Please help build a gaming rig

C

Commander FAT

2[H]4U
Joined
Nov 23, 2000
Messages
3,565
Been out of the PC scene for many years. So long I don't even know what my long time dead PC is built out of.

I think it's one generation after the Pentium 3s.

Anyways....

1) What will you be doing with this PC?
Gaming, gaming, more games, and on days I don't game I'll be gaming. No real need for a CD/DVD burner (unless it's uber cheap) and definitely no need for Blue Ray. Games only, no movie watching, music playing, emailing etc. Getting ready for a couple current games, Company of Heroes, Warhammer 40K, as well as several games next year, Diablo 3, Star Wars The Old Republic, Bad Company 2, maybe the new Alien vs. Predator. Bad Company 2 is an important one. I want to be able to really crank up the eye candy and still be very playable online.
2) What's your budget?
It's a bit open ended. Help me see what's available and I'll decide if I can/want to swing it. But as a guide let's start with $1,000. Depending on what I can get I may bump it up.
3) Where do you live?
Chicago burbs
4) What exact parts do you need for that budget?
Everything minus the case. I'm starting from scratch.
5) If reusing any parts, what parts will you be reusing? Please be especially specific about the power supply. List make and model.
All I have is my Supermicro SC760A full tower ATX case. LOTS of room. HUGE. I could probably fit a baby inside it, maybe two. Everything inside it is old and like I mentioned the damn thing doesn't even boot up anymore.
6) Will you be overclocking? I would rather not have to deal with the headaches unless it's super easy. Anyone remember breaking and connecting those damn bridges on the old AMD chips? If overclocking is anything like that forget it.
7) What size monitor do you have and/or plan to have?
I'd like a good size monitor. Widescreen, 23, 24, 25 inches? Something good for games. I don't see a need for multiple displays.
8) When do you plan on building/buying the PC?
Within the next month or so.
9) What features do you need in a motherboard? RAID? Firewire? Crossfire or SLI support? etc.
I'd like to do a simple RAID set up to help speed up load times. I've seen other builds on here and I don't think I want the expense of solid state drives. I'm not sure what Crossfire and SLI is. Is that connecting multiple video cards together like the old Voodoo 2s? How much would that be and how much of a benefit will I get? I won't need a vast amount of storage space as I'll be using my laptop for email and music. I'd rather have fast hard drives over ample space Also I probably won't need a CD burner, DVD or otherwise (unless it's super cheap). Definitely no need for Blue Ray. I would like the flexibility of adding a sound card later on if I don't like the onboard sound as well as running dual video cards. Also, I'd like to have surround sound on speakers or headphones. I know some sound cards nowadays have optical audio output. I want something equivalent to how the Xbox 360 and PS3 do it.
10) Do you already have a legit and reusable/transferable OS key/license?
Nope. I'll need a copy of Windows. I hate Vista so probably Windows 7 basic edition unless there is a benefit in going to a higher version. I'm attending college right now so maybe I can get a student discount somewhere.

Wow that's a lot of shit I typed. Hope it all makes sense!

Thanks!
 
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$205 - AMD Phenom II X3 720 CPU + ASUS M4A785TD-M EVO AM3 AMD 785G HDMI mATX Motherboard
$94 - G.Skill Ripjaw Series F3-12800CL9D-4GBRL 2 x 2GB DDR3 1600 RAM
$300 - Sapphire 100282SR Radeon HD 5850 1GB PCI-E Video Card
$110 - 2 x Samsung Spinpoint F3 HD502HJ 500GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive RAID 0
$30 - LG GH22NS50 DVD Burner
$80 - Antec Earthwatts 650W PSU
$105 - Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit OEM
$170 - Acer P235Hbmid Black 23" Widescreen LCD Monitor
---
Total: $1094 plus tax and shipping. Reuse your old case if you can.

The HD 5850 is more than enough for 24" monitor. The 24" monitor should give you quite a view for gaming. The Samsung, while OOS right now, should be in stock when you buy. Those Samsungs are some of the fastest hard drives out there, just as fast as Velociraptors drives actually. You cannot buy Windows 7 Home Basic by itself. Even it would, I would not recommend anyone to buy it since it's just a stripped down and gutted version of Windows 7 that does not represent Windows 7 at well.
 
