New Gaming rig...suggestions and comments please...

[Shishak]

http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?k...F1GouaaMNZXrVQ

Tell me what you think, where it can improve? I got about 3.5-4k available to put into this rig, would like to keep it under 3k with out shipping and taxes etc...

[wingnut2600]

Your PSU just seems like overkill; you don't really have that serious of power needs currently. You should shift some of that cash towards more and faster RAM (maybe 2x2GB of DDR2 800 minimum) and a better Mobo.

Your PSU will not be a limiter on your system performance as much as those two components...

Plus... you can save a bit if you shop around at more than one store. Check out this site: http://bensbargains.net/ for low-priced HDs and the like. and zipzoomfly.com is pretty damned similar to NewEgg in price and service.

Look at your sales tax and shipping too... always bites you in the ass.

Good Luck. Always a fun time, even if it takes a month or so to make it rock solid.

[Shishak]

Yea I was thinking that the PSU is over kill, a friend of mine suggested it...I found a watt calc online, and i will need roughly 600watts with the current settings, so I was thinking that I should look for a PSU in the 1k watt range. I am also looking for suggestions for your ideas.

I was also thinking that I should get 4GB of ram...

Updated spread sheet, 4 GB of ram...

[lezwez]

3/4 k i never even knew they existed

[devils.master]

I dont have any suggestion for you. I am just out of my mind!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[mountain_rage]

If you want faster hard drive access times you might want to look into the western digital Raptors or even a solid state hard drive. If you are even crazier you could put get a scsi drive but thats getting to be a little too much.

If I may ask why are you going with the 64 bit variation of windows xp? From my experience with it there are certain applications that will not work with it and to be honest there isn't much of a benefit from the change.

Also if you are planning some over clocking you might want to get a liquid cooling system, cut down on noise and allow you higher clock speeds.

To be honest its a little hard to think of what to suggest as you are spending so much. But I guess the only other thing is that AMD is supposed to release their new line of processors anytime now so you might want to wait and see what they are like. If you can't wait check out AMD's FX line, its their performance line of processors if I am not mistaken.

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,2128849,00.asp

[Atheist Icon]

Too be honest, wait till SP1 comes out for Vista before you buy a vid card. DX 10.1 is coming out and SUPPOSEDLY the only card that is going to work is going to be the 8800 series. But then again, the 9000 series will be coming out at that time as well, so there is no need to make the 8800 series compatible with shit.

On top of that, look at windows Vista, unfortunately that is the only Windows OS that can support DX10.

Just like mountain_rage said, AMD will be releasing their quad cores soon, about the same time as 10.1.

I was looking into buying a computer about a month ago until I found out about DX10.1. Its just pissing me off that I will be, yet again, 92 steps behind in the computer world.

Good rig though and have fun building it.

[Signa]

i didnt read your link, but hands-down, the 8800 GT offers the best power for the money. i just got one and its great.

3K for a machine? thats an awful lot. ive always squeaked by a little over 1k and always been fully happy with my machine. i hope you havnt put any money down yet. any way you slice it, buying 3 1k machines over the time it takes them to get dated is going to be a hell of a lot better of an idea than going for the best-of-the-best. most likely, you'd be able to lan them for some of the older games :)

[mountain_rage]

Just remembered don't forget to check out the current trends in Physics processors, an increasing number of games are utilizing them. So read up on them and make a decision whether or not to get one.

[Sephiroth]

Yeah your case comes with a PSU, so there is no point in buying another one, if you really want to get a PSU separate then find a case that doesn't ship with one. Over 400 dollars for a case you are way overpaying for it. I see the link goes to a different case which costs a more reasonable price and is a good one.

As for hard drive speed, if you get a good enough motherboard it will likely have a hardware raid driver which would be the easiest way to go if you want speed is to just setup a RAID 0 array. Just back up anything important to a cd or something else because with a RAID 0 array if one of the hard drives goes bad then you lose everything.

You should go for the better ram, nforce chipset with intel processors I hear are not that good, your better off looking for something with a intel chipset.

The stand alone physics processor is a waste of money, Intel bought Havok which is more people than the other physics processor and the Havok part will use the processing power of your CPU and GPU to provide the same amount or better physics as the stand alone card which only a couple games even make use of. You are better off getting a Core 2 Extreme Edition CPU than the stand alone physics processor card.

You will need to Vista for DX10 graphics and so you will have to get it. I don't know what the big deal is about waiting for SP1, Microsoft put out a couple of patches that fixed some of the annoying issues with Vista, right now it is stable and once you get used to finding where stuff has been moved it is not that bad of a OS. If you don't need Vista to do stuff like gaming in DX10 then its not really work upgrading but there isn't as bad as everyone makes it out to be.

The 8800gt video card really is a good card, and I think you are better off getting that than buying the most expensive Ultra version that has been out on the market for a while and will likely be replaced with a new top end card within in the next 6 months.

[moneoa]

lol What Seph said...

[XKS]

Personally, what I would do would be to get the Q6600 - a quad-core part, rather than a insanely fast dual core part.

Consider also the hard-drive arrangement: in my current system I use Matrix RAID where you get the benefits of RAID-0 and RAID-1 over two hard drives. This would work well with your system (you're unlikely to need ~1000GB of HD space).

But you would need an Intel chipset motherboard for that.