PC Dilemma needs urgent attention :(

[Friend of Wander]

I have a laptop. The most inefficient and frustrating laptop around, and it's not even mine. It's got a 3.21Ghz processor and 64MB Geforce GoFX5100 graphics card. Yeah you heard me.

I need a PC. Fast. Was advised by a certain banned member to plead to ATK for advice on the new computer, and so here I am, armed with muesli and chazelene's account password :P


Basically I have about £400 to blow on the PC from working over the summer. I want it to be really good for gaming...like amazing so that I never have to spend hours fiddling with the graphics options to get games to look good and run reasonably well (which is all I do with my laptop). Everything else can take a backseat to the graphics and power. I have a monitor, mouse, keyboard and not really fussed about one of those heave-inducing gaming cases. I just want an unpretentious powerful gaming PC. Oh and I wanna be able to gawp at Crysis on it :P

The certain banned ATK member gave me some details and a semi-official list of specs which are here:

http://i81.photobucket.com/albums/j227/FriendofWander/peteimage3.jpg


But was told to consult ATK before making the final choice :) Please help me out since I am really trying to get the best value for money possible here! I just want an affordable supercomputer :P And I'm hoping you guys can help me with this :D

woo I shall be waiting.

[VoX]

Switch the Q6600 with a E8400 and go for a HD4850 Toxic and get the settings right once by over clocking it a bit or get a HD4870 and take advantage of the GDDR5 VRAM. The 9600GT is pointless, an 8800GTS would do the same for less money.

[Chalex4]

Instead of that old crappy motherboard, look at the Asus P5Q Intel P45, it's what I put in Charlie's new PC, and is great.

Also, an ATI 4850 would be much better than that 9600, if you can afford it. Either that or get an 8800GT.

Other than that, looks like a fairly decent spec, although I would buy some arctic silver 5 as well and choose XP over vista ;).

[Chalex4]

Ah, Vox beat me to it lol. I would only get the Q6600 if you KNOW you are going to make use of it (i.e. encoding, rendering). For just gaming you should just get a dual core (e.g. E8400) and spend the spare cash on the better GFX.

To explain myself a little better, the 9600GT is just an 8800GT but slightly worse. The 8800GTS 512MB is better than them both (I have this card). Basically, get the 4850 and you should be happy, depending on your resolution. How big is your monitor?

[ez64]

If you must go nvidia which isnt a bad idea the 8800gts 512mb is the sweet spot.

and yes unless your rendering or playing 32gb blu ray movies or using seti @ home then the Q6600 is not the way to go and a dual core can be more powerful in many games.

[VoX]

Well as an nVidia fanboy myself, the longer I look at the new ATI cards the more I want one, Darkeagle is planning a new PC that were gunna build together so we know stuff for future reference, and there's gunna be a big can of whoopass opened as the GCard looks likely to be a 4870 or maybe a 3870X2 (cost permitting.)

Like I said though, the 4850 Toxic is the 4850, but majorly vamped up with specs that start to rival the GTX260, but for £70 less.

4850 Toxic specs: 512MB GDDR3 RAM; 675MHz core clock; 1.1GHz memory clock (2.2GHz DDR effective); 2 x 400MHz Ramdacs; 800 stream processors; PCI-E interface; TV-out; DirectX 10.1; DVI
(Copied from Computer Advisor.)

And that doesn't include the OC potential of having a huge Zalman cooler! 24x CFAA Anyone?
http://www.sapphiretech.com/en/productfiles/247specimage.jpgPage on Sapphiretech (http://www.sapphiretech.com/us/products/products_overview.php?gpid=247)

[ez64]

Please never buy cards on raw spec's though since its all about drivers which nvidia spank on since they helped pay for a lot of the games.

Read reviews and get real bench marks on them before you buy.

[VoX]

The review said that it beats the 9800GTX in Crysis, World in Conflict, Stalker and Fear.

I will agree though the nVidia drivers blow ATI out of the water. Also, a kid at our school has 2 9800GX2's (might be 3) running in SLI mode with one monitor, 2GB/3GB of VRAM! *drool*

[ez64]

:D would have been nice but the VRAM doesnt just add up, there two 8800 gts 512's stuck together, so if it cannot handle a game with 512mb it will be no better with 1gb/3gb since the memory is not linked in anyway making those cards suck balls at 2560 resolutions.

Hence why the 280's are much stronger cards at high resolutions.

[Vicious Horizon]

I have the same thoughts, I was thinking about buying one of the computers in the from of PCG magazine...

*Hijacked*

[Friend of Wander]

wow thanks for all the comments...starting to get kinda confused now :P Basically, the reply that makes most sense to me is Chalex's. i.e drop the Quad core and spend the savings on a better graphics card. As to what card to get, it has to be NVidia since ATI don't do SLI, but apart from that I'm open to suggestions. The 8600GT seems highly recommended but I'm sure there are better cards...or better yet cards that run best with the configuration of the PC I posted earlier, minus the quad core. I wanna get SLI so that when times get tough, I can just slam another gfx card in and get the performance back, so I don't intend to use both slots straight away (that's what she said)...

[VoX]

But ATI do CrossfireX instead of SLI.

Chalex was right in saying that an 8800GTS is a good bet, if you can afford it go for a 1GB version as it'll make gameplay a bit smoother.

[ez64]

512mb is fine for all games unless you have a lolxlol resolution the 8800gts 512mb is the sweet spot.

Perfect price 9800gx2 comparable performance and mature drivers.

[Calneon]

What makes you want SLI/Xfire? Get a 4850 and you can Xfire it in the future if you want.