|
|
| Unreal Tournament 2004 : Lounge : So im getting a new PC ... |
[Forum Rules] |
Assaultman67  |
  Posted 26th Dec 2009 4:12am |  |
Post 4160 / 4376
 |
And I'm wondering what kinda parts to get ... I'm trying to keep it relatively cheap ...
So far the only thing I've really conclusively decided on is a upper-mid-grade Radeon HD 5000 series card ...
However, the benefits of having a quad core CPU or dual core CPU system for gaming doesn't stand out to me ... Have games started a trend to utilize all cores or is it just better to get a high end dual core with a faster clock speed ... (i guess i have to keep in mind the on chip cache size ... you guys can assume the same size for arguements sake)
I also considered getting a 30Gb SSD for the OS and some apps and a 1Tb drive for other files (movies, music, works in progress, etc) ... but after looking at the prices and dependability of SSD's (they start to die after 100,000 writes or so) i don't think ill get one ...
For memory ... memory is expensive  ... I'm thinking ill just get 2 2Gb sticks unless you think i could somehow compensate in some other area to squeeze in some memory ...
Other parts I plan on cannibalizing from the computers already sitting around (I've been eyein' two other fairly obsolete computers in the corner of my room for a while  )
I also plan on ordering it sometime after Christmas in hopes that the price will drop for some components (because CENSORED ... i could of sworn that memory used to be pretty cheap ... and I'm not sure if its due to inflation or due to Christmas season) |
|
|
| RF Grim Reaper |
Posted 26th Dec 2009 12:44pm | |
L4Y Member
Post 877 / 902
 |
Are you building or buying? I would guess building
On the memory front, DDR3 is quite expensive at the moment. I've got a system in the works that will handle either DDR3 or 2 so I can upgrade to 3 when prices come down. Might be worth considering a Mboard which can handle both 
If you're looking for somewhere to squeeze money from I'd say either skip the SSD or get a smaller one (if it's only really holding the OS and a couple of programs you use the most).
Personally I'm not sure about how much more you get from a quad compared to a dual in games that are out there now so I'll leave that for someone else to answer  |
|
|
| RED-FROG |
Posted 26th Dec 2009 3:47pm | |
L4Y Resident
Post 4869 / 5258
 |
SSD
imo SSD is either for enthusiasts or for those that already have a PC setup that beast every actual game, as well as games to come out.
The thing with 100.000 writes or whatsoever is wrong. The SSDs have a reverse, plus there are calculations that you cannot wear down all sectors within at least 15 years 24/7 @ full bandwidth. This case is totally unrealistic and will apply to nobody. That is on an Intel X25-M Postville. The same that I also own. IF you want a SSD, I'd only get one of those or one of OCZ. They both share great SATA controllers and have good read/write.
A high end HD does almost 100MB/ read and 100MB/s write @ 8-12ms.
SSDs on the other hand go from 20MB/s (USB crap) up to something like read 260 MB/s write 210 MB/s @ <0,1ms.
My Intel X25-M Postville (G2) 80GB does 250MB read and 87MB/s write. (my Win7 boot..and this isn't just a fresh Win7 install)
RAM
imo DDR3 is not required at all. Complete garbage.
DDR3 has only some statistical theoretical advancements over DDR2, the only real advancement they require less voltage - thus they don't get that warm. (cpu OC potential) 
The benchmarks show that the cpus can't really take advantage of DDR3, most of the time it's 100fps DDR2 vs 103fps DDR3. Do you want to pay 400$+ (expensive mainboard, expensive RAM, expensive cpu) for 3fps? I don't
I wouldn't even think about getting DDR3.
CPU
Since you aren't sure about quad or dual core, let me tell you that I think quad core is absolutely necessary. So you would most likely either choose between Core2Quad or Phenom II x4. The Intel i7 cpus doesn't need to be mentioned since they are too expensive and you gain no real advantage of it - as a gamer. (There is no single game on the whole market which would require that performance. Even a Core2Quad or Phenom II outrun most requirements with ease). Furthermore an i7 requires you to buy DDR3 RAM and a DDR3 mainboard (dbl price)
I can only recommend you a AMD Phenom II x4 955 (AM3 socket) or the flagship 965 (AM3 socket) Black Edition.
