Some folks at a flightsim forum advised me to run my questions by several hardware forums, you being one of them. I want to buy, or have built, a computer to play several different games. Flight Simulator X is one but would like to try my hand at some of the ones I've read that are used in benchmark testing (Crysis, Left4Dead, Far Cry) and some new ones (Mass Effect2, Batman, Resient Evil). Want a machine that provides smooth gameplay with the the visual enhancements turned up. Budget is no problem. I'm looking at a Dell with either an i7-860 or i7-920 and ATI 5770 or 5870. HP offers the same CPUs with an ATI 4850 or GTX 260. Tried unsucessfully to find the manufacturer and model number for the motherboards, hard drives and PSU's that Dell and HP use. (Should I be concerned about these components and what brands they use in their computers?) I don't plan to overclock: I don't trust myself, and neither Dell/HP or the two outfits that build computers locally will do it. Would appreciate yout thoughts and advice on buying versus having it built, and the Dell and HP systems.
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Totally undun
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Dell, HP, and other OEMs use components from the same manufacturers that we do. HP, I believe, uses Asus motherboards (but built specifically to HP's specs). My last Dell had a Foxconn motherboard in it. But I've seen Intel manufactured motherboards in them as well.
Hard drives vary between systems. I've seen Seagate, Samsung, WD, and Hitatchi in the various pre-built systems I've worked on. Mostly WD
PSU's are where pre-builts usually fall on their face where components are concerned. A lot of times they'll use cheap quality and sometimes dangerous (to the system, not necessarily you) PSU. And they're typically not capable of powering much more than what came with the system.
Hard drives vary between systems. I've seen Seagate, Samsung, WD, and Hitatchi in the various pre-built systems I've worked on. Mostly WD
PSU's are where pre-builts usually fall on their face where components are concerned. A lot of times they'll use cheap quality and sometimes dangerous (to the system, not necessarily you) PSU. And they're typically not capable of powering much more than what came with the system.
Thanks Ryan
I'm not very knowledgeable about computers, so have been learning by reading lots of reviews of computer hardware available online as well as posts on various forums (so I have only a very basic understanding of the various components). So, if I buy from Dell, I'm looking at an i7-920, Win7 Pro, 8 GB DDR3 Tri-channel SDRAM, a TB hard drive (it's 7200 RPM SATA but no idea if it supports 3 GB/s or how large the cache is), CD/DVD combo, ATI 5770, 23" monitor (ST2310) and 3 years of tech support for a tad over $1,800 plus shipping. Per your comments, I may want to replace the PSU with one at 750W, so that will be added on. And for an extra $150, can upgrade to an ATI 5870.
Should this take care of the gameplay I want or should I look at a gaming computer company or have one built. All comments are welcome!
I'm not very knowledgeable about computers, so have been learning by reading lots of reviews of computer hardware available online as well as posts on various forums (so I have only a very basic understanding of the various components). So, if I buy from Dell, I'm looking at an i7-920, Win7 Pro, 8 GB DDR3 Tri-channel SDRAM, a TB hard drive (it's 7200 RPM SATA but no idea if it supports 3 GB/s or how large the cache is), CD/DVD combo, ATI 5770, 23" monitor (ST2310) and 3 years of tech support for a tad over $1,800 plus shipping. Per your comments, I may want to replace the PSU with one at 750W, so that will be added on. And for an extra $150, can upgrade to an ATI 5870.
Should this take care of the gameplay I want or should I look at a gaming computer company or have one built. All comments are welcome!
Shadowssong
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8gb of triple channel makes no sense... I hate OEM ram choices, triple channel comes in 3's, you get 3gb, 6gb, 9gb or 12gb, not 8.. stupid dell... You definitely want to stick with the i7 as flight sim is extremely cpu dependent, and the i7 is one of the most powerful processors out there. Honestly, if you want to avoid buying anything new for a while you might as well upgrade to the 5870. Is there an option to ugrade the psu? Which model dell is it that you are working with?
