New Computer

[Ramor]

So, my old computer broke and here I am on a library computer asking my FFXI forum to help me make a new one.

I was looking at this combo and am in need of a half decent card to go along with it. I'm not particularly good at building computers, but from what I've heard from a few friends is that this particular quad core i5 is a cheaper version of an i7 (relatively speaking, don't nitpick at this comment i r noob). I don't know what kind of power sources go with what and how to figure out what cases I could use etc etc... I'm hoping someone has some general options on a card to go with this particular bundle or has any suggestions on something that would be cheaper and just about as effective.

I have about 800$ to spend (hopefully less), I plan on doing SC2/Diablo 3/FF14/other new MMOs probably. I have a monitor/keyboard/speakers and a spare 9400GT that I have left over from my broken computer, but the rest of the parts from that computer are either broken or wayyyyy out of date.

Suggestions, thoughts, anything welcome.

[nitsuj]

Best bang for your buck will be i5 750 intel processor. I'd start there.

[Bardicrune]

Sorry, I'm going to disagree. I personally think you should stay away from the P55 chipset. There aren't enough PCIe lanes built into it. The X58 chipset and Core i7 processors are the minimum I recommend to anyone that will be doing gaming. You should also look into getting a board with USB 3.0 and SATA 6.0 in order to future proof the machine. With the components you need for your system, I would spend a little more and get this combo.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ComboB...t=Combo.328905

[nitsuj]

Sorry, I'm going to disagree. I personally think you should stay away from the P55 chipset. There aren't enough PCIe lanes built into it. The X58 chipset and Core i7 processors are the minimum I recommend to anyone that will be doing gaming. You should also look into getting a board with USB 3.0 and SATA 6.0 in order to future proof the machine. With the components you need for your system, I would spend a little more and get this combo.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ComboB...t=Combo.328905

Well, he wanted to spend less than 800 dollars total. I don't think he's too concerned with "future proofing" since USB3, SSD, and maybe even bluray will be about 150+300+150 = 600 bucks by itself, no?

i7 is great, don't get me wrong, but so far I've very happy with i5 750 and P55 chipset. It's not ideal, but for the money I spent it's more than adequate.

i5 750 and P55 overclocks very easily, as well.

But i7 is definitely a good choice as well

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...&Tpk=P55A-UD4P

and

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...-215-_-Product

For comparison/prices.

[Olo401]

I'll come back to the combo in a moment.. wanted to address this first:

Sorry, I'm going to disagree. I personally think you should stay away from the P55 chipset. There aren't enough PCIe lanes built into it.

Don't take this the wrong way, but this is an absolutely stupid and uneducated comment to make. Intel made the P55 platform for mid-range gamers, as an alternative to the much more powerful and expensive X58. They also made it as a precursor for the lower end H55/H57 and the business-viable Q57, all of which have integrated graphics for the low-end non-gamer or for HTPC applications. In fact the main PCIe 16x lanes go directly to the CPU, not to the chipset (4 of the chipset's 8 lanes can be used for graphics if the motherboard has a slot for it). This allows tons of flexibility as well. For example on P55 you can run..

- A single card running at 16x (which for just about any application besides Folding@home is FAR MORE than will ever be used)
- ...and add to that a second card running at 4x...
- or you can have two cards running at 8x...
- ...and add to that a third card running at 4x...

http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/...u/p55block.jpg

In contrast, the current X58 chipset has a full 40 lanes available, allowing for two cards running at full 16x and a third running at 8x, or whatever combo you can make from that (there's an ASUS board with a ridiculous 7 PCIe 16x-sized slots - figure that shit out!)

You should also look into getting a board with USB 3.0 and SATA 6.0 in order to future proof the machine.

I'll agree with getting USB 3.0 compatibility.. it's just recently become available on some new motherboards. I haven't yet seen a board with SATA-600 though it should be available soon.

So, my old computer broke and here I am on a library computer asking my FFXI forum to help me make a new one.

I was looking at this combo and am in need of a half decent card to go along with it. I'm not particularly good at building computers, but from what I've heard from a few friends is that this particular quad core i5 is a cheaper version of an i7 (relatively speaking, don't nitpick at this comment i r noob). I don't know what kind of power sources go with what and how to figure out what cases I could use etc etc... I'm hoping someone has some general options on a card to go with this particular bundle or has any suggestions on something that would be cheaper and just about as effective.

I have about 800$ to spend (hopefully less), I plan on doing SC2/Diablo 3/FF14/other new MMOs probably. I have a monitor/keyboard/speakers and a spare 9400GT that I have left over from my broken computer, but the rest of the parts from that computer are either broken or wayyyyy out of date.

Suggestions, thoughts, anything welcome.

I'm not too happy with this combo for one significant reason - the power supply.. you couldn't pay me to recommend Rosewill's shit. The $100 you save on this combo will be spent in six months when you have to get a new power supply. Aside from that I have a small nitpick - the motherboard is good but it's a micro-ATX board which limits your system expandability, and it's matched with a mid-tower ATX case designed to hold a larger board, which kinda makes no sense.

Here's what I'd do.. keep the HD, memory and case and grab this mobo/CPU combo - same CPU, but with a full ATX board that has USB 3.0 support. That puts you at about $635, add this power supply for $80. Now for a video card.. if we go with a Radeon 5770 it's gonna put you just over $900 total with the taxes & shipping.

[Tirrock]

There are some cheap USB 3.0 cards too. This one has 2 USB 3.0 ports and 2 SATA 6.0Gb/s ports on the back for $30.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813995004

Although I don't know if the PCI-E lane could handle that much information if it was all being used at once.