Thanks for the info.

Is that video card and motherboard something I can go dual with down the road? I only see the one slot on the mobo.

Are dual cards even worth the expense?

Is it worth the money to go for a faster CPU, like the Phenom II X4?
 
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Commander FAT said:
Thanks for the info.

Is that video card and motherboard something I can go dual with down the road? I only see the one slot on the mobo.

Are dual cards even worth the expense?

Is it worth the money to go for a faster CPU, like the Phenom II X4?
Click to expand...

no you cannot put a CrossFire configuration on that board, it only has a single PCIe slot

its only worth the expense if you've got a very high resolution display or want some vendor specific eyecandy (like 3DVision, Eyefinity, SLI-AA, Edge Detect AA, etc)

as far as a faster CPU, it makes relatively no difference at the resolution you're going to be playing at (1920x1080), so I'd stick with the X3 unless you're gonna break that deal up for a new motherboard, in which case, yeah an X4 would have advantages outside of gaming (video encoding, audio encoding, heavy image manipulation work, CAD/CAM rendering, sci/viz computing, compiling, basically anything that can take advantage of multi-threaded execution)

if you want multi-GPU rendering, from AMD that'll be CrossFire, supported by AMD and Intel chipsets, something like this:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131368

from nVidia that'll be SLI, supported by nVidia and SELECT ULi and Intel chipsets (ULI M1685 and 1687 and Intel D5400XS and X58), something like this:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813141010

honestly I'd probably go with Danny's build, a 5850 is quite fast

also
Diablo 3 is not a 2010 release game, it has no set release date, although speculation currently is towards mid/late 2011 at the earliest, so trying to build something compatible with that is somewhat unrealistic
 
depending on the screen resolution dual cards can some times be better from what I get, but in general it's not worth it unless you're using two of the high-end cards, and even then, scaling isn't normally anywhere near +100% unless you do some work. I'm still new to this, so if others have better advice on the matter take it, lol.

beaten to the punch with better advice, lol.
 
Leon_Solitario said:
depending on the screen resolution dual cards can some times be better from what I get, but in general it's not worth it unless you're using two of the high-end cards, and even then, scaling isn't normally anywhere near +100% unless you do some work. I'm still new to this, so if others have better advice on the matter take it, lol.

beaten to the punch with better advice, lol.
Click to expand...

it will never be +100% (aka: 2x), refer to:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl's_law

for an explanation

nVidia, AMD, and S3 have shown in-house data (thats been verified by a number of 3rd party sources like anand and [H]) which support average scaling to be something like 1.65x to 1.70x, with the absolute *best* case scenario being something in the realm of 1.90x and the *worst* case scenario being something in the realm of 0.30x (yes, actually worse than a single processor), generally these extremes are rare

two things worth noting:
if a single processor is enough for the task at hand, the extra performance is wasted (look at benchmarks for twin 4870X2's), unless some vendor specific toys are used (like Edge Detect AA on quad 4870, its almost "free" in 24x mode, whereas with a single card you can expect around a 90% performance hit)

if a single processor is not enough for the task at hand (for example if it cannot handle the chosen game), two or more processors will not improve this

some numbers to give bearing:
say you've got your BitBoys Oy! 3D Blaze and it gets 60 FPS in DNF at 1920x1200, so you decide that you'd like some more performance, and buy another card, you'll probably get somewhere around 90-110 FPS

however, if instead you're playing Van Buren at 1920x1200, and your 3D Blaze only gets 10 FPS, so you buy another card, thinking ok, we'll solve this, well, you're probably gonna get between 15 and 18 FPS....still basically unplayable

the only exception to the above is if the application will run, but doesn't run as smoothly as you'd like, or with the settings you'd like, for example say DNF will run at 2560x1600 at 35 FPS with AA off, if you add that second 3D Blaze in, you'll very likely be able to enable AA and other widgets, and have a more stable frame-rate
 
obobski said:
...
its only worth the expense if you've got a very high resolution display or want some vendor specific eyecandy (like 3DVision, Eyefinity, SLI-AA, Edge Detect AA, etc)

as far as a faster CPU, it makes relatively no difference at the resolution you're going to be playing at (1920x1080), ...
Click to expand...

