Ballpoint's New Gaming Rig - Please Advise

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ballpoint

Gawd
Joined
Mar 30, 2006
Messages
917
Hi guys. I'm a full-time independent website designer and hardcore PC Gamer. I like to go for the high end video subsystem, and then the optimal price\performance\upgradeability on other components. The use of the system is production in Flash/Photoshop/Premiere/MAX and 3D gaming at 2560x1600.

My main system was purchased in January 2006. It has gone through a few upgrades and here's how it's currently configured:

CURRENT SYSTEM:
Cooler Master Wave Master
XP Home
ASUS MVP32
AMD X2 4400+ no o\c
4GB OCZ PC3200 Platinum EL (I know about the 32 bit limit.. 3GB is better than 2GB)
160GB WD RAptor o\s and program installs
500GB Barracuda storage
LG Blu-ray drive
LG Multiwriter
Crossfire X1950XTX with X1900XTX
X-fi Platinum
Dell 3007
Logitech Z5500
Logitech diNovo
Logitech G7
(bunch of different gaming and design input devices)

The budget for the new system is $1500, not including the HD4870X2 I've already bought. I've decided to be a little more conservative choosing parts, and perhaps upgrade more often. I'm done with Crossfire, so no need to recommend a Crossfire mobo to me (I realize the 4870X2 runs onboard CrossfireX).

Here is how I've configured it so far:

NEW SYSTEM:
Cooler Master Cosmos
Vista 64 bit Business Edition
Asus P5Q Deluxe
Intel Core 2 Duo Dual Core E8600
Zalman CNPS9700NT CPU cooler
2x2x2048MB OCZ DDR2 PC2-8000 ReaperX HPC (8 GB in 4 slots)
OCZ 750W PC Power & Cooling Silencer 750 Quad Power Supply (ATI Red)
160GB WD Raptor (possibly a Velociraptor depending on how my RMA goes)
+ remaining parts moved over from previous builds (Blu-ray drive, etc.)

The above parts and OS price out at CAN$1501.22

I would love to hear any critiques, red flags, insightful comments about this build and ways it might be improved without blowing the budget too much.
 
-You dont need 8 gb, plus if you plan to overclock, you will be severly hampered.
-What resolution do you play on ?
- Goign to sell old parts? :)
-vista home premium 64 not enough?
- Some people will say your overpayign for the e8600, which you are but its what I would get if i built right now :)
 
8GB allows you to run without a page file. I won't be overclocking because the system is for production as well as gaming, and so it needs to be completely stable. I have 4GB now so it feels like I have to double that for this to really count as an upgrade, lol.

Playing games at 2560x1600.

Not planning to sell any old parts. Will keep old system as a backup box. Already gave the X1900XTX to my sister (she's into Half-Life).

I need Remote Desktop, so that's why I'm going with Business edition.
 
So does 4GB, but you'll get the same or greater benefit as running without a page file if you tweak it to a set, small value, like 1024MB if you have 4GB of RAM. Honestly running the PC without a page file is useless, Windows was designed around having it around even if it's small and some software needs it.

8GB is also useless, it only really has the potential to hurt performance and stability at this time. I'm not saying it will necessarily, but you might have trouble getting your motherboard to like running 4 sticks, and could hinder your max FSB, raise voltage requirements all around, require looser timings, etc
 
Yes, you're right about turning the page file off. I won't be doing that. What I meant to say is that 8GB will virtually eliminate use of the page file. Good for Photoshop and video editing, creating large files, etc.

4 DIMMs of this stuff will run at 1000MHZ in the P5Q at stock settings no problem. Again I'm not OCing so there's no concern about pushing the FSB or lowering timings.
 
Well after some research, it turns out you can't use more than 2 DIMMs of any of OCZ's advanced cooling solution stuff. Neither Flex HLC or Reaper X. Damnit! The shit's too big!

I'm gonna go with 2 sets of OCZ 2 x 2GB PC2-8000

It's so cheap and I often find myself staring at Photoshop waiting for it to do something, so I need all the RAM I can get.
 
For your needs, a fast quadcore would be a better choice (Q9550 or Q9450). Any media encoding will be much faster with a quad core, and if you multi-task as much as my website-designer friends, you'll love the power of a quad.

ballpoint said:
Yes, you're right about turning the page file off. I won't be doing that. What I meant to say is that 8GB will virtually eliminate use of the page file. Good for Photoshop and video editing, creating large files, etc.

