Some time ago I posted a topic asking for people to help me assemble a new PC for my gaming needs. Since that topic's dead now I'm here to say thank you to all you people who answered my questions. Thanks a lot guys you really helped out a lot. So anyway here are the specs on my new PC: Motherboard: Intel DX58SO2 Processor: Intel i7 Extreme Edition Graphics Card: ATI Radeon HD 5970 RAM: 6GB Hard Disk: 1TB SataII with 7200 RPM Monitor: 22" Full HD LCD/LED monitor OS: Windows 7 Ultimate I may have forgotten some things like power supply and whatnot, also I didn't go into much detail about some stuff here because I got too lazy to look it up but I'm assured by my builder that everything's in order. What do you guys think? If there's anything I need more just tell me so I can get it. I wanna build the fastest gaming PC in my country!
windows 7 ultimate was a waste of money. Professional is much cheaper and you won't notice the difference in functionality. Multiple disks help speed (one for windows, one for games, one for temporary files)
I'd recommend a ssd for your os and any games that you play frequently. You might want to look into duel-booting XP. Most games will work on 7 but even with the superior capatability settings in 7 some games (that worked in xp) will refuse to work. The majority of them back be made to work but it could take time to look up how to. Amd fanboyism here. Intel is overpriced. AMD is much cheaper and just as reliable.
SSDs are bad, especially for OS. They have a limited lifespan and random write performance is absolutely atrocious.
I'm an Intel fan myself but yeah you do make a good point. Intel is a tad pricier but you get what you pay for and I don't mind shelling out cash as long as I know it's worth it.
A tad? Um yah... Let see... i7 Extreme - $999, Phenom II X6 - $279 I wish i was rich enough for $700 to be a 'tad pricier' [sarcasm] You could have bought AMD and donated your savings to feed hungry children in africa. Children in Africa are starving to death because you didn't. How does that make you feel? [/sarcasm] But yah... I don't know of any games that are required to have a hex core processor to run. Nor do i know of any games that require a quad core to run. As of now hex cores are only useful to people who do heavy video editing. You could have bought a quad core and saved yourself at least half a G. And can you give me a link to what you said about ssd's? Because what you've said pretty much goes agenst everything i've heard about ssd's. Edit - Here's a i7 extreme review i pulled from newegg. Its pretty much what i think about the i7 extreme. I laughed at the bolded part.
I get what you're saying but there is a reason why I bout the i7 extreme. Not only is it great for gaming but I probably won't need to upgrade the chip for a while so that saves me money in the long run AND I can save up to feed african children in the future. But seriously, I have the money and I just had to have it.
He's running a 5970. You're not going to do much better unless you want to risk shitty GTX570/GTX580 drivers or scrap the 5970 altogether and roll with two 6870s or a 6970 (which offer a minimal performance boost in both cases). And before someone says Crossfire 5970s, the scaling up of the performance you'd get from that isn't impressive at all. Unnecessary on both counts. With a rig like that you can run a Virtual Machine to handle any games that will only work on XP (which aren't many). As for the SSD, the only noticeable performance increase is to put your OS there so you can boot in a matter of seconds. Since it's a desktop, boot times really aren't a big deal. Putting games on your SSD is stupid, with the reading and re-writing going on you're going to wear out that drive by a notable factor of time. Seriously, nobody here needs an SSD. By the way, an i7 Extreme is overkill. Seriously overkill. My friend's overclocked his i5 dual-core to 4GHz and even with aftermarket cooling it'll still be cheaper than your chip - and chances are you'll really not be using all that power. You could have bought a second monitor with the extra money, or a new keyboard and mouse. And as Loony said, Windows 7 Ultimate is really not that impressive. I have both Professional and Ultimate and there is basically no difference except for a few tools you'll likely never use. Another HD would have been a better pick. The moral of the story for anyone reading this thread and thinking about doing a custom build? Build smarter. Big numbers don't necessarily mean big performance when it comes to what you want to do (which around here is generally to play games). Ask for advice, read reviews, make a budget. Work within some strictures to squeeze the most performance out of every cent.
That's not always doable though, VM software tends to have shitty graphics performance because the virtual hardware is designed to run on as much as possible. If the VM software could somehow allow the guest OS full access to the host's graphics card, then this would be viable in a lot more cases than it currently is.
Although true, I'm gonna have to contend that to my knowledge there aren't really many graphics-intensive games that only run on XP so the point is pretty much moot.
