical Drive: Two Plextor PX-716A

Mouse: Logitech G7

Speakers: M-Audio Studiophile LX4 System. Is there a better speaker set.
What do you think? Is there any component that could be changed to something better? Are there any other significant components I have not considered? Remember, I am primarily going to use this computer for gaming and money is no object.

EDIT:
I almost forgot, what would you say is, or what should I look for, in a PC camera and a microphone? I also plan on making much use of Dragon Speaking Naturaly.

Edit 2: I forgot about a monitor. I am planing on a Dell 2405FPW or would that Apple 30in. be better? I have heard that it is not very good for games because of a low response time.

2

The X2 has issues with some games, as do Intel dual-core CPUs but is the better longer-term choice.

512 MB. Umm… no SLI?

Unless you’re an audiophile, most motherboard sound systems are entirely adequate.

There are lots of good ones these days.

Don’t bother. You’re not going to be performing fancy data processing. What you should do is ensure that the motherboard supports RAID 1 and get two disks and make a mirror set.

You won’t go wrong with Crucial. But many motherboards can only use 1 GB DIMMS. Server motherboards are another matter.

Get two monitors: one for gaming and the other as your main workspace. With LCDs you’re restricted in resolution.

3

Also, CRTs still have deeper, richer colors and blacks, so games tend to look better on them.

4

Well, if all you plan on doing with it is gaming, I’d personally go with the FX-57. If you also do alot of media file conversion, video/audio editing, alot of programs at once, etc. you might prefer the X2.

Dual-core processors are really not necessary for gaming. the vast majority of games don’t multi-thread at this point.

If you want to see how all the various Intel and AMD currently stack up to each other, Tom’s Hardware just did a Benchmark Comparison of about every AMD/Intel CPU on the market at the moment here: http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20051121/index.html

You’ll notice the AMD FX-57’s outperform the X2s with games benchmarks like UT2004, Farcry, HL2, Doom3 etc., as well as many of the Application/Video/Audio benchmarks.

I will say that in the categories the X2 did pull ahead of the pack, they did so at a pretty significant bump. This is mainly due to the fact that the majority of current applications and even several benchmarks don’t support multi-threading yet. I wouldn’t worry about it not being useful in the future, however.

One alternate option is to go with a motherboard that supports 64/64-FX/X2 chips. Buy a single-core 64 or 64-FX now, and still have the option of upgrading to an X2 in a year or so, when the price will have come down, and perhaps more games/apps will support multi-threading at that point.

I’ll be putting one of these (haven’t decided which, though I’m leaning toward the Premium) in my next rig, (which I’ll be building in a few months): ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe Socket 939 NVIDIA nForce4 SLI or the Asus A8N-SLI Premium nForce4 SLI

I see you only have one 7800GTX listed for video cards. You will need two absolutely identical video cards for an SLI setup. Do you already own a 7800GTX, or are you purchasing two at the same time. Remember the cards must be absolutely identical, including the BIOS of both cards.

I’m personally going to wait for more ATI Crossfire tech to hit the market before I make my decision to go SLI or not. I’m likely not building my new rig till March-Aprilish, so I’ve got time to wait a bit.

The thing I like about the Crossfire tech (in addition to the way it renders compared to an SLI setup), is the fact that as long as one card is a Crossfire Edition card, and the other one is a Crossfire compatible card, they’ll work together. Assuming of course, you have a Crossfire motherboard :wink:

I’m only going to be doing one card in my new rig, and adding a 2nd card 9-12 months after I build, so I won’t have to worry about trying to find an absolutely identical (including BIOS) 7800-family card when it comes time to add the 2nd card. (I’m looking at the 16-pipe X1800XL or X1800XT. If you buy a Crossfire-compatible 12-pipe card like the X800, when you add a Crossfire Edition 16-pipe card, it gets throttled back to 12 pipes to match the older card.)

RAM- I don’t think you can use PC5400 RAM with any AMD chips. DDR2 RAM isn’t supported by AMD, only Intel, far as I know. You could go with PC400 if you go with the Deluxe Mobo, but personally I think it’s overkill. PC3200 is just fine, though I’d only get 2 gigs. (mark you, the Deluxe mobo will support up to 4 GB)

2 1GB sticks of Corsair ValueSelect PC3200 CAS3 will serve very well if you don’t plan on doing alot of overclocking. If you plan on overclocking, or you just really want to be ostentatious about it, you could get a 2GB kit of Corsair TWINX2048-3200C2 DDR400.