I just watched Kyle's EyeInfinity review video and I am amazed by it. I want it.

Is this a case where a faster CPU will be beneficial? I know Crossfirex cards will be beneficial when ATI fixes the support for it.

Other than the number of PCI Express slots what are some of the main differences between these two boards that were recommended. I see the dual PCIe board has only DDR2 memory while the other has DDR3. Is that going to be a considerable performance hit on gaming?

ASUS M4A78-E AM2+/AM3 AMD 790GX HDMI ATX AMD Motherboard
ASUS M4A785TD-M EVO AM3 AMD 785G HDMI Micro ATX AMD Motherboard


If I want to go Crossfirex down the road it looks like this is identical to the original one recommended by Danny Bui

ASUS M4A785TD-V EVO AM3 AMD 785G HDMI ATX AMD Motherboard - Retail


Also, why choose this particular chipset versus the others available?

North Bridge AMD 785G
South Bridge AMD SB710

You guys are really helping, thanks!
 
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You'll see no noticeable performance difference between DDR2 and DDR3 RAM. However, the prices between the two are such that we can't really recommend DDR2 RAM for most builds. The long story short is that DDR2 RAM, as the older technology, will become more scarce and more expensive over time while DDR3 RAM, the newer technology, will become more plentiful and less expensive (in comparison).
 
DDR2 vs DDR3 has no impact on real-world performance, and I'll be honest I just grabbed the two first results on newegg for 2x PCIe, one for AMD and one for nVidia

Eyefinity requires a Radeon HD 5000 series card, and may or may not be worthwile, my thoughts:
http://www.hardforum.com/showpost.php?p=1035095611&postcount=8

in order to do Eyefinity do consider that you need three monitors that will connect to your HD 5800, which means DisplayPort for at least one of them

CrossFire X works just fine, Eyefinity is supported to a decent degree, will likely improve quickly:
http://www.anandtech.com/weblog/showpost.aspx?i=662


you'll easily blow your budget just buying monitors and the graphics adapter, let alone the rest of the system though
 
Refreshingly simple. Some things to consider, since your budget is flexible:

$30 Windows 7 Professional (student deal @ win741 doot coom) - read forums for instructions on making a fresh install with this, and getting the professional rather than home premium edition

$310 Hans-G HG-281DPB 28" TN-panel LCD - Both "Nothing but gaming" and "Only want 1 monitor" suggest a cheap, fast TN panel LCD. This is one of the better bargains - the biggest screen you can get anywhere near this cheaply.

$90 CORSAIR CMPSU-750TX 750W - currently one of the more popular/reliable PSUs. The Earthwatts line was formerly very high quality, but when they refreshed it and added the 650w version they apparently cheaped out on the parts

Stick with 4 or 6GB of memory - more is not needed at this juncture for gaming, less is not recommended if you want to run windows 7 and the next few years of games.

Motherboard-integrated soundcards have pretty much taken the place of dedicated ones for 95% of gamers, with vast increases in quality in the last decade.

Load times for games are no longer particularly dependent on hard drive speed. Unless you have a really good backup solution, I don't recommend RAID 0 - it's not worth doubling your risk of a drive failure. High transfer rate SSDs are well out of your budget, unfortunately. Smaller SSDs that do extremely well with latency aren't very helpful in gaming, to my knowledge. If you are going to be picking up a lot of modern games, I would recommend a larger hard drive, though. Installs can run 20GB or more on some of these games.

I would not consider Nvidia right now - they're two years into a three-year engineering rut, and it's become very clear that their cards are not competitive right now. Crossfire is indeed like the old Voodoo cards, and we've even seen the Voodoo4-style multi-GPU cards make a comeback.

There are great bargains to be had in this price sector in the last generation of AMD video cards with the 4850x2 and 4870x2, but if you're responsible for them you'll pay back some of what you saved in power bills, and they're missing dx11, which will become important a year or two down the line. They also won't scale quite as well for Crossfire. Crossfire on modern games with the 5x00 series typically increases benchmark framerates by 50%, but there is a LOT of variability. Going from the 5850 to the 5870 represents about a 20% increase in performance, going from the 5850 to the 5970 (dual gpu card) is about a roughly 50% increase, since it uses Crossfire.