They can be used on DDR2 mainboards with the socket AM2+. There are several AM2+ mainboards with support AM3 cpus already. Pure AM3 socket mainboards use DDR3 which doubles the price overall - and again you gain almost nothing from it. Other than maybe a "show off @ friends" effect.
I don't know much about the Core2Quad. And since they are too expensive versus AMD cpus that deliver the same, if not more gaming performance for less $$$, I'd not recommend that crap. Actually Phenom is extremely popular right now.
You don't need to reach for the stars if you want to get a decent CPU.
Graphics
DirectX 10: mighty HD4870 512 or 1024MB (doesn't really matter)
With that one you play Crysis at High settings and high resolution.
I've played pretty much every actual game, Win7 records: 74 games installed, and the HD4870 just laughed at them. Most of the games are console hardware limited, thus they won't go beyond what our PCs can achieve. (except if they're badly ported)
DirectX 11: HD5770 or higher which costs around the same as a 4870, but is capable of doing Dx11, then you won't have to upgrade that soon again.
Nvidia...don't want. Less performance for the price, poor support and bad image.
Don't let yourself get blinded by PhysX, that actually no game takes serious use of. (Mirrors Edge is a joke, Batman Arkham Asylum as well). I can play every game just fine.
Plus, AMD is doing their own thing atm, or might get PhysX as well. Nonetheless, gamers shouldn't really care about it. |
| ¤ MARS WARS 3! - Red Faction revamped on the unreal engine. Superiority ¤ |
|
|
Assman15  |
Posted 26th Dec 2009 4:12pm | |
Post 1894 / 2085
 |
I don't think a SSD is really necessary unless a fast boot time is absolutely crucial. You'd probably get more use out of storage space than speed for your money. There's always the middle route of using RAID-0 on some relatively fast HDD's.
As for RAM, DDR2 is more than enough. Upgrading beyond that likely won't yield any noticeable performance boost. IMO 4GB is enough to tackle any game out right now, but be sure to leave a couple slots open for future upgrades.
I don't think the need is quite there yet for quad-core processors, at least not for consumers. IMO a dual-core is all you really need currently. I think that sacrificing a couple cores for faster speeds (at the same price) is a good trade off.
I just bought myself a Radeon HD5770 and it's been great so far. Very reasonably priced for a high performance Direct X11 card. Newegg had quite a few deals going when I bought mine. I ended up with a free game (Stormrise, I wouldn't recommend it) bundled with mine. |
|
|
| RED-FROG |
Posted 26th Dec 2009 4:56pm | |
L4Y Resident
Post 4870 / 5258
|
Nah, SSD is not only for booting.
It loads any program a lot faster. It loads simultaneously up to 10times faster than HDs. Even compared to Raid0..
Raid0 HDs doesn't really help against SSDs. SSDs have less than 0,1ms access/seek time, while even the best HDs have to fight with 8-12ms.
Imagine a game with 100 little single files (thats nothing). scattered around on your HD. The HD head has to seek for every piece, it has to move and seek again each time it found the last item and go for the next one. Not to mention that if one of those files is fragmented, it has to seek even more/longer.
A SSD doesn't have any mechanical parts that would cause breaks. It doesn't care about fragmentation, it doesn't have a physical disk that varies in dense/shape or speed. (the outer ring of a HD performs a lot more different than the inner ring)
When I click on a program...it pops up. The only remaining loading time is the cpu calculation. For example if you load a map in UT3 using a SSD, the SSD gives extreme MB bursts into the memory, and the cpu cores process that data as fast as they can... the SSD idles meanwhile, while the 4 cores are @ full work.
You cannot outrun a SSD with Raid0. It's not only about read speed. And most files that have to be read, are not as large.
It doesn't create any noise, it requires less power, you can throw it at a wall or hit your PC case while it is loading, and it'll not crash.