Anything more than 2GB, I don’t see you getting enough extra performance out of to justify the cost. You can always add more later if you’re unhappy. shrug

Hard Drive- You’re talking about the Western Digital Raptor 10,000RPM drives. shrug I don’t think they’re worth the money, unless you just want bragging rights. Get a small-capacity 7200RPM w/16MB cache Maxtor for your OS, and you’re not gonna notice the performance difference between the two.

I think the Hitachi 7K500s are a bit overdone too unless you really need all that storage space, but if you go with em, get the SATA 7200RPM w/16MB cache ones, not the Ultra ATA’s.
Optical Drives- shrug The Lite-Ons are just as good for considerably less, but if you really just want to dump money in this for the sake of dumping money into it, it’s your choice.

Speakers- shrug I don’t know diddly about audio, the Sound Blaster cards have gotten good reviews, though I think the X-FI Elite Pro is overkill.

Mouse- the G7 is a really nice gaming mouse, plan on picking one up myself.

Monitors- Try and get one with 8ms and you should be fine. CRT’s are still best for gaming, but LCDs have caught up quite a bit. Whichever model you pick, try and find user reviews of the model, you can see what gamers have to say about it. I’m going with a 19", the Hyundai ImageQuest L90D+.

One last note about SLI. I didn’t see you mention a case or power supply. If you’re going SLI, you want a big enough case for plenty of airflow, those two cards can put out alot of heat. I’d go with a full-tower case for better airflow, unless you’re really short on space for the box, were it my machine.

Also, make sure you don’t skimp on your power supply, I’d get a 600W at minimum.

You might want to look at components most reccommended for SLI by NVIDIA at their company’s SLI Zone

5

Instead of starting my own thread, this seems like the place to ask the experts:

To play Half Life 2 and Battlefield 2, what video card specs do I need? I see on the net that HL2 recommends DirectX 9, 256 MB RAM. Got it. But I find those specs on cards from about $50 to $150. The differences I can find on those are the pixel pathways and the version of OpenGL. I don’t totally understand any of those specs except for the RAM, and I have no idea about the last two, as they’re not mentioned on any of the pages I found.

I have a P4 2.4 GHz chip and 512 MB DDR RAM .

Explanations or recommendations?

6

Muad’Dib, I think your system looks good. A couple of things to think about, in addition to the other advice:

  1. How loud will it be? My previous system was Really Damn Loud, mostly due to having many fans. It was like a white noise generator sitting next to me. When I built my new system, I focused on limiting noise, and am very happy with the result. I spent some time researching on www.silentpcreview.com. I recommend it.

  2. The 7800GTX is a great card, but a bear to cool. Fortunately, there is a 7800GTC TOP model from Asus, which uses the Arctic Cooling silenced cooler. It consumes an entire additional slot, so you need a motherboard that puts two slots between your video card PCI slots. The Asus Delixe SLI boards do so.

  3. As noted already, if you’re planning to do SLI, you need two identical cards. Since you’re blowing an insane amount on this anyway, might as well go ahead and get two.

  4. On HDs: if you go with the Asus mobos, beware of going SATA-only. I had an interesting time setting mine up with no IDE hard drives. My system drive is G: (C; and D: are the optical drives on the IDE bus, E: and F: are the card readers in the floppy bay), which is wacky.

  5. Also on HDs: Speed ain’t everything. Yes, you want 7200rpm drives, but look for ones with 8MB of onboard ram. Don’t bother with the 10,000rpm drives. Also look for reliability and low noise. Seagates are generally well-liked for both.

  6. Monitors: If you have the desk space for one, a big CRT is still better than a big LCD… except if you want to go with HD. There are some monitors that are HD-ready, which is a nice option. Like this one, if you really have more money than you know what to do with.

Or consider this alternative plan: Instead of spending $4000 now on a cutting edge system, spend $2000 on a really really good one, and then $2000 on a new really really good one in 18 months. The performance differential between the $4000 and the $2000 system now will be minimal, and the difference between what $2000 will buy 18 months from now and the performance of an 18-month-old $4000 system will be notable.

What are you going to play on this beast, anyway?

7

I have never seen a case where the OpenGL version on the card mattered, to start with.

To put is basically, the number of pixel pipelines tells you how many pixels the graphics card can perform operations on per clockcycle on the GPU. If the GPU is running at the same clockspeed, an 8 pixel pipe card like a Geforce 6600 is going to be much faster than a 4 pipe card like the Geforce 6600LE. Of course, there are cases like the 12 pipe Geforce 6800GS, which runs right on par with ithe 16 pipe Geforce 6800GT, due to the 6800GS having a higher core clock.

Also important is the amount of memory bandwidth. This is pretty easy to figure out - take how wide the memory interface is (64 bit, 128 bit, 256 bit are common) and multiply by the clockspeed of the memory. 500 mhz memory with a 256 bit bus would be equal to 1000mhz memory with a 128 bit bus.