The gold standard for "enough" for current games is unfortunately still a two-year old benchmark-friendly game called Crysis, which the developers decided to make so complex graphically that it could barely be run on current hardware. It takes a 5970 at $600 to consistently get 60fps at max settings at 1920x1200 - or perhaps even more (3x 5850?) if your processor isn't up to snuff.
 
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Squalish said:
I would not consider Nvidia right now - they're two years into a three-year engineering rut, and it's become very clear that their cards are not competitive right now.
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not competitive? they're doing pretty well, unless we're gonna drag the whole DirectX11 whining out again

new products are expected within a quarter

There are great bargains to be had in this price sector in the last generation of AMD video cards with the 4850x2 and 4870x2, but if you're responsible for them you'll pay back whatever you saved in power bills, and they're missing dx11, which will become important a year or two down the line. They also won't scale quite as well for Crossfire.
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scaling is just fine for Radeon HD 4k

power argument is fluffy, see here:
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/display/radeon-hd5970_5.html#sect0

either way you're downing a considerable amount of juice, I'm not saying get a 4870X2 over a 5870, but neither choice is going to "go green" or "save the planet", if thats the real goal, unplug the computer

DX11 argument more or less invalid, two years from now I'll honestly be surprised if 5890 can hold its own, let alone 5750 or 5770 (which can already be maxed out with DirectX 9 titles), API support does not guarantee "future proofing"

The gold standard for "enough" for current games is unfortunately still a two-year old benchmark-friendly game called Crysis, which the developers decided to make so complex graphically that it could barely be run on current hardware. It takes a 5970 at $600 to consistently get 60fps at max settings at 1920x1200 - or perhaps even more (3x 5850?) if your processor isn't up to snuff.
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its a poorly written piece of code (there are newer titles that will run fully maxed on a single 5850 into higher resolution, and look pretty good while doing it) and brings me to an interesting point:

of the titles OP listed:
Diablo 3 - N/A, doesn't exist as a beta, no release date, etc (estimated 2 years out, wouldn't bank on being able to futureproof)
Bad Company 2 - N/A, unreleased, expect March 2010
Star Wars Old Republic - N/A, unreleased, no testing date announced, but its an MMO so expect it to support a WIDE range of hardware (this one I wouldn't worry about)

basically, its all speculative for unreleased games, can't really tell you how a system will perform under those conditions
in modern games, the 5850 is more than sufficient by itself, especially for a 1920x1080 monitor, if you're running somewhat older titles, less performance is needed

SO, here's what I'm gonna tell you:
shelve this idea
come back to it when the games you want to play are released, so you know what kind of performance you need, and how much money you need to spend to get there (or if there's a case like Crysis...)
otherwise its like pissing into the wind and hoping you don't get wet

squalish:
I think you meant Voodoo 5
and ATi's solution is closer to this:
http://hothardware.com/reviews/images/MAXX/rage_fury_maxx_board.jpg
than V5
 
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Nvidia has plenty of cash onhand from years of being the GPU leader & their wildly successful 8800 series & subsequent 8800-based series - they'll spring back eventually, but their cards right now just can't match up with cheaper AMD offerings. Nvidia Tesla is being aimed not at gamers, but at workstations - and even that product has been scaled back in features recently. For the purposes of recommending rigs right now, a somewhat competitive product in three months isn't something I bother debating.

Clarification: The 4800 series won't scale quite as high simply because it takes more of them to equal the same performance. More cards - more problems. It's still damn cheap to get a dual 4800 given how well it does on dx10 games(often better than the 5870).

Eyefinity can get very expensive very quickly - one thing leads to another, and you've spent more on monitors than the rest of your rig. So far, 3 same-resolution screens in portrait or landscape is all that's possible. TN LCD panels, which are cheap, plentiful, and fast, have some problems with off-angle viewing in portrait mode, but the fix is LCDs which are 2-3x as expensive. My personal wish is for 5x1 portrait on 24" IPS panels, based on the soon-to-be-released HD5870 Eyefinity6 edition.

