€2500 - New System Build

Slaanesh

A mate of mine has a bit of cash to build a new gaming system.

Here are the specs he was thinking:

1 AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+ or Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6700 2.67GHz Socket LGA775, 8MB not sure which is better

2 EVGA nForce 680i SLI, nForce-680i SLI, Socket-775, 2xGbLAN, DDR2, 2xPCI-Ex16

3 I reckon ill need 1000w power supply for 2 graphics cards

4 2048 memory

5 2 x Club3D GeForce 8800GTX 768MB GDDR3, PCI-Express, HDTV-Out, HDCP, Dual DVI for the SLI

6 Western Digital Raptor 150GB SATA 16MB 10000RPM for games

7 Western Digital Caviar SE16 500GB SATA2 16MB 7200RPM for files and other stuff

8 Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate English OEM DVD 32bit

9 Loads of fans to keep it cool



You reckon I could the above for around 2,500. [\QUOTE]

Firstly, the chip and GFX cards come to about 2,200 straight away.
I think a quad core is overkill, wouldn't a dual core 6700 suffice?

Any comments/suggestions appreciated.

joe_chicken

Tell him to wait a few months...

see the other threads about intel aggressive price cuts coming soon (i.e. the next couple of months)

Besides that, you won't need 4 cores for a couple of years, and at that stage they'll be cheap as chips (well 200 euro bags of chips)

Spending nearly a grand on a cpu alone is not clever.

dazftw

yea 6600 or 6700 would probably do, Intel are supposed supposed to be better than the amd chips I hear?

Im getting the same setup as you minus a graphics card! Should be hopefully next week ill be ordering it!

You dont have a case in the list?

I reckon a Antec Nine Hundred or NZXT Zero case they both have good ventilation!

Also what size is your monitor? If your going to be playing games below 1600 X 1050? I dont know the other half of the res lol!

Theres no need for 2 graphics cards! Depending on the size of the monitor!

dazftw

joe_chicken wrote:

Tell him to wait a few months...

see the other threads about intel aggressive price cuts coming soon (i.e. the next couple of months)

Besides that, you won't need 4 cores for a couple of years, and at that stage they'll be cheap as chips (well 200 euro bags of chips)

Spending nearly a grand on a cpu alone is not clever.

When are they due?

SwampThing

For comparison, I'm looking at this rig :-

• 1 x Asus Striker Extreme, nForce-680i SLI, Socket-775, 2xGbLAN, DDR2, 2xPCI-Ex16
• 2 x Crucial DDR2 BallistiX PC8000 2048MB CL5 Kit w/two matched BallistiX 128Megx64
• 2 x Samsung SpinPoint T166 320GB SATA2 16MB 7200RPM
• 2 x Western Digital Raptor X 150GB SATA 16MB 10000RPM
• 1 x XFX GeForce 8800GTS 580M 320MB XXX GDDR3 ,PCI-Express,2xDVI/HDTV/HDCP,580/1800Mhz

€2890 with a QX6700 - €2450 with the E6700

I think I'll go for the E6700 and in a year or so upgrade to a quad-core - when a) I can get some benefit from 4 cores and b) it doesn't cost the earth.

The extra €400-odd will go twoards cooling, a case etc. etc. If I get out for under €3K I'll be happy and know I have a good platform for upgrading in the future. I can add a second gfx card later on or change it to a DX10 without having to change the entire system and I can add storage to beat the band.

Only thing I'm unsure of is the PSU - I've an OCZ Modstream 520W - hopefully it'll do for this build and if needed, I'll change it later on.

DirkVoodoo

God, for a minute I thought that said 6 x WD Raptors.

Ditch Ultimate, get a copy of XP Pro. At the moment the cost just doesn't justify the return. There are no DirectX10 drivers yet from NVIDIA, so games like supreme commander won't look any better.

Get some Decent memory, some Corsair DDR2-1066 if ya can afford it and want to overclock, else some decent DDR2-800.

Also, as number of fans increases, amount of noise generated increases. Get a few 120mm fans (scythe, akasa ambers, etc.) and have 'em run at low RPMs.