4 DIMMs of this stuff will run at 1000MHZ in the P5Q at stock settings no problem. Again I'm not OCing so there's no concern about pushing the FSB or lowering timings.
Click to expand...

With 8GB of RAM, you can turn 4GB of that into RAMDisk, and use said ramdisk for your scratch disk -- MUUUUUUCH faster than any raptor/vraptor-overpriced-pos drive. :p

Heck, if you're livelihood depends on your work, I'd put a RAID5 array in there instead, using a dedicated RAID card instead of a single Raptor + storage drive.

On Intel platforms, running the RAM at a higher ratio than the CPU is virtually useless, even with your system's main usage. Since you're not OC'ing the CPU, you don't need DDR2-1000 RAM, as the system will perform nearly the same with DDR2-667 RAM. Trust me, the 1-2% performance improvement isn't worth buying more expensive RAM.

ballpoint said:
Well after some research, it turns out you can't use more than 2 DIMMs of any of OCZ's advanced cooling solution stuff. Neither Flex HLC or Reaper X. Damnit!
Click to expand...

No need for all that super duper useless fancy cooling for RAM... RAM doesn't get THAT hot, lol.
 
Thanks for the advice. I'm going to stick with the dual core because I don't often multitask enough to stress my system even now, I'd rather have the extra speed for gaming. I want to get the fastest CPU I can afford to minimize bottlenecking on my HD4870X2.

I have to admit to being a bit dense about the relationship between the speed ratings of CPU mobo and RAM. I'll read up on the RAMdisk thing.

RAID has been too complicated up til now, but I will look into that too. Maybe a RAID array of Barracuda 7.11 500GB drives... I already have the hard disks so they're not part of the budget.
 
ballpoint said:
Thanks for the advice. I'm going to stick with the dual core because I don't often multitask enough to stress my system even now, I'd rather have the extra speed for gaming. I want to get the fastest CPU I can afford to minimize bottlenecking on my HD4870X2. ...
Click to expand...

At the resolution you'll be gaming at, you won't be able to tell the difference between a higher clocked dual core and a slower clocked quadcore as long as they're not too far apart from each other. At such high resolutions, you're more GPU bound, and CPU has little effect at that point unless the game was made to take advantage of more than 2 cores (Crysis, SupCom, FSX, etc).

With media encoding, a quadcore can split the job between all 4 cores, so 4 cores that are slightly slower than 2 fast cores will still beat out the 2 faster cores.

Unless you're running synthetic benchmarks all day long, you won't see the difference if your RAM is running at DDR2-1000 or DDR2-667. Even in the benchmarks, the difference is negligible, especially when translated to real world performance.
 
That's awesome guys, thanks. See in all my Googling I never thought to look up "CPU scaling in games"... looks like there really isn't much of a difference between those processors at high resolution, although my one question about that article is they're not exactly using the most blazing fast video card. I'd like to see the same test with my card. Even so, for a few hours I was committed to the quad core... but now I've come back around. Cuz I think I might like to just have the fastest fucking CPU possible for Photoshop and other CPU bound tasks, and damn all the multitasking stuff... I hardly stress the 2 cores on my X2 4400+... if I get a big video encoding project maybe I'll upgrade to four-core, but otherwise the most hardcore multitasking I do is listening to a DVD commentary while I do 3D, Flash, or Photoshop.

Also I will now have a fairly quick fall-back system to do larger 3D renders and stuff, instead of trying to multitask around it.
 
Some tweaks to memory, and CPU cooler. Turns out I think I would like to try some overclocking to squeeze the potential out of the 4870X2 in all scenarios. Took HD out of the list because I'll either use the RMA'd Raptor drive, unlikely at this point, or buy a cheap Caviar or Barracuda and possibly upgrade if the RMA eventually comes back as a Velociraptor. Definitely not going to do RAID5 after some of the horror stories I've read. I'd rather use a single fast drive and not deal with the drivers, power, noise, space, and heat problems.

NEW SYSTEM:
Cooler Master Cosmos
Vista 64 bit Home Premium
Asus P5Q Deluxe
Intel Core 2 Duo Dual Core E8600
Cooler Master Hyper Z600 CPU cooler
2x2048MB OCZ DDR2 PC2-8500 ReaperX HPC 1066
OCZ 750W PC Power & Cooling Silencer 750 Quad Power Supply (ATI Red)
+ remaining parts moved over from previous builds (Blu-ray drive, display and speakers, etc.)

The above parts and OS price out through my system builder, including build fee with warranty, at CAN$1333. I expect to see framerates stable
 
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