The i5/i7 line is certainly considerably faster than the Phenom II line, but AMD's motherboards and CPUs are quite a lot cheaper than the $300/cpu, $150-$250/mobo Intel choice - putting that money into better video cards often pays off if gaming is your only priority. For the authoritative take on this, see xbit labs.

Regarding Crysis: Your "buggy code" is someone else's "freedom fighter". Crysis is perhaps 'less optimized than preferable' or 'not incorporating all the performance tricks the coders have learned since', but software errors do not equate to design decisions like "Let's put them into a jungle and model every leaf individually". It became a standard, that's all I'm sayin'.

PS: Yup, voodoo5.
 
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Squalish said:
Nvidia has plenty of cash onhand from years of being the GPU leader & their wildly successful 8800 series & subsequent 8800-based series - they'll spring back eventually, but their cards right now just can't match up with cheaper AMD offerings. Nvidia Tesla is being aimed not at gamers, but at workstations - and even that product has been scaled back in features recently. For the purposes of recommending rigs right now, a somewhat competitive product in three months isn't something I bother debating.
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read the rest of my post, none of the games he's looking at are available today, three months out its another story, nVidia can come back onto the table

as far as today, for the money, for games that exist today, nVidia is just fine (this assumes you can still buy a GTS 250 for ~$120 and a GTX 275 for ~$220, if this has changed then nvm)

and I'm not referencing Tesla (its not even a graphics adapter, its a GPGPU compute acceleration card)

and unless something has changed in the last eight months, their primary sources of cash are mobile/embedded devices, and workstation/professional markets, not consumer GPUs

Clarification: The 4800 series won't scale quite as high simply because it takes more of them to equal the same performance. More cards - more problems. It's still damn cheap to get a dual 4800 given how well it does on dx10 games(often better than the 5870).
Click to expand...

so you're saying it scales "poorly" because per chip, its slower than Radeon HD 5---, that isn't the same concept, scaling performance is "how much % do I get from adding this chip", for example if you pair two 4870's together, its about +1.70x, same is true for two 5870's, the fact that the pair of 5870's is much faster doesn't mean anything in terms of that comparison

and the scaling numbers hold up pretty well to three and four processors from both camps, as long as theres data for them to process

Eyefinity can get very expensive very quickly - one thing leads to another, and you've spent more on monitors than the rest of your rig. So far, 3 same-resolution screens in portrait or landscape is all that's possible. TN LCD panels, which are cheap, plentiful, and fast, have some problems with off-angle viewing in portrait mode, but the fix is LCDs which are 2-3x as expensive. My personal wish is for 5x1 portrait on 24" IPS panels, based on the soon-to-be-released HD5870 Eyefinity6 edition.
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I don't think thats just your wish :cool:

only concern would be, can a single 5870 actually handle 6x 1920x1200 with any decently respectable AA settings and a modern game, I'm thinking not

Your "buggy code" is someone else's "freedom fighter". Crysis is perhaps 'less optimized than preferable' or 'not incorporating all the performance tricks the coders have learned since', but software errors do not equate to design decisions like "Let's put them into a jungle and model every leaf individually". It became a standard, that's all I'm sayin'.
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yeah, I know, I still think its about an unrealistic representation of a "standard" as futuremark, so what if it runs it, it doesn't reflect realworld scenarios

for example, a 5870 or a 4870X2 or a 5850 or a GTX 285 (etc) can run most modern DX9 (and those rare DX10) titles fully maxed into a 2560x1600 display, at between 30 and 80 FPS, none of those boards can approach that with Crysis

so in that sense, yes, its bad code, so what if it compiles and is stable, if it doesn't run its still worthless
 
Thanks everyone for all the tips.

I understand some of the games I posted are not quite out yet but there are still a few games I want to play now. Some new, some older.

Company of Heroes,
Warhammer 40K DOW 2
COD MW2 and World at War
I even have a hankering to pick up Homeworld 2.

With that said I would still like to build a new rig soon/now.

