Getting a new computer. Need advice.

[Izzy]

Originally Posted by Fast Fingered Fiend

Can you elaborate?

If your harddrive dies I'd rather only lose half of my information then all of it. Plus you only wasted 50 dollars for a 500 GB HD then 100 for a terabyte.

The more smaller harddrives you have the more data transferring you can do, due to multiple sata cables.. Well due to having multiple harddrives obviously. It's about the same price so I don't see why not.

You can usually get two 500 GB HD's at 7200 rpm for the same price as a 5000 rpm terabyte HD.

[ninjaKIWI]

Originally Posted by MrGiggles

It's soooooo much cheaper to build a middling computer and purchase 1 new component per year. More effort? Sure. But you save several grand. Seriously what is wrong with you people I always see these stupid builds and everyone laughs at it.

I guess Rubix's is okay since his situation apparently involves excess dough and insurmountable laziness but godDAMN

Urgurgrug EXACTLY.

The 5970 is an over hyped and overpriced piece of junk, there's no reason to spend so much money on it. 12GB of RAM is worthless because you're never going to need it unless you're doing some sort of 3D rendering.

[Izzy]

Agreed, there is no reason to have so much ram. You could maybe use 6 gigs if you have 20 large applications open at the same time as working on large pictures in photoshop.

[MrRubix]

Fast Fingered Fiend:

You don't need 12 GB. You can probably get away with 6 -- 8 tops.
I've had no problems with my 1 TB drive but odds are you can get away with a few 500's just for risk purposes, especially if you have enough room in your case.
I also recommend the i7 920. Lower price, and yet it overclocks up there with the best of them. It runs hot, so you'll need a good heatsink. I recommend what I got for my own machine -- a Prolimatech Megahalem.
I'd also get a beefier PSU -- maybe 850W.

I should also add that it's easier to overclock with less RAM.
Get some decent-quality RAM, too, like Corsair Dominators or OCZ Gold or Kingston.

[MrRubix]

Originally Posted by MrGiggles

It's soooooo much cheaper to build a middling computer and purchase 1 new component per year. More effort? Sure. But you save several grand. Seriously what is wrong with you people I always see these stupid builds and everyone laughs at it.

I guess Rubix's is okay since his situation apparently involves excess dough and insurmountable laziness but godDAMN

Is this for gaming? Go i5. It's all you need, i9's will never max out.

How on earth is it laziness? It doesn't require that much more effort to buy a "middling" computer.

As long as your processor hits 3.0-3.5 Ghz, you'll be fine for a while. I notice no real difference in my current-day gaming performances when I operate at 3 vs 4 GHz, all else equal. But if you're going to get an uber video card, you need an uber machine to go with it or else you're just wasting money and bottlenecking its potential.

[MrGiggles]

Originally Posted by MrRubix

How on earth is it laziness? It doesn't require that much more effort to buy a "middling" computer.

As long as your processor hits 3.0-3.5 Ghz, you'll be fine for a while. I notice no real difference in my current-day gaming performances when I operate at 3 vs 4 GHz, all else equal. But if you're going to get an uber video card, you need an uber machine to go with it or else you're just wasting money and bottlenecking its potential.

I thought you said you didn't want to bother with upgrading a component every couple months/years? Maybe I'm mistaken. That's not really laziness, I guess. Just imprecise speech on my part.

[MrRubix]

Originally Posted by MrGiggles

I thought you said you didn't want to bother with upgrading a component every couple months/years? Maybe I'm mistaken.

That's only an upside side-effect. I got the uber machine because I get great pleasure from being able to throw every game out there at my computer and have it get completely beasted at uber-max settings, and I like the idea that this will happen for quite a few years.

When I see a preview for a pretty game, I already know it's going to look that way on my machine at its maximal quality.

[ninjaKIWI]

Originally Posted by MrRubix

Fast Fingered Fiend:
I've had no problems with my 1 TB drive but odds are you can get away with a few 500's just for risk purposes, especially if you have enough room in your case.
It runs hot, so you'll need a good heatsink. I recommend what I got for my own machine -- a Prolimatech Megahalem.
I'd also get a beefier PSU -- maybe 850W.

I'm not too fond of HDDs over 500GB just because it's always faster to have a lower capacity. Less seek time, and less fragmentation. I've never had any problems with HDD failure so I can't really comment on that. All I know is stay away from Maxtor drives.

The Megahalem is probably one of the best in air cooling solutions you can get, but I definitely recommend the H50 or the H70 over any air cooling.

It's always good to have a little buffer of extra power. Having too much is no problem, and leaves room for future upgrades should they require more.