Hi Shadowssong
You are so right. The 8GB DDR3 are dual channel. My mistake. I thought I had read somewhere that the i7-920 supported only tri-channel memory but I was wrong. DDR3 memory is what it supports.
Glad to hear your comments about the ATI 5870. Looks like an outstanding card. And yes, I'm sold on the i7-920, although the i7-860 and i5-750 are not too shabby. Would assume those two are appealing due to their price and need for a less expensive motherboard.
Now to Dell: they do not provide an upgrade to the psu, which is 475W. The Dell I'm looking at is the XPS-9000, with a base price of $1,449. This includes the i7-920, 8GB DDR3, 1 TB hard drive SATA 7200rpm (but no idea if it supports 3GB/s or the size of the cache), ATI 5770 and a 23" ST2310 monitor. Adding Win7 Pro ($130), cd/dvd combo
($30), sound card ($40), 3 years of tech support ($169) and upgrading the graphics card
($150) makes it $1,968. Add on the cost of a larger psu and shipping should be able to come in around $2,100.
Do you think this machine will be able to play the games (see original post) decently with the visual enhancements set fairly high? Does the price seem reasonable or should I try another company or have it built?
Advice and suggestions are welcome as always.
You are so right. The 8GB DDR3 are dual channel. My mistake. I thought I had read somewhere that the i7-920 supported only tri-channel memory but I was wrong. DDR3 memory is what it supports.
Glad to hear your comments about the ATI 5870. Looks like an outstanding card. And yes, I'm sold on the i7-920, although the i7-860 and i5-750 are not too shabby. Would assume those two are appealing due to their price and need for a less expensive motherboard.
Now to Dell: they do not provide an upgrade to the psu, which is 475W. The Dell I'm looking at is the XPS-9000, with a base price of $1,449. This includes the i7-920, 8GB DDR3, 1 TB hard drive SATA 7200rpm (but no idea if it supports 3GB/s or the size of the cache), ATI 5770 and a 23" ST2310 monitor. Adding Win7 Pro ($130), cd/dvd combo
($30), sound card ($40), 3 years of tech support ($169) and upgrading the graphics card
($150) makes it $1,968. Add on the cost of a larger psu and shipping should be able to come in around $2,100.
Do you think this machine will be able to play the games (see original post) decently with the visual enhancements set fairly high? Does the price seem reasonable or should I try another company or have it built?
Advice and suggestions are welcome as always.
Shadowssong
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i7-920 is triple channel, you are correct, but 8gb can not be configured in triple channel which is what I was curious about. If it was 8gb it was probably for the i7-860 which is the lga 1156 not the lga 1366, the lga 1156 does run in dual channel while the 1366 runs in triple channel. It's confusing yeah I know, haha.
I'm looking at the XPS thing and that isn't right, it says 8gb of dual channel, which is wrong. Call dell before you order it and make sure that you do get triple channel ram.
As for the gpu, its hard to tell if its a good deal, $150 over the 5770 is pretty good for a 5870, but then you don't know how much the 5770 was originally. Why are you adding Win7 pro? Home should be fine. Unless you are an audiophile you don't need a different sound card. $100 more dollars for one year of service, iffy imo... I would call and ask them how they expect to run an i7 920 with a 5870 on a 475w psu, that is extremely sketchy.
You can look around, you can also try to build a system which would be much more flexible and possibly better for the money than what you would get with dell.
Edit: FYI I just tossed together a build with the similar specs (obviously higher quality parts than dell would use) and also added in a SSD($220) and it was only $2088 shipped. If you are interested in building it yourself I will post the build here. It would come out to about the same price but have superior parts.
I'm looking at the XPS thing and that isn't right, it says 8gb of dual channel, which is wrong. Call dell before you order it and make sure that you do get triple channel ram.
As for the gpu, its hard to tell if its a good deal, $150 over the 5770 is pretty good for a 5870, but then you don't know how much the 5770 was originally. Why are you adding Win7 pro? Home should be fine. Unless you are an audiophile you don't need a different sound card. $100 more dollars for one year of service, iffy imo... I would call and ask them how they expect to run an i7 920 with a 5870 on a 475w psu, that is extremely sketchy.