[Ramor]

I suppose I could have phrased things better, but 'future proofing' isn't something I'm honestly banking on being able to do. I'm mostly concerned with getting a good computer that won't be mid/shit-tier in about 2 years for 800$. 800$ is my absolute limit unfortunately so some of the options you guys have posted aren't so good. I'll take into consideration heavily the comment about the power supply though, but I'd also like to ask how people feel about the HDD in that combo. I have some doubts about it because of the reviews, and I really won't need more than 500gigs to be honest (1.5TB would be fun, but I don't think I'd make use of all of it)

further suggestions?

and hanks for all the responses so far guys.

Also, what exactly is USB 3.0? If someone can just give me a brief overview of what it is and why I should care about it that'd be nice, I'm sure I could google the hell out of it but not really get why I, the average gamer, should care so much about it.

[Jurgen]

Someone claimed that the P55 chipset doesn't support enough PCI-e bandwidth. There was an article over at Tom's a couple months ago I think that compared two cards running at x16 x16 vs. x8 x8. The difference came out to be between 6-8% performance. Based on what most people spend on computers, 6-8% is hardly worth the extra money ($200-300) you'll have to dump into a good X58 motherboard, RAM, and core i7.

The i5 750 and a good P55 board be more than enough for the next 2ish years.

[Celeras]

If you want an SLI setup that requires two PCIe 2.0 slots, I would also recommend going i7. Even a single dual-gpu card would get the same recommendation, as newer gpus like the 5970 are coming dangerously close to being bandwidth capped by a PCIe 1.1 slot. Not quite there yet, but it's going to happen soon and you don't want to drop coin on a new card and not have it work to its potential.

[edit] 1.1 is equivalent to 2.0 x8(250MB/s bandwidth), and 2.0 itself is x16(500 MB/s bandwidth). Sorry for unnecessarily using alternative lingo ;x

[Waraji]

Mine New PC.

Spoiler: show

http://img251.imageshack.us/img251/4272/rig2s.jpg

Just ordered the last bit of stuff today. Have a 9800GT gpu, but gonna upgrade to single GTX 285 this summer, then dual before october. And an SSD to boot windows, as I already have an excess of hard drives laying around.

Not to forget this here I bought me couple months back.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...Tpk=HP%202159m

[Ramor]

after reading everything i think i'm going to stick with my original combo, and pick up this:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...-080-_-Product

as my graphics card.

if i do, would it be worth it to try and overclock it since someone mentioned that the i5 overclocks well and that gpu has a liquid cooling unit right on it? i've never overclocked and i'm not particularly keen on the idea, but assuming that there really won't be any issues with overclocking i might give it a shot (but probably not).

also, anyone familiar with radeon gpus? i've only ever dealt with nvidia so that's about where what i know comes to a halt, i remember the HD4870? was pretty high end about a year or two ago, of course that's definitely changed.

tldr; recommend me a decent gpu to go with my computer that won't break bank (i.e. <= 200$)

[Ramor]

one last question, can anyone recommend a 5.1/7.1 sound card? and if i do get a mid-way/high-end one how much would it run me? i realize with most audio stuff your 'high end' will easily jump from like 100$ to 10,000$, so i'm looking for relatively cheap 'high-end' stuff, not the crazy studio-producer level stuff

[Celeras]

after reading everything i think i'm going to stick with my original combo, and pick up this:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...-080-_-Product

as my graphics card.

I'm confused, do you think that this is an nVidia 295 series graphics card? Because it isn't, its just the block you attach to the bottom of it so you can use your water cooling system for the card. A 295, while being the best nvidia card available (until Fermi next month, which you should probably wait for as it will make everything else cheaper), will cost you at least $500.

[Waraji]

I was wondering why he linked to a water block... I'm also waiting for the next Nvidia batch to hopefully see some price drops in the GTX 200 series.

[Ramor]

I'm confused, do you think that this is an nVidia 295 series graphics card? Because it isn't, its just the block you attach to the bottom of it so you can use your water cooling system for the card. A 295, while being the best nvidia card available (until Fermi next month, which you should probably wait for as it will make everything else cheaper), will cost you at least $500.

gdi, this is why i ask, i was looking at the 295 earlier for 500$ and saw that and thought it was just a single card version of the big one, le shrug

this is why i ask!, and what is Fermi? if it's going to make things cheaper i may just hold out on a computer, although to be honest using my roommate's netbook is dildos

[Waraji]

Fermi is the new architecture that Nvidia is going to dish out in response to ATI's DX11 compatible cards, specifically the HD5970, which is like fkin ATI's golden child of high end cards right now. They are going to support Dx11 among other things, which in my opinion will probably drive GTX 2xx prices down. I'm still hopeful for them to release some marginally inexpensive Dx11 cards.

[CoronA1979]

will probably drive GTX 2xx prices down

Which in all likelihood will drive ATI's "Golden Child" down some in prices also since they have likely already made a killing on the 5870 and 5970. So, why not bring your price down a bit and people will still be more apt to buy your product.

I have been an Nvidia fan for a longtime but I have to say with things of late I have been eyeballing the ATI side of the fence for a while now >.>

[Ramor]

nvidia for life!

i guess i'll just wait on them there gpus, but one last question before i go!

for games the "multi-core threading" option was always unchecked for TF2 and some other games, with a quad core would something like that help? i had a duo before but it always told me to leave it unchecked ("recommended" settings anyway), i honestly have no real idea what that option is or does

and thanks again to everyone who helped