Is he running two screens? If not then SLi 8800 GTXs is like fitting wheels to a tomato.

Also, I agree, wait for the quadcore to come down to the 500 euro mark in the next while, or just buy a dual core now. A gaming rig will perform the same with a dual or a quad core at this time. oh, and an E6600 is easily overclockable to 6700 speeds on stock volts, dont waste your money!

joe_chicken

DeafVision wrote:

When are they due?

Q3

Looks like AMD are bringing out new chips then aswell...

I'll say it again, 1000 euro on a processor is not clever

L31mr0d

joe_chicken wrote:

Besides that, you won't need 4 cores for a couple of years, and at that stage they'll be cheap as chips (well 200 euro bags of chips)

I'm sorry you're wrong. The main misconception with quad core is that people put it in the same bracket as the move from 32bit to 64bit. The reason it is taking years for software to adopt 64bit is that the benefits to desktop users will be negligible as the majority of operations atm undertaken on a desktop PC are still way below even 32bit.

The differences with multi-core'd CPUs is that the benefits to the end user scale better (albeit not proportionally) with the introduction of more cores, ergo there is more reason for the developer to add support for multiple cores as the benefits are easily seen. Also, adding multithreading support to games and programs is a lot simpler than adding 64bit support (albeit it is still a lot more difficult than adding single core support) Currently Supreme Commander is coded to make use of 4 cores and Valve have been working on adding quad core support to the Steam Engine for the last quarter, I can see most graphically high end games being released in the next year having quad core support or at least adding it down the line.

Even so if one game doesn't have quad core support, windows does, so it allows you to run up to 3 other applications in the background without it interfering with your main game application by setting the affinity of each program to each core. The main benefit i've seen with this with my present dual core is playing music on my pc while playing a game, before, when the music software would either change a song or I would adjust the volume the game would stutter, but now, having the game on 1 core and my WMP on the other this problem is gone altogether.

That ALL being said (sorry for the ramble) if you are on a budget, I'd recommend the OP to invest in a C2D E6600 and a decent air cooler (Tuniq?) and overclock it. You will save ALOT of money doing it this way, the money you save can be invested in a larger monitor, another raptor for RAID0 and maybe 2x2GBs of RAM (note you should also consider buying ram that you can overclock also)

SwampThing

L31mr0d wrote:

I You will save ALOT of money doing it this way, the money you save can be invested in a larger monitor, another raptor for RAID0

L31mr0d, I though we spoke about this already! You're not allowed to speak about RAID as it gets you all fired up and cranky. We'll let it go for now, but try avoid threads with 'RAID' in them - you know, it's just not good for you!

d_advocatus

Core 2 Duo's are so easily overclocked. Get a good board (I have the Asus P5B-DLX and have currently over 60% overclock stable) and you're sorted. My E6300 is running stable (~30c idle, ~50c full load) at 3.15GHz (from 1.86GHz) and using only air cooling. I'm using the Zalman 9700 HSF.

My 3.15GHz E6300 is beating stock Core 2 Extreme 2.93GHz in benchmarks showing also that cache isn't really a big factor, so don't worry about having only 2MiB.

Fanny Cradock

Your friend cold buy a very high end, future proof system for about €1500 and still have €1000 left for upgrades over the months/ years. In terms of price to performance ratio he is pissing money down the drain.

In similar manner to the CPU, I think two 8800GXT is a waste when considering that the next batch of DX10 cards will be released in a couple of months.

Just to reiterate: spend the money now on a very good system. Later on he can then use the spare cash to switch to quad core and improved graphics for a heck of lot less cash.

d_advocatus

Fanny Cradock wrote:

Your friend cold buy a very high end, future proof system for about €1500 and still have €1000 left for upgrades over the months/ years.

There's no such thing as a future proof computer.

Fanny Cradock

Very constructive!

I think the point is clear. Lets not get into semantics.

SwampThing

d_advocatus wrote:

There's no such thing as a future proof computer.

Not future proof, but certainly scalable and supportive of future trends.

