Advice on a new rig

[NiX]

Budget: ~$800
Need it to: Run EVE smoothly with multiple instances of FF in the background. During school I typically run excel, lots of firefox and multiple word, which tends to rape my RAM. Run quietly. Any suggestions for better fans, throw 'em in there.

Case: Antec Three Hundred Gaming Case
CPU: Uh, don't know. I'll be playing EVE and I usually run multiple instances of Fire Fox with the occasional Photoshop, WinAmp and the new, hog like, live messenger.
Motherboard: Depends on the CPU, suggestions? (Don't need on-board video, on-board sound is good and don't need built in wireless)
PSU: Cooler Master Extreme Power 650W ATX 12V V2.01 Silent Power Supply
RAM: Suggestions? Lower timings are better, but I can't find RAM under 5-5-5-15. Minimum 4, 8GB worth it?
Graphics: I see some people buying the ATI HD series, don't really know about the new NVidias.
[d]Drives[/b]: I'll just pick some cheap DVD-RW drive
HDD: Raptors worth the extra cost? Most I'll need is 500GB

I'll have to find out if I can get a discounted copy of Vista through my school.

[Fabricated]

Dunno if 8 gigs is really worth it. As for the CPU one of the Intel Quad Cores would do you nicely and they're all pretty cheap now.

RAM I never really care too much about since I've used various timings and never noticed much of a difference. Get something from a recognizable brand and thatll be fine.

As for GPU, I have no idea anymore. I'm out of the loop. My 8800GT is doing me just fine, but I hear some 4xxx series Radeon gives better performance for a better pricepoint. Still don't trust their drivers however.

I'm going to be trying to build a new rig (well, new Mobo/CPU/Ram/Case, everything else is getting transplanted from my current PC) and I'm still trying to figure out if the i7 is worth it.

[NiX]

I saw the i7 and was curious if it was worth the extra $, but I'm really waiting for Trippy or one of the other tech gods to bestow some wisdom on me.

Last time I heard about good ram was here and about 2 years ago. I remember someone pushing Mushkin and saying OCZ was overpriced crap.

[Trippy]

CPU: Uh, don't know. I'll be playing EVE and I usually run multiple instances of Fire Fox with the occasional Photoshop, WinAmp and the new, hog like, live messenger.

When you say "multiple instances" of Firefox do you mean multiple windows/tabs or do you mean multiple separate installs/versions of the app (e.g. you run 2.0 and 3.0 at the same time)?

[NiX]

multiple windows running multiple tabs. Typically I have 2 separate ones open each with about 3 tabs open on each.

[Falwell]

You can pick up an E8400 Wolfdale CPU from Newegg for 164 bucks as of right now, retail box. Best 164 bucks you'll ever spend. I know this is like the 4th time I've whored for this CPU on here but it's just solid as a rock. Runs fast, stable, and very very cool.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819115037

for my MB I went with a Gigabyte for the first time and have had no issues with it whatsoever. Easy to work with, shitloads of overclocking features (if that's your scene) and frequent and stable BIOS updates. The link below is the one I'm using currently. Egg has it as deactivated, so it may be out of retail circulation.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128059

Personally, I think 8 gigs is overkill on RAM. I've been running 4 gigs with the above mentioned hardware and an 8800GTX Ultra with zero issues. I'm not sure I've come across an app, or a combination of apps, that has really put a heavy strain on my RAM.

My opinion, go with 4 gigs of ram and put the saved coin towards a higher end CPU or GPU. Much better bang for the buck.

[Yoru]

Regardless of whether you go with 4 or 8 gigs of RAM, remember that you'll need 64-bit Vista to actually make use of it. Or 64-bit XP, but it's better to not speak of such things in polite company.

Personally I'd go with 4 gigs to start, and then if you find the thing chugging during your average session, upgrade to 8. You can always buy more. I run EVE on Vista 64, and I tend to have OpenOffice and Firefox in the background, on a box with 4GB and I haven't had issues. Although not with the same crazy amounts of documents and tabs you tend to have open.

Going to hijack this thread for advice on a decent laptop!

Just looking for a well priced laptop that isn't too annoying to carry about (will be using it at uni and home) and must be comfortable to do a lot of typing on (larger keyboard the better). Decent enough to play some games though no need to be near the cutting edge.

I've been super happy with my Macbook Pro, but you pay a premium for them. Apparently they run Windows quite well, but I have no experience doing that. I know one of my former coworkers used his in a dualboot setup and said his ran XP with games just fine.