I understand three monitors and a second card blows my initial budget out of the water but the $1000 was just a starting point. Once I saw Kyle's EyeInfinity review video I decided I have to have it. I really want to play Bad Company 2 on three monitors. He linked to some Dell 22" and 23" displays and they are about $200 a piece. $600 for displays is not totally out of the question.

I guess for simplicity sake I will stick with DDR3

As for that $30 Windows 7 deal it looks like it's for an upgrade version. I'd rather not have to read a third party forums to turn it into a fresh install. I'd rather just keep it simple and get a full version copy, pop it in, install, done. I have very little patience and am willing to pay to make things even a little more simple. It's an expensive personal characteristic. :(

Onto RAID0. Sounds like no point in doing a RAID0 set up? Would I benefit more from taking the time to overclock what I would already have?

Onto overclocking. What's entailed in overclocking the current Phenom 2 chips? If it's easy and all done from either a Windows app or from the BIOS I would probably be up for it.

Onto motherboards. The original board recommended was ASUS M4A785TD-M EVO AM3 AMD 785G HDMI Micro ATX AMD Motherboard . It looks like this board, ASUS M4A78-E AM2+/AM3 AMD 790GX HDMI ATX AMD Motherboard , is identical except for the amount of PCI Express slots. Are there other boards I should look at for what I want to do? I want the flexibility of doing Crossfirex down the road and overclocking the system. Maybe a different north and south bridges entirely?

So how about this. Get a motherboard capable of Crossfirex video cards. Maybe just get one card now and get the second card and other two displays down the road in a few months? By then the prices would drop a little more and be a bit less expensive. Forget RAID, overclock what I would have.

Thanks again and hope your holidays are good!

dave
 
FYI, the OEM version of Windows 7 Home Premium is about $105 at NewEgg.

The risk of RAID 0 is that one bad drive causes you to lose all of your data. RAID, in general, is not a back-up solution. If you believe that the increased performance from a RAID 0 array is worth the risk, and you have a spare HDD available for backups, then go ahead and pursue it.

There are plenty of guides available on how to overclock Phenom II processors. I recommend, however, that you buy a good CPU cooler like the Cooler Master Hyper 212 Plus before you start overclocking. IIRC, the M4A78-E is a good board, but go with something that supports DDR3 RAM, like the Gigabyte GA-MA790GPT-UD3H.

CrossFire is generally a bad move if you aren't going to buy both cards right away. The long story short is that unless you deal with high resolutions (above 1920x1200), it's easier and more practical to deal with one video card than two or three. Plus, if you were to, say, go for an HD5870, you could recoup some of the costs by selling your old card. Or, by the time that you planned on buying that second card, there could be new cards that outperform that card for the same price range. If you're going to wait more than three months to buy the second card, I recommend waiting until a newer, better card arrives, and then replacing your current card with the new one.
 
tiraides said:
There are plenty of guides available on how to overclock Phenom II processors. I recommend, however, that you buy a good CPU cooler like the Cooler Master Hyper 212 Plus before you start overclocking. IIRC, the M4A78-E is a good board, but go with something that supports DDR3 RAM, like the Gigabyte GA-MA790GPT-UD3H.

CrossFire is generally a bad move if you aren't going to buy both cards right away. The long story short is that unless you deal with high resolutions (above 1920x1200), it's easier and more practical to deal with one video card than two or three. Plus, if you were to, say, go for an HD5870, you could recoup some of the costs by selling your old card. Or, by the time that you planned on buying that second card, there could be new cards that outperform that card for the same price range. If you're going to wait more than three months to buy the second card, I recommend waiting until a newer, better card arrives, and then replacing your current card with the new one.
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Oops. I posted the wrong board. I meant to compare this one.


ASUS M4A785TD-V EVO AM3 AMD 785G HDMI ATX AMD Motherboard - Retail

and not the M4A78-E that does DDR2

Makes sense to wait until Bad Company 2 comes out then do a EyeInfinity solution.
 
