New Machine...

**orangat** · 08-30-2006, 17:12

I see some really strange wacky recommendations here.

I'll never recommend a 10k rpm drive unless the user is an enthusiast with
a good cooling setup.

Originally Posted by _Martyr_

IMO you are going major overkill with that 7950GX2... Its disproportionatly powerful (and expensive) compared to the rest of your PC. The money would be better spent on a better CPU or more RAM. I would say get the E6600 instead of the E6300, it has a 4MB L2 cache which really does transform to better performance. Go for a 7900GT for your graphics card, its really where the sweetspot is atm for bang for buck. Sure there are better cards, but in a few months when DX10 cards are released even the beast you were looking at before will be obsolete... Then in 6-8 months time upgrade to what is then the best bang for buck DX10 card out.

Why is the 7950gx disproportionately powerful?
How do you know that the e6600+7900gt will give better performance especially when the e6300+7950gx2 is only $50 more?
And where did you get the idea that DX10 cards going to turn current models obsolete in a few months? DX10 is not going to be a factor for about at least 2 years.

**Al Khalifah** · 08-31-2006, 00:25

Re-thought idea - for the same price (weird no?):

CPU: (Sckt775)Intel® Core™ 2 Duo E6600 CPU @ 2.4GHz 1066FSB 2x2MB L2 Cache
Motherboard: Asus P5N32-SLI SE Deluxe nForce4 SLI Chipset LGA775 Supports Core 2 Duo CPU FSB1066 DDR2/800 Mainboard w/GbLAN, USB2.0, IEEE1394&7.1Audio
Memory: 1GB (2x512MB) PC6400 DDR2/800 Dual Channel Memory (Corsair)
Video Card: NVIDIA Geforce 7950 GX2 1GB 16X PCI Express Video Card
Hard Drive: 300GB SATA-II 3.0Gb/s 16M Cache 7200RPM Hard Drive
Optical Drive: SONY DUAL FORMAT 16X DVD±R/±RW + CD-R/RW DRIVE DUAL LAYER (BLACK COLOR)
Optical Drive 2: SONY 16X DVD-ROM (BLACK COLOR)
Sound: ON-BOARD 7.1 AUDIO
PSU: NZXT PF-500 500 Watt Power Supply

I like this. It has room for expansion, can increase memory to 2GB in the future, add a sound card, add another HD (possibly for some RAID) or (if I win the lottery) go to Quad-SLI.

**orangat** · 08-31-2006, 00:37

Get the e6300. If your pc's most taxing task is typically on games, there won't be a significant difference. The e6300 is a great overclocker and you save some money. The bigger 2Mb cache has practically zero value over the standard 1Mb for games despite what others think.

And get a good psu because the 7950gx2 is a beast.

**Papewaio** · 08-31-2006, 01:39

Originally Posted by orangat

I'll never recommend a 10k rpm drive unless the user is an enthusiast with a good cooling setup.

Would you recommend a SATA RAID for capacity and speed?

**Al Khalifah** · 08-31-2006, 01:53

What arrangement ?

**Papewaio** · 08-31-2006, 02:39

Well to go faster and have more capacity first. Adding extra drives for redundancy would come second. As DVD-RWs are so common now all vital files can be stored offsite I would focus on speed more then data integrity for a games machine, particularly one that I would rebuild to play with.

**orangat** · 08-31-2006, 14:53

Originally Posted by Papewaio

Would you recommend a SATA RAID for capacity and speed?

Only if there is real proof of need. Eg. Can you justify RAID over getting another drive for more disk space. I generally don't because the probability of failure is increased.

**Papewaio** · 09-04-2006, 00:22

I would be using data striping (RAID 0) for extra speed (mainly the loading of the game in the first instance, not game play itself) and capacity. Yes you do have a larger chance of failure {(probablilty of a single drive failing) to the power of the number of drives in a set}.

But I havn't had a drive fail in ages and as a game PC I would go for speed and data volume over mirrored for redundancy. With our enterprise servers we use RAID sets and and clustered servers using 15k rpm drives, but that is overkill for a game pc which most vital data is the saved game file, which are rather tiny.

Of all the things that might kill a PC that is being overclocked I doubt the HDs will be the first to go (unless someone is playing with them too) and then the time taken to rebuild a PC will come down to how fast things get loaded which will tend to bottleneck at the HD. Later on when playing it is other things that normally form the bottleneck. So in essence I'm saying build for speed of loading the game to the system and more capacity and knowing that the flaw is no redundancy, back it up!