Building a high spec gaming/dev machine | The Coffeehouse

leeappdalecom
.nettter

Basically want to build my own gaming machine that I also want to use for development. Anyone got any suggestions on hardware? specifically graphics cards / sound cards and motherboards.

spivonious

CPU - i5 700 series (no hyperthreading) or i7 800 series (yes hyperthreading).

Motherboard- p55 chipset (socket 1156)

Video - ATI HD4870 (or splurge and get the new HD5870)

Sound - use built-on (no reason for dedicated sound card anymore, unless you're an audiophile)

W3bbo
The Master of Baiters

In reply to spivonious

#Sep 29th @ 4:53 AM

I question if hyperthreading is really worth it given we already have 4 cores processors I've never saturated all of them at once.

As for video, I'd stay on the side of NVidia with their GeForce 300 series coming out in a few months, which should deliver a superior product to ATI.

Dodo
I'm your creativity creator™ :)

Get a DFI motherboard and a Core i7 920 plus some OCZ DDR3 RAM. Faster memory is more important than a slightly faster CPU and it's cheaper. Pck a graphics card priced below 200 bucks and a HDD and you're good to go.

leeappdalecom
.nettter

This is what I have so far:

CPU - Intel Core i7 920 D0 2.66GHz Socket 1366 8MB

MOBO - ASUS Rampage II GENE Republic of Gamers X58 Socket 1366

Graphics - BFG GTX295 1792MB DDR3 Single PCB Dual DVI PhysX and Cuda ready PCI-E Graphics Card

Memory - Corsair 6GB (3x2GB) DDR3 1600MHz XMS3 Dominator Memory CL8(8-8-8--24) for i7 Motherboards

HDD - Western Digital WD3000HLFS 300GB Hard Drive SATAII 10000rpm 16MB Cache - OEM WD VelociRaptor

Case - Coolermaster HAF 932 Full Tower Case

Cooling - Zalman RESERATOR XT Black Edition Hybrid Liquid Cooling System

Power - Coolermaster RealPower 520W Modular PSU

spivonious

In reply to leeappdalecom

#Sep 29th @ 5:59 AM

The 920 is not worth it. http://anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=3634

520W should be fine for that machine, but if you ever add in more video cards, you'll probably find yourself stressing that power supply. If you do plan on going SLI then I'd get a 750W power supply. Plus they're usually most efficient around a 50-75% load.

I find this calculator to be fairly accurate: http://extreme.outervision.com/PSUEngine

W3bbo
The Master of Baiters

In reply to spivonious

#Sep 29th @ 6:26 AM

Make sure that powersupply has the right PCI-E power connectors. It must have at least a 6-pin and an 8-pin connector for the GTX295.

Ion Todirel
buuu

In reply to leeappdalecom

#Sep 29th @ 5:59 AM

I would suggest:

- MOBO: get a usual ASUS mobo, Rampage is overrated

- Primary Storage: get an Intel SSD or 2, if you want decent IO, Visual Studio loves it

- Graphics: AFAIK, two GTX 285 in SLI performs better than a single GTX 295 (which has "2" GPU's), I would also consider RADEON 5870, which has a DisplayPort output and other cool stuff, not to mention that is cheaper

- Colling: I wouldn't jump to water cooling, is not worth it and it's unreliable

- Power: get a nice 1KW PSU

Ion Todirel
buuu

In reply to spivonious

#Sep 29th @ 6:26 AM

isn't 870 and 750 on the new chipset, which sucks at SLI/CF?

LeoDavidson

In reply to Ion Todirel

#Sep 30th @ 2:15 AM

SLI/CF haven't seemed worth it to me since the days of the Voodoo 2.

You get slightly higher quality/performance in existing games at the cost of additional money, heat, noise, PSU issues and driver / game bugs.

Always seems better to put the money you'd spend on a second card under a matress, wait a year, then buy the best card available at the time (and if they're NVidia cards, relegate the old card to doing PhysX work if you want). Then you'll get new features in addition to better performance, with fewer driver/game issues. It usually takes that long for a game to come along that would actually need the power of two SLI'd cards, too.

Perhaps Crysis is an exception, but it always is. Smiley If someone wants to spend lots of money building a machine to play that short (very good, but quite short) game over and over then more power to them. For anything else, SLI seems like madness to me. Heck, apart from Crysis my three-year-old 8800 Ultra still runs every game I've tried at 1920x1200 and high quality (though not absolute highest quality with the AA maxed, of course). (Crysis ran well enough at a lower res.)

stevo_
Human after all

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/buyers-guide/2009/09/15/what-hardware-should-i-buy-september-2009/1

give it another two weeks and they'll have the 'what hardware should i buy october 2009' article..