The "pencil trick" is long dead, though its legacy lives on. Motherboard makers realized that people would pay to be able to do it in the BIOS, CPU makers realized that they were never going to get hardcore overclocking enthusiasts to pay for a CPU at stock clocks - they still sell gamers $1000 chips, but it's either people with more money than interest or competitive people who want to pour liquid nitrogen on them. AMD's "Black Edition" CPUs even have some of the multipliers completely unlocked for easier OCing. At this point, plenty of motherboards also integrate 1-click auto-overclocking features, but most people still do it manually. The i5/i7 will max out at a little under 4ghz with enough overvoltage, a solid 50% overclock for the entry level chips. The Phenom IIs will start a little higher and end up a little lower, but you'll still likely get at least 20-40%. You may not see too much difference in real-world gaming results (again, see above scaling comparison) on low-framerate scenes, but most of us do it using the BIOS features anyhow.
 
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I recommend that you check out a TN panel turned to portrait in person and try watching it a little off-center, as you would in an Eyefinity setup. If it's tolerable to you, then great. If not, then your most popular/cheap next step up is currently the EA231WMi - though that recommendation is likely to change once some of next year's monitors get announced at CES in early January.
 
I'm guessing for gaming and dual cards I'll be much better off if I get a board that can do at least 8x on both slots?

Seems like performance boost between 16x and 8x is pretty slim.
 
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For CrossFire/SLI, you want a board capable of at least dual x8, which indicate the maximum bandwidth available for each card. Boards with dual x16 CF/SLI are available, but they tend to be very expensive.
 
Any reason to stick with AMD over Intel? The MSI P55-GD65 looks to be really sweet and got a good review but a CPU at a comparable speed is $200 versus an AMD at $125.
 
More bang for the buck is the reason to stick with AMD over Intel. Most of the games that you're going to play are largely GPU-driven, so you wouldn't gain a huge performance boost from an Intel-based system (compared to an AMD-based one). Considering all of the (listed) wants and needs, a AMD processor and board would free up money you could use for other, better components.
 
After doing lots of reading online and all the comments in here I think I'm going to go with a 790FX board to facilitate dual 16x video cards in the near future (when Bad COmpany 2 comes out).

I can't decide on which of these three to get:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...3047,4944:34969,4944:36126,4944:34970&bop=And

I would like to overclock since from what I've read it's pretty painless.

Reports of poor overclocking (in HardOCP's review) on the MSI 790FX-GD70 made me decide against it.
 
Wait, so you are planning on buying two cards right from the get go correct?
 
No getting one now, then either a second one down the road or upgrade to two new ones down the road.
 
CrossFire works best if you buy two cards and use them right away. If you decide to wait, say, six months after the purchase of your first card, oftentimes, there will be a newer, cheaper, better video card available.

Get the board if you truly want it, but I recommend treating CF as a now-or-never proposition. Most people that I know of who say they're considering using CF either buy both cards immediately or forget about using it several months down the road.
 
tiraides said:
CrossFire works best if you buy two cards and use them right away. If you decide to wait, say, six months after the purchase of your first card, oftentimes, there will be a newer, cheaper, better video card available.
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One of my plans was to upgrade to two new cards down the road.

What do you guys think about those three boards I compared on NewEgg?
 
Commander FAT said:
One of my plans was to upgrade to two new cards down the road.

What do you guys think about those three boards I compared on NewEgg?
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Still a very odd plan. Most people who buy Crossfire or SLI capable motherboards rarely do that: upgrade to two new cards down the road. It's only the more performance hungry and starving hardcore enthusiast that does that. In addition, it's been shown in that a multi-GPU setup, Intel's Core i7/X58 setup provides significantly more performance over other CPU+CF/SLI capable mobo setups.

As for the motherboards, you really can't go wrong with any of those motherboards. Same features, similar quality, similar performance, etc.
 
How soon down the road? If you're going to wait over three months, you might as well wait until the next high-end cards arrives and replace your current card with one of them.

The Gigabyte board has three PCI-E x16 slots, two SATA 6GB/s ports, and USB 3.0. The Asus M4A79T Deluxe has four PCI-E x16 slots. The Asus Crosshairs III Formula has X-Fi audio. Which one has the features that you need?
 
tiraides said:
How soon down the road? If you're going to wait over three months, you might as well wait until the next high-end cards arrives and replace your current card with one of them.

