For the first time in about 4-5 years I'm building a new rig. Although I used to be rather into this sort of stuff in times past, I've slowly lost touch with it to the extent that I have absolutely have no idea what's going on in todays world insofar as chipsets, processors, graphics cards etc. are concerned (AGP is dead?). So with that said, I was wondering if you guys could help me out with two things. First, anyone have any links to useful articles that sort of sum up what's out there? I browsed a bit but got sort of overwhelmed by it all. If anyone has an article which sort of sums up the various chipsets/procs/graphics cards that would be awesome. Second, make me some reccomendations! This computer is intended as sort of a house computer, so it doesn't need to really shine in any one area but it shoudl be able to handle games, video editing etc. pretty comfortably. My budget is between 800-1000 bucks, and I already have the monitor and harddrives. Any suggestions would be really welcome.
Budget of $800-1000? Core 2 Duo, 2GB of DD, and at least an Nvidia 8600. Any parts (such as an optical drive or hard drive) that you can reuse? What are your primary uses? If you can tolerate a "small" hard drive, say 200-320GB, you could easily stay within your budget.
I already have 2 350gb hard drives so I'm sorted in that respect. The primary use will probably be photo/video stuff, but I'd like for it to be able to handle gaming decently as well.
Do you want something rather future proof (if there is such a thing)? SLI is nothing to get too excited about, but it's nice to have that option. Other than sli the boards/chipsets aren't all that much different other than alot faster FSB. 2 gigs of DDR2 is pretty much required with Vista. Dual core core2duo a must for video editing...I was amazed. I haven't heard much on AMD's abilities on video/graphics processing. PCIe is twice the bandwidth of AGP....yes AGP is dead. What I looked for in a chipset was P4, P4d, P4xtreem, core2duo and core2 quad compatability. The nforce 650i chipset did that with the added bonus of supporting the penryn cores (1333Mhz FSB) coming out at the end of the year. Everything the 680i offers at about half the price. I went with the EVGA 8800gts vid card (GPU) and am glad I did! Games all maxed out and shit is what my aim was. The drawback of the 650i chipset is that in SLI (scalable linear interconnect...esentially making both cards act as one with enhanced performance) the PCIe only runs at 8X rather than 16X.
Hardly a drawback. You aren't using even the full bandwidth of 8x let alone 16x yet. Definately go with a Core2 Duo, fastest you can afford. 650i chipset. If you are running Vista go with 4gb ram. You might want to consider 2 Geforce 7800's in SLI. DX10/DX10.1/OpenGLv3 is kinda iffy right now, I'm waiting for things to settle down with that.
If those HDDs are not SATA, for performance reasons, consider getting one that is to use as your main drive. It can be smaller. Also, if you're installing the 32-bit version of Vista, don't waste your money on 4GB of RAM. Read why here. ATi's current line of cards simply sucks, so go with nVidia, but avoid the current mid-range stuff (8600 GT/GTS) and get a (last gen) 7900 GPU instead. The 8800 stuff, OTOH, is great.
great advice here. i was going to mention too that the 8600 series is rubbish and 4gb is just overkill, as stated above.
Yeah, 4GB of ram is a waste unless you're running a 64-bit OS. How much can XP and Vista address, 3GB?
I have the 64 bit ultimate and max 2 gigs out all the time. So the statements about 2 gigs for 32bit and 4 gigs for 64bit are accurate. Video rendering is still fast...I'm aiming to make it faster, so 2 more gigs of mushkin extreem is in order.
I just setup vista 32 on a new Q6600 and haven't used the system yet for burning dvd or encoding but stess testing for OC and the memory is maxed. This does not happen with XP. The next time I open this box I'm adding 2 more. Vista any flavor= 4 gigs.
I have yet to run Vista.... Just haven't been up to taking the plunge yet. I'm still running Windows XP X64, and it is very stable and pretty quick. I don't mind it at all, and have no reason to upgrade as of now. ~Will Courtier~
I think I like it. I've been too busy elsewhere to play with it much. Shit hit the fan here this month, My tenant moved out so I have to clean, repair and paint an apartment while I'm also building my new garage / workshop. I just finished 15 yds. of concrete. I don't think I can move from this chair at the moment. My bed is calling but it's just tooooooo far. This old shit sucks...
I'll probably pick up Vista Home Premium over the winter just for fun, but here's my delima - install it on my Core 2 Duo w/ 2GB of ram desktop, or my Macbook w/ 2GB of ram. I hate this product activation shit.
Vista sucks so terribly, terribly bad. Seriously if DX10 is really going to be Vista SP1-only I'll probably boycott the entire generation of games. Come on DX10 Linux/XP emulation
I thought that about vista at first. When I got all the hardware squared away, and gained the media capabilities I was searching for, this OS is just the ticket. It has some quirks, but they're getting fixed slowly. The eye candy is cool and toys are becoming more available.
Is the 8600 series very far behind the 8800? Its hard to recommend the 8800 because of its cutting edge mark up when Vista SP1 will make available features that current cards arent capable of. EDIT: I just looked up some benchmarks and you are right about the 8600 series. Even the 7900's beat it at almost everything. Still buying a $400 8800 640MB now seems a little silly.
That's why it's not very smart to build right now. Video cards are a grey area, DDR3 is really expensive, more Quad Cores coming. Wait it outtt.
Hrmmm, I'm currently looking at graphics cards, and think I'm gonna go the 2x 7900GS route. Each one with rebate is 120 bucks. However, I haven't seen any benchies or anything. Is there a single card offering from N-vidia/ati that can beat the performance on this? N-vidia would be especially preferable since then I could add another card (motherboard is 650i) down the line.
Check this out. You can compare a variety of setups against lots of different applications. Should answer all of your questions: VGA Charts 2007 | Tom's Hardware
Yeah, but it hasn't been very smart to build for the last three years. Just depends on how long you want to "wait it out" before you realize that yesteryear was the better year to build because the state of technological flux moves faster with time.
I'm still stuck with K7 systems because of that. I've decided that 2008 will be the year I go quad-core, though.