It's not rocket science to bring this down to the foundations - if you base your build on a high-end and flexible motherboard, you're protecting your investment somewhat.
- buy a board that supports quad core but start off with a dual core cpu for now. Overclock it until it squeals and run it until quad core become affordable and more mainstream.
- be sensible with RAM - don't fully populate your board's sockets; leave room for expansion.

It's not future proofing your system but more getting value now for your investment and reducing your future upgrade costs.

papu

q6600 price drop is on teh way as is the r600 now is the time of saving ....ddr3 is on teh way too but thatl take a little bit longer....:D

and btw 2x gtx's is soo overkill sli dosent improve and on most things it unimproves and 1000w psu is a bit silly tbh tooo much to overkill get a decent 600 r 700 ocz from komplett itl save you a load

dazftw

Yea im getting a OCZ 700Watt PSU I dont think ill need more im getting same setup as you minus the raptors and 1 GTX lol

awhir

ur getting a 6800?

Kintarō Hattori

L31mr0d wrote:

Even so if one game doesn't have quad core support, windows does, so it allows you to run up to 3 other applications in the background without it interfering with your main game application by setting the affinity of each program to each core. ...............having the game on 1 core and my WMP on the other this problem is gone altogether.

I thought Windows would just automatically handle a second program or task with a Dual Core processor. Can you actually instruct windows what to do?

Any linkage for me to furthur my knowledge?!

Prisoner6409

Where are u buying the EVGA mobo(680i). There is a problem with the first revision of this mobo(P\N: 122-CK-NF68-AR) with regard to overclocking Quad CPU's. EVGA are currently swapping the older revision boards for the newer revision board(122-CK-NF68-A1), the newer revision board has the problem fixed. This would be an issue for me as the whole idea for me in buying this board is the ability to upgrade to quad core in the future. Komplett.ie are currently only selling the older revision of this mobo even though they are aware of the issue. EVGA has already said the newer revision would be available from retaillers on March 5th. There is a lot more detail regarding this here: http://www.evga.com/community/messageboard/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=28369


BTW the other edition of this board(122-CK-NF68-TR will be replaced with 122-CK-NF68-T1).

Khannie

eo980 wrote:

I thought Windows would just automatically handle a second program or task with a Dual Core processor. Can you actually instruct windows what to do?

The OS does handle it automatically, and somewhat intelligently (in linux (from what I've seen) it's flawless, though you can still force affinity). In general, there's no need to set affinity, but it can help reduce processor process swapping (which is expensive).

eo980 wrote:

Any linkage for me to furthur my knowledge?!

In taskman, right click on the process and select set-affinity iirc (been a while since I used windows).

Khannie

L31mr0d wrote:

adding multithreading support to games and programs is a lot simpler than adding 64bit support

I'm sorry, but this is just wrong. I've done a large scale port from 32bit to 64bit and have also worked with multithreaded code. I can safely say that threading (in c/c++, which is the language of choice for games companies) is not only more difficult, it's a pain in the tits to debug when things go wrong.

Edit: I agree with your main point ofc though. I think that 4 cores will be well utilised in games by the end of the year. For most task though, I still think the dual cores are perfect for now. Having said that....I LOVE MY QUAD.

joe_chicken

Khannie wrote:

I'm sorry, but this is just wrong. I've done a large scale port from 32bit to 64bit and have also worked with multithreaded code. I can safely say that threading (in c/c++, which is the language of choice for games companies) is not only more difficult, it's a pain in the tits to debug when things go wrong.

I think he's making the point that 64 bit has not been fully taken advantage of yet... sure you can make a port, but does it really need or take advantage of 64bits?

L31mr0d

Khannie wrote:

I'm sorry, but this is just wrong. I've done a large scale port from 32bit to 64bit and have also worked with multithreaded code. I can safely say that threading (in c/c++, which is the language of choice for games companies) is not only more difficult, it's a pain in the tits to debug when things go wrong.