A Geforce 6600 will play any game out there right now, though without the pretty anti-aliasing and aniostrophic filtering. About $110 for the AGP version. The faster Geforce 6600GT will cost $145 or so. Don’t bother with 256 video MB memory unless you plan to shell out for >$150 card - the lower end cards can’t really uses that much video memory without the GPU being a bottleneck anyways.

8

Cardinal, with only 512MB of RAM, I’d also reccomend adding more. 1GB of RAM should suit your system just fine. The absolute newest games are running even better with 2GB, but since the rest of your system is older, I think 1GB and a new vid card should still show you an improved performance.

My current system is running an AMD 2400+ XP, with a ATI 9800 Pro (128MB), and a gig of RAM, and I haven’t had a problem running anything on it yet.

**An additional thought I had about Muad’Dib’s computer. If you’re really only dumping this much money into something just for bragging rights, instead of building your own, I’d personally just go spend the money on an Alienware or VooDoo gaming machine. You’d get more “gamer cred” out of that than blowing 4 grand building your system yourself.

Otherwise, as Brainiac4 noted, it’s really kind of silly to spend 4 grand on a cutting edge system now, when you can spend 2 grand on a really sweet system now, and either upgrade that system or build another one for another 2 grand in a year or so when all the new tech with all it’s shiny new bells and whistles have come out.

9

A few throwaway comments:
X-Fi soundcards - I’m not aware of any particular killer benefits of these, but I have seen lots of people on BF2 forums kvetching about issues with them. I am totally unpersaded that there is any point going beyond a standard Soundblaster 5.1, particuarly if you are going to be polite to your fellow humans and wear headphones. However, there are still performance benefits to be had with a dedicated soundcard rather than on-board audio, depending on the implementation

Crossfire/SLI - I believe SLI is now up to the point where it will accept two identical model cards, and will overlook bios differences and so on. However, it is still a bit flaky. Crossfire edition cards aren’t available retail yet as far as I am aware, so who knows what they will be like…

Hard disks - if you are going to be running big intensive games that want to load levels or hit the pagefile a lot (MMORPGS, Flight Sim, etc.) then a fast hard disk may help you out, and a Raptor may give a tiny improvement. However, if money REALLY is no object then you want 15,000RPM SCSI drives - they will trash the performance of other drives as badly as badly as they trash your wallet.

RAM - the more the merrier, although for several current games 1gb is now recommended and 2gb is good. Windows can’t deal with more than 4gb. I’d say that 2 x 1gb of dual-channel PC3200 is fine, and corsair/crucial/GEIL/any name brand should be fine. 2gb DIMMS are way too expensive.

Other components - decent name-brand stuff should be fine. Peripherals/monitor etc - check in a store. Particularly mice and stuff you should always handle before ordering, or you may end up shipping it back because it’s uncomfortable.
Finally, always remember that life at the bleeding edge of technology can be uncomfortable as well as exciting. I second the suggestion that if you have a tonne of cash, get AlienWare to build, configure, test and ship the thing for you. Then it will definitely work as it should and you have someone to call up if the thing breaks, plus it will look good. :smiley:

10

I would recommend water cooling a beast like that. Adequate air cooling something that powerful would be like living between an elevated train station and an airport. I don’t know enough about different WC components to make recommendations. Plan to spend big dollars on a power supply. PC Power & Cooling supposedly has some of the best out there. If you do go dual 7800GTX, you’ll need something in the 600+ watt range. Don’t forget a powerful UPS. For hard drives, I’d go with 4 Maxtor 7200RPM 250GB w/ 16MB cache SATA drives in a striped and mirrored raid array, and then I’d add an external drive to store music and video and for backups.

Now for the editorial. Listen to Brainiac4. Other than to go onto boards to brag with like-minded people about your system, you are literally burning money. You can cut your costs in half and would be hard pressed to notice any difference outside of benchmarking programs. If you can’t stand to save, get a large flatscreen high-def TV. Go on a wild vacation. Buy new furniture. Hell, go to the nearest strip club and have the wildest night of your life. You’ll still have a PC at home which will make tons of gamebois drool.

11

All the specs on video cards seem even more confusing than on buying a computer overall.

I’m going to take the easy way out and ask if there’s a brand and specific model someone would suggest for a graphics card in the mid $100 range. Apparently there are almost untold combinations, and I can’t seem to make my way through them without my eyes glazing over. I don’t really understand the implications anyway. Thanks.

12

eVGA 128MB 6600GT AGP. $150 here.