Need new PC what should I get?

[Shapeless]

Hay guy's I'm buying a new gaming rig but don't know what to get and or avoid getting. Someone told me to spend at least $1200 and don't buy generic dvd/blu-ray drives. so do I really need quad-core what about water cooling, Nvidia vs ATI, should I go 64bit?

my budget is like $1800 but I can go higher if it's worth the extra dough.

[Craigs]

Shapeless said:

Hay guy's I'm buying a new gaming rig but don't know what to get and or avoid getting. Someone told me to spend at least $1200 and don't buy generic dvd/blu-ray drives. so do I really need quad-core what about water cooling, Nvidia vs ATI, should I go 64bit?

my budget is like $1800 but I can go higher if it's worth the extra dough.

I'd suggest you send a PM to Doom Marine. He helped walk me through building a desktop that could max out crysis (and even come close to maxing out Arma 2 which is pretty impressive) for around $900 (~$1100 after I bought a new monitor for it).

In the mean time
http://i52.tinypic.com/1z18jmv.jpg

[Xeros612]

Shapeless said:

Someone told me to spend at least $1200

HA

and don't buy generic dvd/blu-ray drives

Yes, make sure to spend loadsamoney on brand name drives that work the same as generic ones.

so do I really need quad-core

It's advisable, since dual-cores are kind of running out of steam in the modern market even with the glut of bad console ports in terms of gaming. Go six-core if you really have loads of dosh to blow.

what about water cooling

Fuck that nonsense. No intelligently built and assembled computer should need that high a level of cooling unless you're planning on doing all sorts of unnecessary stupid shit like triple monitor 3D ultra high resolution gaming.

Nvidia vs ATI

NVIDIA.

should I go 64bit?

That's like asking if you should get a new OS or stick with XP. Yes, go 64 bit. Make use of more than 3.75 GB of RAM.

Also:
http://s919.photobucket.com/albums/ad37/Xeros612/?action=view¤t=Untitled-4.png

It's missing an optical drive (because I would be using the one I currently have), an OS (because I already have one to install), and I need to replace the sound card in the list because I didn't notice when I was putting the list together at 1:16 AM that newegg actually listed a sound card THAT SUPPORTS WINDOWS 2000 AT THE NEWEST IN THE YEAR 2011.

Beyond that, that's a good, strong computer "built" under $1000. If you want to go more towards that $1800 budget, bump up to a six-core processor and a 580.

[Whoo]

Xeros612 said:

Go six-core if you really have loads of dosh to blow.

Barely any programs and/or games run faster on six core processors, as nobody knows how to code for them.

Xeros612 said:

Fuck that nonsense. No intelligently built and assembled computer should need that high a level of cooling unless you're planning on doing all sorts of unnecessary stupid shit like triple monitor 3D ultra high resolution gaming.

You're a real PC techie. Overclocking (Which many PC gamers do) produces excess amounts of heat (depending on the OC frequency) and water cooling is a real help in bringing those temps down. I also don't see how a tri-monitor setup is "stupid shit".

Xeros612 said:

That's like asking if you should get a new OS or stick with XP. Yes, go 64 bit. Make use of more than 3.75 GB of RAM.

32-bit systems can only use 3.25GB.


And now to respond to the thread:

I'd wait a couple months before buying/building as the Radeon HD 7000 series is coming up soon and Nvidia surely won't be too far behind it.

[Maes]

Whoo said:

Barely any programs and/or games run faster on six core processors, as nobody knows how to code for them.

Damn, I must have been ahead of the times then. For if I simply tell my graduate large sparse linear systems program (which I wrote in 2006, and in Java) to crunch stuff on 6 threads instead of 1, 2 or 4, it will happily make use of 6 or more cores and achieve a speedup close to the maximum theoretical (I've been able to confirm this with up to 8 cores on moderm hardware, while at the time of writing I could only test it on a 2-CPU Hyperthreading Xeon with a max of 4 threads, and it achieved near 3x speedup).

Something more recent, if I tell Mocha Doom's parallel renderer to work with as many threads as the core allow, you DO get some speedup in any case, compared to not doing that (confirmed with up to 4).

It's not that nobody knows how to code for SMP (simultaneous multithreading), but that not all problems are well-suited for parallelizing, and especially video games have typically a pretty bad structure that is the exact opposite of what makes a problem worth parallelizing.

E.g. think of how Doom processes thinking in a fixed, serial fashion, or how it traverses BSP trees serially. Sure, you can have a parallelized NUTS.WAD but then good luck finding a way to record consistent demos. Also, some stuff works great at the graphics level (where you only work with big, dumb matrices without complex and dainty data dependencies) and is best performed by the GPU, rather than general-purpose cores.

The above being said, good programmers who know all about the implications of parallel programming are indeed a rare breed, and tend to work more for university and big number crunching problems, not on video games or as web programmers.

[Xeros612]

Whoo said:

You're a real PC techie. Overclocking (Which many PC gamers do) produces excess amounts of heat (depending on the OC frequency) and water cooling is a real help in bringing those temps down.

See: stupid shit. Base clocking and configs are powerful enough. I'm running midrange hardware from 2008 on base clocking and configs and I can run ARMA 2 and Crysis on decent enough settings. "Gamers" can OC and bitch when shit breaks down all they want.

I also don't see how a tri-monitor setup is "stupid shit".

I meant it in conjunction with the other things, but tri-monitor is pretty stupid. Dual-monitors at most should suffice, unless you have a phobia of a little thing called alt-tab.