Id say that still today an i7 920 and 6gig of ram is pretty cheap and powerful.

spivonious

In reply to Ion Todirel

#Sep 30th @ 2:15 AM

Yeah it's not quite as good with graphics that max out the PCI-E channels, as the P55 chipset only has 16 lanes, so you get 2 x8 slots instead of 2 x16 with the X58 chipset. But even with two 5870s in CF you still only lose a couple fps, and then only in games that really stress the GPU. http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=3649&p=2

It's not worth the extra cost to me.

ScanIAm
On a scale of 1 to 10, people are stupid.

There are some good ideas here, but the new frotier of speed is going to be HDD access. If you have the money, go for a solid state drive or 4. At least get one for your OS.

magicalclick

In reply to ScanIAm

#Sep 30th @ 11:27 AM

I would RAID0 the SSD to make even crazier speed on it, as long as the bus can handle it. Big Smile

LeoDavidson

In reply to ScanIAm

#Sep 30th @ 11:27 AM

Be careful to get a good SSD. Some of them are much slower than normal HDDs under real usage. (Some of them are great, though. Just gotta be careful not to buy a turkey.)

Ion Todirel
buuu

In reply to LeoDavidson

#Sep 30th @ 7:08 PM

There aren't many options I'm afraid, Intel X25 or not Smiley

leeappdalecom
.nettter

Thanks for the tips fellas, I need to rethink my list now Smiley

LeoDavidson

In reply to Ion Todirel

#Sep 30th @ 7:27 PM

I've heard that two of the new OCZ models are decent. Not as good as the Intel ones but good performance for the price. For me it still seems worth waiting a bit for the technology to mature and also to come down in price, both of which finally seem to be happening.

I bought an older OCZ model (well, it was a brand new model when I bought it a year ago) and it was a complete waste of money, at least in terms of speed. The thing would frequently lock up the entire machine while it thought for a few seconds and when it wasn't doing that it still didn't manage speeds above what a normal HDD would give.

If you do choose an SSD and can't afford the Intel one, find a good review before you put down your cash. Make sure the review actually tested using the thing for real. Reviews which only show raw speed/throughput benchmarks aren't telling the full story with many SSDs.

ScanIAm
On a scale of 1 to 10, people are stupid.

In reply to LeoDavidson

#Oct 1st @ 3:31 AM

My machine 'stops and thinks for no good reason' all the time. It's sad that hardware manufacturers spend so much time giving us more power, when that power sits idle while the OS scratches its multithreaded s$$ Smiley Every time I checked, it seemed that either the disk was busy, anti-virus was scanning a file, or one of the many office products was hung while trying to contact something on the internet.

Meh. There are some other potential issues with SSDs here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_drive#SLC_versus_MLC .

That said, if I were building a new machine, I'd definitely try to go that direction, but like LeoDavidson said, read the reviews. Even though the intel drives are expensive, you can get a small one for the OS and then put the rest of your data on larger and potentially slower HDDs.

spivonious

Even a crappy SSD will outperform a HDD in random reads since the seek time is nonexistent.

Dodo
I'm your creativity creator™ :)

In reply to spivonious

#Oct 1st @ 9:35 AM

Not so much with random writes, as they may require a cell delete first, which gets even slower with MLC flash.

kettch

In reply to Dodo

#Oct 1st @ 1:16 PM

Windows 7 is supposed to have some features that will mitigate these disadvantages. I guess it's too soon to see how this works over time, but it looks promising.

http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2009/05/05/support-and-q-a-for-solid-state-drives-and.aspx

Dodo
I'm your creativity creator™ :)

In reply to kettch

#Oct 1st @ 1:49 PM

I know, the thing is just, this means deleting a file would now delete it for good, and people might disable it, if that's even possible. I also doesn't affect pagefile performance at all.

littleguru
<3 Seattle

This is what I bought most recently:

1 LIAN LI Lancool PC-K7B Black Aluminum/ SECC ATX Mid Tower Computer Case

1 ASRock X58 Extreme LGA 1366 Intel X58 ATX Intel Motherboard
1 SAPPHIRE Vapor-X Radeon HD 4870 1GB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready CrossFire Supported Video Card
1 XIGMATEK MC NRP-MC651 650W ATX12V Ver.2.2 / EPS12V Ver. 2.92 SLI Ready CrossFire Ready 80 PLUS Certified Modular Active PFC
1 Intel Core i7 920 Nehalem 2.66GHz LGA 1366 130W Quad-Core Processor Model BX80601920
1 Intel X25-M SSDSA2MH080G1 80GB SATA II MLC Internal Solid state disk (SSD)
1 OCZ Gold 6GB (3 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Low Voltage Desktop Memory Model OCZ3G1600LV6GK
1 Western Digital Caviar Green WD10EADS 1TB SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive
1 LG 22X DVD±R DVD Burner with LightScribe Black SATA Model GH22LS30 LightScribe Support
1 Scythe SY124010L Fans
1 Scythe MUGEN-2 SCMG-2000 120mm Sleeve CPU Cooler

Ion Todirel
buuu

In reply to littleguru

#Oct 1st @ 8:06 PM

looks almost as good as mine, almost Wink