It's all just about the money.. and SSD technology just ISN'T cheap. We can actually be very happy that they finally came to the point to invent it and made it kinda affordable.
And actually, when we talk about SSDs, we are talking about the peanuts. The SATA stuff..
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227499
That is real SSD power. And I think it will happen to become affordable. Or at least, it's going to make the "lower end" section a lot cheaper. PCIe shouldn't really be required.
But anyway, this is serious loading power. 
There are even SSDs that read 1,4GB and write 1,2GB in a second. approx 1,5mio hours runtime.
18 731$
CPU
If you want to play high demanding games such as UT3, FC2, GTA4, Crysis or even games such as RF:G, a quad core IS just the best choice.
Even the loading times will cut into almost a half. In UT3, as mentioned above, each of my 4 3,2ghz cores is running at the absolute limits when I load a map or the game itself.
This increases the processing speed a lot, if not by half the time against a dualcore.
Everything will be processed much smoother because there will always be a free thread.
You will NOT have a CPU that is the bottleneck, you will NOT feel fps drops caused by a quad core.
For exmaple you cannot go for a fancy Dx11 card but stay at dualcore at the same time. That'd be the biggest phail you could pull off. |
| ¤ MARS WARS 3! - Red Faction revamped on the unreal engine. Superiority ¤ |
Modified Dec 26th, 05:07pm by RED-FROG |
|
| Assman15 |
Posted 26th Dec 2009 5:09pm | |
Post 1895 / 2085
|
I never said a RAID array could perform as well as a SSD, the SSD wins in performance hands down. I was simply suggesting that a RAID-0 setup could have fairly good speed without sacrificing storage capacity. Assaultman67 said he wanted to keep it cheap, and high capacity SSD's definitely aren't cheap. |
|
|
| Assaultman67 |
Posted 26th Dec 2009 7:37pm | |
Post 4163 / 4376
|
I've done the raid 0 thing for a while now ... ive got two 250 Gb hard drives in the computer im using right now ...
and about the SSD wearing out ... I just looked into it and it seems that most companies have included a chip that counts how many times a block has been written to and in response shuffles the location of data around to avoiding a block being worn out
Im also looking at getting a card that looks like a racecar  Vroom Vroom! LOL!
Here's the combo deal im looking at right now ... The mobo is DDR3 though ...
The solid state drive i was looking at was this one |
| |
Modified Dec 26th, 09:30pm by Assaultman67 |
|
| sobe |
Posted 31st Dec 2009 11:34pm |
Post 3136 / 3194
 |
Ok I'll chime in as Ive missed this thread due to no internets
SSD... OCZ or Intel. With OCZ if your drive goes bad in the next 3 years, return and get a new one via OCZ customer service. (OCZ Vertex2, Agility, etc.)
Outside of SSDs look at Samsung Spinpoint F series and Western Digital Caviar Black.
For CPUs, of course if you are looking at save a little green instead of looking around like for deals at frys.com that has Core i7 920's for $170 you can go with a slower performing AMD offering or Intel's Core2Quad line. But these days you can find the 920 D0 stepping for a mere $150 ~, you just have to look around.
DDR3, it's made its advancements with the newer motherboards. And it would be stupid nowdays to NOT go DDR3 when getting a new setup, because DDR2 and DDR3 are nearly equally priced now.
For vid card I'd TRY to stretch for a 5850. I have the 5870 myself and I gotta say the 58xx series are no slouches.
Also, classifieds in places such as Overclockers, HardForums, Anandtech, etc. are a great place to find good used parts for cheaper than new prices. So keep that in mind.