[Trippy]

The Core i7 is the latest and greatest but it's been optimized to better compete with AMD in the server arena which has been kicking Intel's butt in terms of multi-CPU/multi-core performance for quite some time now. For game performance the i7 may or may not be faster than the equivalent Core 2 CPU. For highly parallel, multi-threaded apps the i7 performance is significantly better than the Core 2.

http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdoc.aspx?i=3448&p=1


For GPUs, the ATI/AMD RV770 GPU (4850/4870) is a much better design than NVIDIA's current offerings. It's roughly analogous to the ATI 9700 days when it was putting the beat down on NVIDIA's 5xxx design. Unfortunately ATI's driver *still* sucks (not counting NVIDIA's earlier problems with its 64-bit driver), especially if you were thinking of going with dual cards/GPUs.

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3469


EVE does not support multi-cores/CPUs AFAIK so going with a quad-core CPU may be a bit of an overkill unless you have multiple accounts and are running multiple copies of the game on the same machine. E.g. even if Firefox/Photoshop/whatnot is consuming all the CPU cycles of a single-core, your EVE performance will not be affected cause it's using the other core (more or less, you can force it that way if you have to).

http://myeve.eve-online.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=965668

Of course there are games that can use multiple cores/CPUs and there will be more in the future. When I play City of Heroes, which makes very good use of a second CPU/core, I sometimes have to lower the priority on my browsers to stop them from eating so many CPU cycles (fucking Flash) when CoH is running on my dual-core CPU. If had a quad-core CPU I wouldn't have to do that.


There are people that swear up and down that the (Veloci)Raptor hard drive is significantly faster than the 7200 RPM equivalents with normal desktop applications (server applications is a different story). So far I still haven't seen any real-world benchmarks that show that. It is faster, but not by much. Personally I would much rather have the extra disk space but I also do a lot of video capture/editing/processing and have many terabytes of disk space storage sitting in my computer room currently.

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3303


For RAM my next machine will most likely have 8 GB. I really really hate the way Windows manages virtual memory so spending some extra money to keep it from swapping is worth it to me. 3D games will easily eat up 1 GB of RAM by themselves. I run Firefox and Opera and both together will eat up 1.5 GB+ of RAM. With the OS itself and other stuff running I'm easily using 3.5+ GB of RAM/virtual memory so even if I had 4 GB of RAM I would still be swapping to disk. If you don't mind the swapping then 4 GB of RAM should be okay unless your Photoshop files are very large.

[Evil Elvis]

I'd go with the i7 and an ati 48xx.

[Trippy]

I'd go with the i7 and an ati 48xx.

Unforunately going with a Core i7 will destroy his budget.

[Evil Elvis]

I'd go with the i7 and an ati 48xx.

Unforunately going with a Core i7 will destroy his budget.

You're right.  I wasn't thinking about the price of an i7 mobo.

[Falwell]

Christ, Catalyst is STILL shit? I've been hearing good things about their newest lines and was considering picking one up.

[Trippy]

Based on your budget here's a "reference" system you can use to compare your options.

CPU: Going with a quad-core Core 2 will eat up quiet a bit of your budget. I'd stick with a dual-core for now. You can always upgrade later if you don't mind the uninstall/reinstall process.
$157 Intel Core 2 Duo E7300 Socket LGA775, 2.66 GHz

Motherboard: I'd go with the Intel P45 chipset. ASUS has a wide range of P45 MBs in its P5Q lineup:
$160 Asus P5Q

RAM: 4 GB (2 x 2 GB) DDR2, you can add more later if you want
$88 Corsair XMS2 TWIN2X4096-6400C5

HD: I prefer Western Digital, best blend of performance, power consumption, and quietness
$82 Western Digital Caviar (WD6400AAKS) 640GB SATAII

Video Card: The ATI 4850 (a RV770 GPU) is just out of reach of your budget given everything else (by ~$30) so I'd stick with NVIDA for now:
$155 EVGA e-GeForce 9800GT 512MB (512-P3-N975-AR)

Your case + power supply is another $153.

Total: $795 (not inc. OS, DVD burner, and misc. items)

[Trippy]

Christ, Catalyst is STILL shit? I've been hearing good things about their newest lines and was considering picking one up.

Here's a relatively recent example with Far Cry 2:

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3463&p=6

[Falwell]

Nice, eerily reminiscent of the the problems I had with my 9700 pro like, 5 years ago.