[Fast Fingered Fiend]

i7 920 is out of stock on newegg and the 950 is like 6$ away from the cheapest 1366 so yeah. About the heatsink, the corsair h50 is liquid cooling. The hard drive, I'll go with a small ssd for the OS, and a 640gb for mah stuff. And about the 5970, the specs and benchmarks say it all so shush xD

[ninjaKIWI]

Originally Posted by Fast Fingered Fiend

i7 920 is out of stock on newegg and the 950 is like 6$ away from the cheapest 1366 so yeah. About the heatsink, the corsair h50 is liquid cooling. The hard drive, I'll go with a small ssd for the OS, and a 640gb for mah stuff. And about the 5970, the specs and benchmarks say it all so shush xD

While the 5970 is at the top at the moment, you're paying a pretty big premium for not that much of a performance boost. AMD cards seem to have a few problems with things like AA and AF (While the Fermi cards are practically made for handling that). I've also heard that the x58 chipset has some trouble dealing with AMD cards.

[Fast Fingered Fiend]

Actually, I could get this instead

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...-695-_-Product

[ninjaKIWI]

I would never advocate getting a laptop for gaming. I can understand the allure of a portable gaming machine, but you're paying a lot more for a lot less.

I don't know much about the mobile version of the 5870, but I would think that having Crossfire 5870s in a laptop would cause some heating problems as well.

[darkshark]

I've been building up a 48 core machine for the last few months, piece by piece.
None of you probably do the kind of work I do, so having so many cores in an octosocket platform probably would never benefit you in a billion years.

For the normal user, 6gb of ram is more than enough for anything they would ever want to do. I find myself running out of ram even at 24gb on some animations I do for the company I work for.

Overall I've spent roughly the same as Rubix, $2k, but I still need more ram, more fans, and a gtx480 or three, that's still not including monitors/soundsystem etc, already have those.

[ninjaKIWI]

Originally Posted by darkshark

I've been building up a 48 core machine for the last few months, piece by piece.
None of you probably do the kind of work I do, so having so many cores in an octosocket platform probably would never benefit you in a billion years.

For the normal user, 6gb of ram is more than enough for anything they would ever want to do. I find myself running out of ram even at 24gb on some animations I do for the company I work for.

Overall I've spent roughly the same as Rubix, $2k, but I still need more ram, more fans, and a gtx480 or three, that's still not including monitors/soundsystem etc, already have those.

I don't know much about GPUs outside the gaming aspect, but wouldn't you be more in need of a workstation card than a few 480s?

[darkshark]

Workstation cards are pretty much just overpriced and overhyped when it comes to openGL performance, and with VRay's new GPU based RT engine coming out, it takes advantage of sheer number of gpu processors, as opposed to workstation cards which are meant for dealing with 4D simulations and such, which I don't do, and have no plans on doing any time soon, so the D3D based gaming cards are the better choice due to the sheer number of cuda processors.

[MrGiggles]

Originally Posted by ninjaKIWI

I would never advocate getting a laptop for gaming. I can understand the allure of a portable gaming machine, but you're paying a lot more for a lot less.

I don't know much about the mobile version of the 5870, but I would think that having Crossfire 5870s in a laptop would cause some heating problems as well.

Every single one of my friends opted for a gaming laptop. Alienware, Dell XPS, etc. All of them overheat after a few hours, require cooling pads underneath, and average 30 minutes of battery life, so they're pretty much overpriced*4 desktops.

Don't ****ing do it.

What I would do is put together a gaming desktop and then just get a netbook or macbook.

[MrRubix]

Back in college, the people I knew who had gaming laptops pretty much only played them in their rooms anyway. They just liked having one computer for gaming AND for portability when it came to doing schoolwork/studying elsewhere.

Personally, I think it's a waste (gaming laptops are steeeeeeep in price for what you get, not to mention other obvious limitations). You're better off getting a nice gaming desktop and a reasonably priced netbook/macbook aka agreed with Giggles.

[Fast Fingered Fiend]

I mean supposedly it has like a whole buncha vents for the overheating problem but idk. I wanna get the desktop, but I'm still unsure of what to get :/

[MrRubix]

Just go for an i5 or i7

[Zageron]

Originally Posted by darkshark

I've been building up a 48 core machine for the last few months, piece by piece.
None of you probably do the kind of work I do, so having so many cores in an octosocket platform probably would never benefit you in a billion years.

For the normal user, 6gb of ram is more than enough for anything they would ever want to do. I find myself running out of ram even at 24gb on some animations I do for the company I work for.

Overall I've spent roughly the same as Rubix, $2k, but I still need more ram, more fans, and a gtx480 or three, that's still not including monitors/soundsystem etc, already have those.

http://www.evga.com/products/moreInf...%20Family&sw=5

If you aren't already using this, this baby is amazing!! Push two mega processors, four nvidia cards of your choice, and 48GB of RAM! Mix that with some SSD Raid 0 array, and you'll be set.