You can look around, you can also try to build a system which would be much more flexible and possibly better for the money than what you would get with dell.
Edit: FYI I just tossed together a build with the similar specs (obviously higher quality parts than dell would use) and also added in a SSD($220) and it was only $2088 shipped. If you are interested in building it yourself I will post the build here. It would come out to about the same price but have superior parts.
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The i7-920 is capable of running dual-channel as well. Most likely they have four 2GB modules in the first two channels and have left the two slots of the third channel empty (if they're even on the board). If they do have empty slots, you can get two more 2GB sticks from newegg or somewhere similar and bump up to 12GB.
It's no different than dual-channel systems being configured to run single-channel mode.
EDIT: As for Dell's 475w PSU, it's probably more than enought to run the i7 (which is only 125w if I remember right) and a 5870. He won't be looking at going crosffire with it, but as I said before, OEMs tend to provide just enough to power what the system came with and not much more.
Also, building your own system gets you no support. So for $2000 he gets 90 days - 1 year on most parts with 10 different maufacturers and you have to troubleshoot yourself. Or for $2100 he gets 3 years of single source support that in my experience has been much less of a headache than multiple maufacturer's pointing each other fingers at the other parts in your system.
It's no different than dual-channel systems being configured to run single-channel mode.
EDIT: As for Dell's 475w PSU, it's probably more than enought to run the i7 (which is only 125w if I remember right) and a 5870. He won't be looking at going crosffire with it, but as I said before, OEMs tend to provide just enough to power what the system came with and not much more.
Also, building your own system gets you no support. So for $2000 he gets 90 days - 1 year on most parts with 10 different maufacturers and you have to troubleshoot yourself. Or for $2100 he gets 3 years of single source support that in my experience has been much less of a headache than multiple maufacturer's pointing each other fingers at the other parts in your system.
Shadowssong
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You get no support when you build your own system? Did I miss the fact that the majority of parts come with 3+ year warranties?
Monitor 1 year
HD 5 years
PSU 7 years
GPU Double lifetime
Ram Lifetime
SSD 3 years
CPU 3 Years
Mobo 3 years
Seems to me like having separate manufacturers is better...
Yeah I am aware that the i7 can run in dual channel, but if all your getting is dual channel why not just get a 1156 platform....?
Monitor 1 year
HD 5 years
PSU 7 years
GPU Double lifetime
Ram Lifetime
SSD 3 years
CPU 3 Years
Mobo 3 years
Seems to me like having separate manufacturers is better...
Yeah I am aware that the i7 can run in dual channel, but if all your getting is dual channel why not just get a 1156 platform....?
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There is no support. A warranty is not the same thing as support. If something goes wrong with the system, YOU have to figure out what part went bad, and YOU have to contact the manufacturer for a replacement and play their little "oh you're using part x, it's not compatbile with out parts" game. Not all them do that, but enough do that it just might be worth having a single point of contact with all of your computer problems.
You do realize that it can be upgraded to triple channel, right? Maybe he likes the option of being able to run in triple channel later if he sees the need to. With an 1156, that's not possible.
hey ryan and shadowsong:
Thanks for your helpful input. Let me clear up something. As much as I'd like to say I could build a computer, I can't (it's not worth the probability that I'd blow something up). Believe me, I know my limits and have accepted them.
Next: I selected the Win7 Pro because I was told that, unlike Win7 Home, it has an emulation mode which allows the playing of old XP games. As far as sound, I rip and burn the occasional songs to cds and my old computer has a sound card. Would integrated sound be sufficient for this purpose? Re the psu: again I was told that I would need a strong cpu and graphics card to adequately run Flight Simulator X at high settings, and that I should have a minimum 600W.
