Time to start planning my new computer

[alanschu]

I'm about to buy all the components for a new gaming rig, since I purchased my current laptop almost three years ago ... and I am waiting until the end of Q3, at least, because there are a lot of standards about to change. Even if they are priced too high for a purchase, they will make all the older stuff much cheaper. (More CrossFire motherboards should be released soon, for instance, and even some that are able to support both SLi and CrossFire, hopefully, too.)

 

I was hoping for that with the AGP cards as well, but it hasn't really been the case in my area. They are cheaper, as all things get cheaper, but I didn't get the large price drop I was hoping for. Probably because there is still too much demand for them.

 

SIMMS didn't immediately drop in price when DIMMS came out for instance, and I guess it'll take a while before whatever new tech comes out soon to really have a significant impact on the price IMO.

[angshuman]

I'm about to buy all the components for a new gaming rig, since I purchased my current laptop almost three years ago ... and I am waiting until the end of Q3, at least, because there are a lot of standards about to change. Even if they are priced too high for a purchase, they will make all the older stuff much cheaper. (More CrossFire motherboards should be released soon, for instance, and even some that are able to support both SLi and CrossFire, hopefully, too.)

 

Secondly, I have a feeling that the next generation of video cards will be big ... nVidia need to pull something out of the bag, and they undoubtably will ... and ATi should have all the kinks out of the CrossFire production line (meaning all the motherboards and driver support, etc) in the next months; for example I would expect forward-compatiblity with DirectX 10, even though Vista is delayed (as the GPU duopoly will have been working to the standard for a year or so by now).

 

Also, the top end cards currently available do NOT have the juice to power a 1600x1200 res monitor with all the candy at maximum, so I don't see any point in buying them (as they are already out of date).

 

Thirdly, monitor prices seem to be in freefall at the moment: every time I check the prices they have dropped. (I can buy a 21" CRT monitor 1600x1200 for just over

[Cantousent]

Well, I'm going to go through and find a combination and post it here for your perusal. If I start that process now, it might be a good 3 months before I pick up all the parts anyhow.

[alanschu]

I went for broke, given that I'm stupid/rich.

[Janmanden]

I guess you are probably a reasonable guy, hypothetically speaking, that wants a solid performer, that doesn't sound like a busy airport or a power bill that blows your cost skyhigh... in which case I can't help you.

 

Considering recommended specs on games and software you'd like to play and reviews and debate of proven tech... well I got a friend with 64 bit everything of this and that and the one or two games that do run works fine, but he's rather limited due to lack of drivers etc as to the rest.

 

Of course if you plan to spend the rest of your life 24x7x365 in front of your pc, then go berzerk, but I guess your wife would gladly settle for less...

[WITHTEETH]

Rambus's new XDR DRAM looks potentially better (on paper) than DDR.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

The XDR solution was engineered to be effective in small high-bandwidth consumer systems, high-performance main memory applications, and flagship GPUs. Also, it eliminates the exremely high (640ns) latency problems that early forms of RDRAM had. Rambus owns the technology. XDR is used by Sony for the PlayStation 3 console.

Can you put that into lay-men terms? Also DDR2 doesn't have the latency problem right?

Edited May 14, 2006 by WITHTEETH

[WITHTEETH]

I'm going to wait till after christmas personally, maybe even till Vista comes out :D

 

-Conroe Processors looks like a solid buy so far

-Ill get the next best DirectX10 Video card

-Newest motherboard with all the bells and whistles, must support SLI or crossfire for future-proofing. Can't go wrong splurging on a mobo, mobos are the last thing you want to upgrade, and its what can bottleneck your upgrade if you don't chooose wisely.

-4gigs of the latest RAM - I know that is alot, but Vista uses more, and I hate searching for matching ram plus having alot of sticks of memory in my PC.

Anything else I might be missing, or specifics I might need to know?

 

Ageia's PhysX PPU is looking rather dull to me. I think I may pass on this until it really starts to improve games other then just bigger explosions and crappy looking water effects.

Edited May 14, 2006 by WITHTEETH

[metadigital]

Rambus's new XDR DRAM looks potentially better (on paper) than DDR.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

The XDR solution was engineered to be effective in small high-bandwidth consumer systems, high-performance main memory applications, and flagship GPUs. Also, it eliminates the exremely high (640ns) latency problems that early forms of RDRAM had. Rambus owns the technology. XDR is used by Sony for the PlayStation 3 console.

Can you put that into lay-men terms? Also DDR2 doesn't have the latency problem right?

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

I have highlighted the relevant bits from the following article that appeared in last month's UK PC Format. All RAM must have some amount of latency: Rambus's RDRAM (allegedly) had 640ns, but even DDR2 and DDR3 have a read-write latency of 64ns; whereas the new XDR latency is 52.5ns for read and 42.5ns for write operations.

 

PS I have copied the article verbatim. That means I have not corrected the author's inexcusably imprecise use of GB/sec and Gb/sec, sic passim ... there's a cookie for anyone able to confirm whether it is GigaBytes or Gigabits per second.

Rambus Mk II

RDRAM may be history, but the company behind it is alive and Kicking. James Morris explains how the long-awaited successor to Rambus will work

 

Back in the latter half of the 1990s, the jury was out what the next generation of PC memory would be. EDO DRAM had been replaced by SDRAM, which increased in speed from 66MHz to 133MHz over its lifetime. But SDRAM reached its limits, and there were two contenders to succeed it

[Dark_Raven]

RAMBUS was the great new memory when it first came out and look what happened to it, it became nothing. Now they want to try it again?

 

DDR all the way.

[angshuman]

On the non-proprietary front, FB-DIMMs seem to be the next trend in memory architectures.