[rattran]

I generally don't upgrade ATI drivers until a few weeks after their release, when any potential problemss have been noticed. So I skipped the 8.11 series entirely, and haven't had any issues.
I've only heard the 300 case on display at Fry's, but it was NOT a quiet case. Swapping out the fans for something quieter than the Antec Tricools would help. Like Scythe s-flex
As for 8GB memory, being able to tell windows swap to fuck itself has been well worth it. I had it set for 16mb for a while for a few games that wouldn't run without a swap, but have it disabled entirely right now.

<edit changed>

Video Card Option: 4850 from Newegg.ca, dunno how the $30USD rebate will apply to Canadia, but it's still listed so should come out close to the $155
$190 (-$30USD rebate) ASUS EAH4850 TOP/HTDI/512M Radeon HD 4850 512MB

[Trippy]

NiX is in Canada.

[rattran]

NiX is in Canada.

That'll teach me to post right after waking. Fixed.

[Segoris]

I think Trippy is spot on with those recomendations. But here are a few alternatives and thoughts:

Alternative with the ram with 4-4-4-12 timings
I've also been hearing really good things from people about G. Skill, but no personal experience with that brand yet. Honestly though, I haven't really seen a truly noticeable difference between 4-4-4-12 and 5-5-5-15, but for a $2 price difference I figured the faster timings would be nice.

For the Mobo, Gigabyte has been great to use in the last couple machines I slapped together. I was an Asus fan for a while until I got 3 DOA boards in a row. But the Gigabyte ep45-DS3R and DS3L models were great and a little cheaper normally then the Asus equals.
Comparison of the 2 Gigabyte boards

I absolutely agree with Trippy on the GPU and the HDD, and for the same reasons.
I've pretty much become a WD fan for HDD, always been a quality product for as long as I can remember. Not a fan of the raptors and I personally think they are not worth the money. Congrats to those with them who can load a zone about 1-2 seconds faster.

For the GPU, I'm currently running with a HD4870 and have yet to have any complaints besides the heating (upped the stock fan from 30% speed to 50% but it's fucking loud now), but for your budget and what it seems you're trying to run, the 9800 series is perfect and does pretty decent even at larger resolutions. No reasons to really go for anything but the 9800 series


Edit: Doh, missed spaced out like a retarded monkey regarding the Canada part. The input is still the same, just different prices

[rattran]

NiX is in Canada.

[Trippy]

[BitWarrior]

Great to hear you're a fellow Canadian, NiX! That being said, I'm going to recommend a company to purchase your supplies from which bears a frighteningly similar name to your own, which hopefully works to score it bonus points:

http://www.ncix.com

I've used them for perhaps 7 years, and they're nothing short of amazing. They're based out of Vancouver.

Not sure if you still want/need more rig advice, but I had an excellent thread along the same topic on my guild forum. It is from September 2008 (well, started), but much of it remains relevant still, especially technical notes regarding things like RAM, CAS timings, shit like that. It can be found here: http://www.ogtguild.com/viewtopic.php?t=3582

One thing to note with NCIX, they ALWAYS have some sort of sale going on, click on the top banner in the middle of the frontpage to check out the various deals going on, you can usually build an entire system out of what you see there.

[Reg]

I'd heard raves here about NCIX as well and I'd fully intended to buy my new PC from them.  I used their PC builder feature and decided exactly what I wanted and then just for fun I got a quote from the PC shop that's half a block from my house. Their quote came in about 50 dollars cheaper than what I would have paid NCIX and I didn't have to pay shipping fees or deal with crappy mail-in rebates.

Maybe the Toronto PC market is just highly competitive or something.

[BitWarrior]

Pro-tip: Don't use their PC builder. You're not getting any of the deals I mentioned in the above post.

[Reg]

Well that makes their PC builder effectively useless then. It was the best part of their site and they aren't technically savvy enough to hook it into their sales pricing?

[Jobu]

For RAM my next machine will most likely have 8 GB. I really really hate the way Windows manages virtual memory so spending some extra money to keep it from swapping is worth it to me. 3D games will easily eat up 1 GB of RAM by themselves. I run Firefox and Opera and both together will eat up 1.5 GB+ of RAM. With the OS itself and other stuff running I'm easily using 3.5+ GB of RAM/virtual memory so even if I had 4 GB of RAM I would still be swapping to disk. If you don't mind the swapping then 4 GB of RAM should be okay unless your Photoshop files are very large.

I recently built a machine, but I'm not going to get involved with the tech talk. But I did go for more RAM for these exact reasons above.... but that all hinges on running a 64 bit OS, right? I was led to believe in my poking around the internet that unless you run Vista 64 (or OSX) anything over ~3.5 gigs is completely ignored by the computer. Running a 64 bit OS will let all your programs see the extra RAM, even though if they are 32 bit programs they can't actually USE all the RAM. Is that right?