Before I forget, the whole AMD/ATi vs nVidia thing. nVidia will soon have their DX11 hardware available for the public. nVidia has for MOST of the time been able to slaughter ATi's offerings with comparable products. Of course when you measure in cost, that is where you may sway over to what ATi has. But nVidia's cards have been the biggest hit in any enthusiast crowd, so I'll stick with the backing nVidia Yes I may own a 5870 as Since the HD4xxx series ATi finally got something right, nVidia's comparable cards have been better. |
| "Apparently, Plaintiff believes that he could sue an egg company for fraud for labeling a carton of 12 eggs a dozen, because some bakers would view a dozen as including 13 items." - Western Digital 2006 |
Modified Dec 31st, 11:38pm by sobe |
|
| Sergeant Todd |
Posted 1st Jan 2010 11:22am |
Post 204 / 274
 |
Assaultman67, I bet your old PC is way better than the one I'm using. Is it for sale? |
|
|
| Assaultman67 |
Posted 5th Jan 2010 7:55pm | |
Post 4178 / 4376
|
it wouldn't be worth it ... an Nvidia 5700 is a really really old card LOL (well in terms of hardware) ... it was manufactured around 2003 ...
For the shipping of the computer alone you could buy a better card |
|
|
| Assaultman67 |
Posted 8th Jan 2010 12:55am | |
Post 4181 / 4376
|
Invokes his Super Admin Bumping powers
So i ordered the parts about a week and a half ago and built it
I got 2 2 gb sticks of DDR3 1600, a Radeon HD 5770, a Hitatchi Terabyte drive, a 3.0Ghz Phenom II (the quad core kinda not tri core), and a Gigabyte motherboard to piece them together ...
Im actually using the computer right now ... although its sitting in an old beige case ... sobe does not approve of my beige case
To be honest, I'm kinda blown away by its speed ... the things that would make my old PC run slow this computer breezes through at 30% capacity ... LOL ... it feels good to have recent hardware
The only major difference in PC's i miss would have to be the fact i don't have two drives in raid 0 like i did before ... although the loading times seem about the same for my old PC and this one ... |
| |
Modified Jan 8th, 12:58am by Assaultman67 |
|
| sobe |
Posted 8th Jan 2010 5:08am |
Post 3138 / 3194
|
| Quoting Assaultman67 |
Im actually using the computer right now ... although its sitting in an old beige case ... sobe does not approve of my beige case |
I'm not a fan of them, lol. Seen waaay too damned many in my experience. I'll stick with black in the least
| Quoting Assaultman67 |
The only major difference in PC's i miss would have to be the fact i don't have two drives in raid 0 like i did before ... although the loading times seem about the same for my old PC and this one ... |
2 things can help you with that.
#1 is going to be, get more RAM. When I was running 8GB of DDR2 800 everything tended to load in half the time. Do what I did, go buy a used phase change unit and see how far you can push that RAM at subzero cpu temps xD
#2, SSD. |
| "Apparently, Plaintiff believes that he could sue an egg company for fraud for labeling a carton of 12 eggs a dozen, because some bakers would view a dozen as including 13 items." - Western Digital 2006 |
|
|
| Assaultman67 |
Posted 8th Jan 2010 6:18am | |
Post 4182 / 4376
|
as of right now im going to call it good with the ram ... i just don't need it simply because im not really pushing my rig as it is ... (the latest games i own came with the CPU and they seem to run fine ... i don't really have any games that are even close to pushing it yet)
I'll wait for prices to go down ...
and as for the SSD ... meh ...too expensive for now ... perhaps for my next build ill do that ... |
|
|
| RED-FROG |
Posted 8th Jan 2010 7:11am | |
L4Y Resident
Post 4917 / 5258
|
I don't ever max out the 3,25GB Window7 32bit has available.
I played pretty much every big title.
(the consoles have to live with 512MB ) |
| ¤ MARS WARS 3! - Red Faction revamped on the unreal engine. Superiority ¤ |
Modified Jan 8th, 07:12am by RED-FROG |
|
| RED-FROG |
Posted 8th Jan 2010 8:26pm | |
L4Y Resident
Post 4920 / 5258
|
Yes.
They have to live with 512MB ...OVERALL 
next generation hardware.. that generation didn't last for a second.
That is also a reason why our 4GB PCs never run out of memory.
Most, well I could almost just say ...all games ...are limited to what consoles capacity offer.
(if someone is now wondering how the heck 512MB would work out, they don't have to run Windows. ) |
| ¤ MARS WARS 3! - Red Faction revamped on the unreal engine. Superiority ¤ |
|
|
|
|