[Cantousent]

If I were going to buy right now, this would be a likely list. However, coming in way under budget, I wonder if I should upgrade my CPU and Motherboard as a first priority or the Video card. Comments?

 

Update ASUS A8N32-SLI Deluxe Socket 939 NVIDIA nForce SPP 100 ATX AMD Motherboard - Retail

$224.99 $224.99

Update AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ Manchester 2000MHz HT Socket 939 Dual Core Processor Model ADA3800BVBOX - Retail

$297.00 $297.00

Update CORSAIR XMS 2GB (2 x 1GB) 184-Pin DDR SDRAM DDR 400 (PC 3200) Unbuffered Dual Channel Kit System Memory Model Twinx2048-3200c2pt - Retail

$189.00 $189.00

Update Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD2500KS 250GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM

$89.99 $89.99

Update ASUS 16X DVD

[alanschu]

Hehe, I went with the A8R-32-MVP Deluxe because I was getting an ATI card

 

 

With gaming though, it always seems to be the video card that makes the biggest impact. Which is probably unfortunate. As long as you get a motherboard with PCI-E though, you should be ok for a while.

[Bokishi]

DDR2, FTW

[Spider]

In my opinion, what you really should do if you're under budget is to add a Raptor to the mix.

 

Second, don't you already own a copy of Windows XP? Seems a waste to pay for it again.

 

Third, where in that list is the video card? Or am I just blind?

[Surreptishus]

Maybe its only licensed to one PC or he only has a "recovery" disc.

[Dark_Raven]

DDR2, FTW

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

DDR3 is right around the corner.

[Cantousent]

I haven't seen the DDR2 standard with any of the Athlon motherboards. I've never built an AMD system before, so maybe I'm just not understanding it correctly.

 

Oh, I don't have the video card on the list. That's going to increase the price by almost $300.

Edited May 15, 2006 by Eldar

[angshuman]

I haven't seen the DDR2 standard with any of the Athlon motherboards.  I've never built an AMD system before, so maybe I'm just not understanding it correctly.

That's because AMD have been using DDR1 until now. They are going to introduce Socket AM2 in a couple of months, and with it, DDR2 support.

 

For the record, DDR2 does give you more bandwidth, but suffers from latency issues. For your day to day applications and games, latency seems much more critical. Only some heavy scientific benchmarks seem to benefit from DDR2 (correct me if I'm wrong about this please, I haven't hunted around much). At the same time, Intel aging platforms perhaps did benefit from DDR2.

 

Poor AMD! Hypertransport was doing perfectly fine with DDR1... They had to do some *crazy* amount of tweaking to get their DDR2-based system up to the performance of their DDR1 system.

 

Edit: Some links...

http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2738

http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2741

Edited May 15, 2006 by angshuman

[alanschu]

Which is why I had no problems opting for the DDR1 solution that I will be getting.

[metadigital]

If I were going to buy right now, this would be a likely list.  However, coming in way under budget, I wonder if I should upgrade my CPU and Motherboard as a first priority or the Video card.  Comments?

 

Update ASUS A8N32-SLI Deluxe Socket 939 NVIDIA nForce SPP 100 ATX AMD Motherboard - Retail

$224.99 $224.99

Update AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ Manchester 2000MHz HT Socket 939 Dual Core Processor Model ADA3800BVBOX - Retail

$297.00 $297.00

Update CORSAIR XMS 2GB (2 x 1GB) 184-Pin DDR SDRAM DDR 400 (PC 3200) Unbuffered Dual Channel Kit System Memory Model Twinx2048-3200c2pt - Retail

$189.00 $189.00

Update Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD2500KS 250GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM

$89.99 $89.99

Update ASUS 16X DVD

[metadigital]

DDR2, FTW

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

DDR3 is right around the corner.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

DDR3 for PCs (as opposed to GPUs) is over a year away.

[alanschu]

Motherboard and RAM are fine. CPU is a bit long in the tooth, and games that require a lot of CPU (e.g. physics-intensive games, and also games like Rome: Total War) will crawl ... that CPU is about three years old, isn't it? ermm.gif

 

Heh, considering my older, single core 3500+ has zero problems playing a game like Rome: Total War, I doubt his will.

 

I'm 99.9999% sure that that processor is not 3 years old. Especially seeing as I can still buy new ones. It's one of the dual cores from AMD, and my friend just got it not too long ago with a GeForce 7800 GTS, and there's nothing he can't play. He watches movies and surfs the internet (on his second monitor) while playing World of Warcraft on insane detail settings.

 

CPU power is not an issue with him.

[Sargallath Abraxium]

If I were going to buy right now, this would be a likely list.  However, coming in way under budget, I wonder if I should upgrade my CPU and Motherboard as a first priority or the Video card.  Comments?

 

Update ASUS A8N32-SLI Deluxe Socket 939 NVIDIA nForce SPP 100 ATX AMD Motherboard - Retail

$224.99 $224.99

Update AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ Manchester 2000MHz HT Socket 939 Dual Core Processor Model ADA3800BVBOX - Retail

$297.00 $297.00

Update CORSAIR XMS 2GB (2 x 1GB) 184-Pin DDR SDRAM DDR 400 (PC 3200) Unbuffered Dual Channel Kit System Memory Model Twinx2048-3200c2pt - Retail

$189.00 $189.00

Update Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD2500KS 250GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM

$89.99 $89.99

Update ASUS 16X DVD

[Cantousent]

Thanks for the input, one and all. Good to see you're still haning out, Sarge.

 

Anyhow, I'll look into these and post the new information with your suggestions in mind.

[alanschu]

Don't believe teh meta. He must have mistaken your processor because my experience with those dual cores has been pretty good.

 

I'm getting the 4200+ for what it's worth, which is the next step up from your 3800+