[Shapeless]

Tri Monitor's are out of the question I'll be gaming on my 50" plasma viera.

[kristus]

Watercooling is a great way to make your computer run quieter and still have good cooling. Also it's easier to clean the accumulated dust out of a water cooled computer compared to one that is not. Lastly, with the modern closed systems. Watercooling is easy and affordable to use. I myself currently got two different closed watercooling systems in my computer. One for the GPU and one for the CPU.

Here's a shot of the innards of my computer. It's an old case, but pretty much everything inside it is top notch. We had to do some "modifications" to make everything fit.
http://a7.sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-ash4/314490_10150285835448857_582593856_7933194_8005931_n.jpg

GPU is a ATI Radeon HD 5790. It's great for running single card. Though it's still running crossfire natively because of it's two cores. Before I put on the Watercooling on this, it could sound like a jet engine at times when it got hot. Now that is not an issue.

CPU is an AMD Phenom II with 6 cores at 2.8GHZ.

The mobo is as people probably can see an Asus Crosshair IV formula and then there's an SSD disc for system disk and to power it all a Zalman 1000w PSU.

I got all this last spring for very little as I found some very generous sellers. Guys that keep building new systems all the time and sell virtually new hardware (with warranty intact) for basically nothing. The GPU for instance I paid less than half of what it would cost in a store.

[Maes]

I found my latest PC on the street. So there.

[Shapeless]

I'm in Canada anybody know of a good place to buy a new PC? last time I got mine from canadacomputers.com

[Maes]

All those Canadians and Americans asking "where to buy a new PC" makes me wonder: isn't it enough to take a walk downtown and cobble one together from the parts sold from the -doubtlessly countless- smaller or larger PC shops? Many of them also sell pre-built (but non-brand) PCs for specific tasks (e.g. Office, Gaming, Home etc.) at reasonable prices, and you can even find used PCs.

Is there some law against building your own system/buying it "offline" or it's simply considered too hard nowadays? This ain't exactly the 80s...

[infurnus1]

Craigs said:

I'd suggest you send a PM to Doom Marine. He helped walk me through building a desktop that could max out crysis (and even come close to maxing out Arma 2 which is pretty impressive) for around $900 (~$1100 after I bought a new monitor for it).

Seconding this.

Also, make sure you get a good power supply unit (PSU) so that the GPU and all the other parts can perform well. Good brands are Corsair and PC Power&Cooling. (Corsair makes good RAM too.) If you find a 80+ certified PSU those are pretty good too, more energy efficient.

Shapeless said:

I'm in Canada anybody know of a good place to buy a new PC?

If you're in Canada, and you don't want to make your own PC, NCIX builds custom PCs. They also sell parts to make your own if you want to do that, too.
NewEgg also operates in Canada and the USA.

On the other hand, if you end up going with another "PC builder" website, I'd like to advise anyone going this route to stay the hell away from overpriced crap like Alienware and Digital Storm. Falcon Northwest is expensive, but if you really-really-really want a custom laptop or their portable FragBox PC, then I guess it's not that bad.
If you're paranoid about making your own PC and would rather have someone that makes PCs for a living do it instead, it's better to find a company that's local or at least nearby. If you use a "PC builder" site, make sure you don't use one of the prefabs or "bundle deals", those cost less for a reason.
Only use builder sites if they let you customize the PC parts, and avoid no-name-brand parts.

Basically, just make sure you research each part you're interested in getting so you can be sure they're compatible and can get enough power.

Also, yeah I agree with Maes a bit. Sometimes you can get a local mom&pop computer store to help you out with PC stuff.

[kristus]

Infurnus said:

I'd like to advise anyone going this route to stay the hell away from overpriced crap like Alienware

Alienware may be expensive. But it's certainly not crap.

[chungy]

Whoo said:

You're a real PC techie. Overclocking (Which many PC gamers do) produces excess amounts of heat (depending on the OC frequency) and water cooling is a real help in bringing those temps down. I also don't see how a tri-monitor setup is "stupid shit".

Overclocking used to be worthwhile back when it could really increase the speed of your system by 200-400%. You know, from 4.77MHz to 12MHz or some thing like that.

These days, overclocking brings you maybe a 30% speed benefit and a whole host of issues simply from the heat. It's not worth it.

[Maes]

chungy said:

Overclocking used to be worthwhile back when it could really increase the speed of your system by 200-400%. You know, from 4.77MHz to 12MHz or some thing like that.

Ahh...the (not so) good old days when the CPU speed was directly linked to the bus and memory speed ;-)

Actually that 30% figure you mentioned was easily achievable with 386 and 486 class CPUs, e.g. if you overclocked from 40 to 50 MHz, but the problem was getting the bus to keep up: the ISA bus had to be kept near 8 MHz by using CPU dividers (but you could overclock even that up to 16.66 MHz if you really pushed it) while the Vesa Local Bus was supposed to run upwards of 50 MHz (while first-gen PCI only up to 33). But they were very unstable, and CPUs got very hot anyway regardless of use these days (no power-saving NOP state, heh).

I heard -but never confirmed it myself- that it was possible to overclock XTs and 286s by replacing the CPUs and the clocking crystals directly, but you had virtually no control over how fast everything else would run: it was all locked, and overclocking required soldering. I think the maximum you could achieve was using a 10 MHz crystal to power up a 20 MHz 286, and forcing the ISA bus to work at 10 MHz as well, or, in XTs, spap in a V30 @16 Mhz in an 8 MHz system.

[Mr. T]

Any generic DVD player will do. OCing is the domain of enthusiasts these days. You won't notice a performance difference.