Ok, i'll concede that was a little bit of codology, and I would of gotten away with it too if it wasn't for you pesky kids

Ok but, in saying this the rest of that argument stands. In that the benefits to implementing multithreading are more readily seen then adding 64bit support. True, it is very difficult to add multithreaded support, but Intel is doing a lot to show how it CAN be done because, well, it serves their needs for developers to adopt multithreaded architectures, AND developers are realising that, regardless of difficulties, multicores are quickly going to become the norm for desktop PCs (aren't they already?)

The main crux, though, of my argument is that if someone was considering to get either a X6800 or a QX6700 (both prices identically on Komplett) i'd advise them to get the QX6700. BUT if they where on a budget and it was something like the choice of a E6600 and a 8800GTX or a QX6700 and a 8800GTS 320MB, i'd recommend the former for gaming. If you can afford a QX6700 and an 8800GTX, do... otherwise stick with a better gfx card and a dual core.

Personally I only bought my QX6700 because I was able to get it for just a little bit more than a new E6600. Otherwise I would of went with a E6600

Khannie

L31mr0d wrote:

Ok, i'll concede that was a little bit of codology, and I would of gotten away with it too if it wasn't for you pesky kids

Haha. Fair play to ya.

L31mr0d wrote:

The main crux, though, of my argument is that if someone was considering to get either a X6800 or a QX6700 (both prices identically on Komplett) i'd advise them to get the QX6700.

Yeah, same here. It has far more total compute power for the same price.

L31mr0d wrote:

Personally I only bought my QX6700 because I was able to get it for just a little bit more than a new E6600. Otherwise I would of went with a E6600

Also same here. (I got the q6600, as the 6700 wasn't available to me, but I love it).

jimmycrackcorm

L31mr0d wrote:

I'm sorry you're wrong. The main misconception with quad core is that people put it in the same bracket as the move from 32bit to 64bit. The reason it is taking years for software to adopt 64bit is that the benefits to desktop users will be negligible as the majority of operations atm undertaken on a desktop PC are still way below even 32bit.

The differences with multi-core'd CPUs is that the benefits to the end user scale better (albeit not proportionally) with the introduction of more cores, ergo there is more reason for the developer to add support for multiple cores as the benefits are easily seen. Also, adding multithreading support to games and programs is a lot simpler than adding 64bit support (albeit it is still a lot more difficult than adding single core support) Currently Supreme Commander is coded to make use of 4 cores and Valve have been working on adding quad core support to the Steam Engine for the last quarter, I can see most graphically high end games being released in the next year having quad core support or at least adding it down the line.

You're obviously not a software developer otherwise you'd realise how infinitely more difficult it is to write multi-threaded code than 64 bit code which is essentially taken care off by the compiler.

Multiple cores are of greatest value to running independent applications. Yes you can expect to see games that will utilise the multiple cores but not as many as you might expect and with not as great a benifit as justifies the cost. The greatest affect for gaming is the graphics card.

Slaanesh

Forgot to thank everyone for their input. I think my mate has made up his mind now thanks to the comments on this thread.

Perhaps make a Thread on the programming about "Difficulties of programming for multiple cores" instead of dragging this one slightly OT

SwampThing

Khannie, L31mr0d - what PC case have you guys built your rigs into?

It's the one thing I can't decide on. I've my current build in a ThermalTake Xaser III - big, does the job. I like the 'door' over the drive bays but it's not the classiest case around.

I was thinking of the Kandalf, maybe even the LCS but I think building the system is enough without adding liquid cooling to the mix.

I've seen the '180' mentioned loads, but I have to say, I'm not a big fan - it doesn't do it for me.

Thoughts or suggestions?

Khannie

Swampy: I have an antec 900. I won it at midlans for the street fighter 2 competition. OLD SKOOOOOLLLL!!!!!!

It's a very good case. Airflow is well designed (there's a straight line of cool air flowing over the CPU, which I really like). HDD's are a pain to get in place, or maybe I'm thick.

Only (slight) trouble I've had with it is that the side panel 120mm fan wouldn't go on with the scythe ninja because of its height. I just clipped the corner off the fan and it was grand though. Pushes cool air directly onto the graphics card.

Jimmy: Take it easy lad....he already put his hands up!