[slog]

For RAM my next machine will most likely have 8 GB. I really really hate the way Windows manages virtual memory so spending some extra money to keep it from swapping is worth it to me. 3D games will easily eat up 1 GB of RAM by themselves. I run Firefox and Opera and both together will eat up 1.5 GB+ of RAM. With the OS itself and other stuff running I'm easily using 3.5+ GB of RAM/virtual memory so even if I had 4 GB of RAM I would still be swapping to disk. If you don't mind the swapping then 4 GB of RAM should be okay unless your Photoshop files are very large.

I recently built a machine, but I'm not going to get involved with the tech talk. But I did go for more RAM for these exact reasons above.... but that all hinges on running a 64 bit OS, right? I was led to believe in my poking around the internet that unless you run Vista 64 (or OSX) anything over ~3.5 gigs is completely ignored by the computer. Running a 64 bit OS will let all your programs see the extra RAM, even though if they are 32 bit programs they can't actually USE all the RAM. Is that right?

yes. I run Vista home premium 64 bit with 8 gigs of RAM

[NiX]

So, I've been playing with what you gave me, Trippy and it I've tweaked it to better fit my range. Sadly, I've run into a huge snag, that being the video card you picked is only sold by NewEgg Canada who decided it's ok to charge $40 shipping on a single fucking video card.

Updated setup:

Canada Computers
--------------------------
CPU: $153 Intel Core 2 Duo E7300 Socket LGA775, 2.66 GHz

Motherboard: $160 Asus P5Q

RAM: $86 Corsair XMS2 TWIN2X4096-6400C5

HD: $61 Western Digtial Cavier 320GB SATAII

Video Card: $151 EVGA e-GeForce 9800GT 512MB (512-P3-N975-AR) - Can't find a replacement 9800 anywhere. No one has it in stock.

Case: $70 Antec Three Hundred Gaming Case

Power Supply: $76 Cooler Master 600W

Total: $606 (w/tax $685)

I built close to the exact same system with NCIX, Newegg and Tiger Direct. All of them required shipping which was enough to push the cost too high. Might as well just drive to Canada Computers and buy it there.

[Segoris]

For a few buck more, there is a slightly faster version (650mhz compared to 600mhz) of that 9800 in stock online and in a few stores it appears.

BFG version of the 600mhz 9800GT in stock in a couple of stores, not online

[NiX]

Typically if it says 1, it's not there. General rule of thumb for that chain. Though the 2 in Richmond Hill has promise. I'll have to get my brother to go look.

[Salamok]

CPU: Going with a quad-core Core 2 will eat up quiet a bit of your budget. I'd stick with a dual-core for now. You can always upgrade later if you don't mind the uninstall/reinstall process.
$157 Intel Core 2 Duo E7300 Socket LGA775, 2.66 GHz

Video Card: The ATI 4850 (a RV770 GPU) is just out of reach of your budget given everything else (by ~$30) so I'd stick with NVIDA for now:
$155 EVGA e-GeForce 9800GT 512MB (512-P3-N975-AR)

I just bought the asus flavor of the ATI 4850 for $150 a few weeks ago and the E8400 was $165 (seems like a nice upgrade for an extra $8) is Nix in Canada and is the US vs. Canadian price difference what is throwing these out as options?

[NiX]

I just bought the asus flavor of the ATI 4850 for $150 a few weeks ago and the E8400 was $165 (seems like a nice upgrade for an extra $8) is Nix in Canada and is the US vs. Canadian price difference what is throwing these out as options?

4850 is $190 and the E8400 is $205.

If anyone is looking at that site, the promotional cash price is cash, obviously, or debit/interac.

[Evil Elvis]

Check out the price of the E7300 on newegg.ca in Canadian dollars, and newegg.com in American dollars.

[Segoris]

is Nix in Canada and is the US vs. Canadian price difference what is throwing these out as options?

As was told to me and another...

NiX is in Canada.

You get to inform the next person to quote USD prices of this fact though 

[Segoris]

Typically if it says 1, it's not there. General rule of thumb for that chain. Though the 2 in Richmond Hill has promise. I'll have to get my brother to go look.

By the way, when are you looking to make this purchase? I re-read your first post and realized that if you need to check with your school regarding discounted Vista, that it may be a little while yet. Stock levels today wouldn't mean much is the impression I'm getting, more importantly meaning that the EVGA 600mhz version of the 9800gt may be in stock. But at least now you have some backup versions to look at for the 9800 card.