The Gigabyte board has three PCI-E x16 slots, two SATA 6GB/s ports, and USB 3.0. The Asus M4A79T Deluxe has four PCI-E x16 slots. The Asus Crosshairs III Formula has X-Fi audio. Which one has the features that you need?
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I would buy one card now to play current games. Then when BC2 comes out I would replace that one card with two new up to date cards.

As for Intel vs. AMD it looks like AMD is not quite as expensive as Intel. What's the current chipset that's comprable to the 790FX by AMD?
 
Intel's Socket 1156 processors currently run on boards with the Intel P55 chipset. Good P55 boards run between $130-$180. The Phenom II processors actually compete with Intel's Socket 775 Core 2 processors; but all Intel Socket 775 board and processors have reached EOL status, making them bad choices for future upgrades.

The release date for Battlefield: Bad Company 2 is March 2, 2010. If you were to buy an HD5850 or HD5870 now (assuming that you'll be gaming on a 1920x1080 or 1920x1200 resolution), I'm sure that either card would be more than good enough (on its own) for that particular game.
 
no

corsair 750tx
CORSAIR 850TX
SeaSonic M12D

The seasonic is a better PSU then the corsair
 
I think I've settled on what I want. All that's left is picking out a monitor and deciding what video card to get now. Do I buy a Radeon 5850 now and a second one down the road when BFBC2 comes (keeping in mind I'd like to do EyeInfinity as well) out or buy a cheaper Radeon 5750 now and then get two of whatever is new at the time BC2 comes out.

$314 - AMD Phenom II X3 720 CPU + ASUS M4A79T Deluxe AM3 DDR3 AMD 790FX ATX AMD Motherboard - Retail
$94 - G.Skill Ripjaw Series F3-12800CL9D-4GBRL 2 x 2GB DDR3 1600 RAM
$140 - SAPPHIRE 100284L Radeon HD 5750 1GB 128-bit
$110 - 1 x Samsung Spinpoint F3 HD502HJ 500GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive
$19 - SONY Black 18X DVD-ROM 48X CD-ROM SATA DVD-ROM Drive Model DDU1681S-0B - OEM
$80 - Antec Earthwatts 650W PSU
$105 - Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit OEM
 
That board doesn't support dual 16x. I'd like to take advantage of that for doing Crossfire with Eyeinfinity. I figure the increased resolution will make good use of the extra bandwidth?
 
Commander FAT said:
Do I buy a Radeon 5850 now and a second one down the road when BFBC2 comes (keeping in mind I'd like to do EyeInfinity as well) out or buy a cheaper Radeon 5750 now and then get two of whatever is new at the time BC2 comes out.
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Commander FAT said:
That board doesn't support dual 16x. I'd like to take advantage of that for doing Crossfire with Eyeinfinity. I figure the increased resolution will make good use of the extra bandwidth?
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Well first of all one issue you've forgotten: Eyefinity does not support Crossfire. So it's a one or the other kind of thing right now: Do you want Eyefinity or do you want Crossfire?

In addition, there has been very very little proof showing any actual performance increase in x16/x16 CF/SLI over x8/x8 CF/SLI
 
ATI just released a Catalyst driver udpate, it's a beta i believe, that allows Crossfire usage with Eyeinfinity. I'm sure full support is on the way.

I'm beginning to second think the benefits versus cost of dual 16x. I found a good article on techpowerup.com and the benefits were something like 1% to 5% increases. That translates into only a few frames per second, some cases even less.

Here's the article.
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/AMD/HD_5870_PCI-Express_Scaling/1.html

I'm gonna rethink my build.
 
Commander FAT said:
ATI just released a Catalyst driver udpate, it's a beta i believe, that allows Crossfire usage with Eyeinfinity. I'm sure full support is on the way.

I'm beginning to second think the benefits versus cost of dual 16x. I found a good article on techpowerup.com and the benefits were something like 1% to 5% increases. That translates into only a few frames per second, some cases even less.

Here's the article.
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/AMD/HD_5870_PCI-Express_Scaling/1.html

I'm gonna rethink my build.
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Huh, didn't know about the beta drive update.

Yeah rethink your build. As it stands now, it's very flimsy planned build IMO.
 
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