Finally, I ran the figures again on the various Dell offerings. These prices include cpu, OS, 8 GB memory, ATI 5770, hard drive, cd-dvd combo, ST2310 monitor and 3 years of tech assistance:
$1,646: has the i5-750. PSU is 350W.
$1,708: has the i7-860. PSU is 350W.
(In neither case are upgrades availble for the ATI 5770)
$1,778: has the i7-920. PSU is 475W. (ATI 5770 can be upgraded to the 5870
for $150.)
Hope to hear from you both about this information.
Thanks for your helpful input. Let me clear up something. As much as I'd like to say I could build a computer, I can't (it's not worth the probability that I'd blow something up). Believe me, I know my limits and have accepted them.
Next: I selected the Win7 Pro because I was told that, unlike Win7 Home, it has an emulation mode which allows the playing of old XP games. As far as sound, I rip and burn the occasional songs to cds and my old computer has a sound card. Would integrated sound be sufficient for this purpose? Re the psu: again I was told that I would need a strong cpu and graphics card to adequately run Flight Simulator X at high settings, and that I should have a minimum 600W.
Finally, I ran the figures again on the various Dell offerings. These prices include cpu, OS, 8 GB memory, ATI 5770, hard drive, cd-dvd combo, ST2310 monitor and 3 years of tech assistance:
$1,646: has the i5-750. PSU is 350W.
$1,708: has the i7-860. PSU is 350W.
(In neither case are upgrades availble for the ATI 5770)
$1,778: has the i7-920. PSU is 475W. (ATI 5770 can be upgraded to the 5870
for $150.)
Hope to hear from you both about this information.
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You don't need 600w to run a single video card setup. The 600w suggestion is to account for low quality PSU's that generally don't put out what they say they do (well they do, but only at 25ºC). Dell PSU's are pretty well known to be at a reasonable quality to put out what it says they will.
Onboard sound is usually good enough for most people. Ripping and burning is done on the CPU and storage system, and the sound card isn't even involved in the process. The best thing is to try out onboard sound and see if you like the way it sounds when playing music/games. If not, get better speakers
. Seriously though, you can always add a sound card later, and probably cheaper (just like memory).
I haven't run into a game yet that worked on XP that won't work with Win7. There are some out there, I'm sure.
Onboard sound is usually good enough for most people. Ripping and burning is done on the CPU and storage system, and the sound card isn't even involved in the process. The best thing is to try out onboard sound and see if you like the way it sounds when playing music/games. If not, get better speakers
. Seriously though, you can always add a sound card later, and probably cheaper (just like memory).I haven't run into a game yet that worked on XP that won't work with Win7. There are some out there, I'm sure.
Thanks ryan_975,
Roger on those speakers...either that or get my ears examined! lol For grins I checked out Hewlett-Packard computers. Like Dell they offer three types with the i5-750, i7-860 and i7-920, respectively. Their prices are about the same ... maybe a tad lower. Only differences are power supply (460W) and graphics card (ATI 4850). Only one of the configurations offer an upgrade (GTX 260). Whitchever company I eventually choose, I'll probably go with the i7-920 .. a bit more expensive initially but the lga 1366 offers the opportunity for upgrading. I've posed some questions in another forum concerning monitors. I suppose what Dell and HP are offering are fine but ... there's gotta be some good competitors out there.
Hope I'm not wearing out my welcome ... look forward to hearing from both of you.
Roger on those speakers...either that or get my ears examined! lol For grins I checked out Hewlett-Packard computers. Like Dell they offer three types with the i5-750, i7-860 and i7-920, respectively. Their prices are about the same ... maybe a tad lower. Only differences are power supply (460W) and graphics card (ATI 4850). Only one of the configurations offer an upgrade (GTX 260). Whitchever company I eventually choose, I'll probably go with the i7-920 .. a bit more expensive initially but the lga 1366 offers the opportunity for upgrading. I've posed some questions in another forum concerning monitors. I suppose what Dell and HP are offering are fine but ... there's gotta be some good competitors out there.
Hope I'm not wearing out my welcome ... look forward to hearing from both of you.