I'm going to be purchasing a new gaming rig in the next month or so, and I'm trying to decide if I should buy one from a small vendor like Alienware or Polywell, or if I should attempt to build one.
Please keep in mind that I have never built a PC from the ground up before, but I can learn very quickly and have several walk-throughs from pc magazines.
What is the better way to go? Cost isn't too much of an issue, and I'm going to build a very fast PC.
Athlon 4800+
Dual GeForce 7800 GTX
2GB RAM
3 Hard drives, 2 in RAID 0 and one back up
DVD RW and CDRW/DVD-ROM
Creative X-Fi Sound
550 watt PS (minimum)
Buy it or Build it?
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Vertigo Zer0
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I just bought a new PC from Falcon Northwest and I'm extremely satisfied with my purchase.
My setup is very similar to what you're planning:
Mach V Exotix LaserWorks:
ICON Aluminum Chassis
Silverstone 650Watt Power Supply
Windows XP Professional
Asus A8N-SLI Premium Motherboard
AMD Athlon64 FX-57
Zalman ZNPS7000LED ALCU - CPU Cooler
Corsair TwinX 2048MB 3200XL-PT (4/512MB)
2x nVidia GeForce 7800 GTX 256MB PCIE - SLI
2x Maxtor DM-10 300GB SATA 16MB Cache (RAID 0)
2x Plextor PX-716SA DVD±R/RW CD-R/RW - Black
Sony 1.44MB Floppy Drive - Black
Ergodex DX-1 Falcon Edition
Black with Silver Falcons Paint Scheme:
Porsche Black Automotive Paint
Silver Falcon Logos
LaserWorks Two-Color Lit Falcon Eye
I couldn't get the Sound Blaster X-Fi Fatal1ty FPS because it wasn't available yet, so I'm picking that up and installing it myself when it is available. I'm going to call Falcon tech support and have them walk me through how they would install it and route whatever cables I need to route so it looks like they installed it.
While I could've easily built my own PC, I wanted a Falcon because I've bought from them before and was very satisfied with the people and the product. Plus, I had them paint my new PC and put in a light box, two things I couldn't have done myself.
Other people will tell you they are overpriced, but I think they are worth the money.
BTW, you may want to think twice about getting a dual-core CPU for gaming. I've come across a few threads about games crashing on AMD64 X2 CPU's seemingly because the two cores aren't running at the same clock speed. The suggested workaround is to disable the second core in the BIOS, which makes buying a dual-core CPU kind of pointless until this can be fixed.
My setup is very similar to what you're planning:
Mach V Exotix LaserWorks:
ICON Aluminum Chassis
Silverstone 650Watt Power Supply
Windows XP Professional
Asus A8N-SLI Premium Motherboard
AMD Athlon64 FX-57
Zalman ZNPS7000LED ALCU - CPU Cooler
Corsair TwinX 2048MB 3200XL-PT (4/512MB)
2x nVidia GeForce 7800 GTX 256MB PCIE - SLI
2x Maxtor DM-10 300GB SATA 16MB Cache (RAID 0)
2x Plextor PX-716SA DVD±R/RW CD-R/RW - Black
Sony 1.44MB Floppy Drive - Black
Ergodex DX-1 Falcon Edition
Black with Silver Falcons Paint Scheme:
Porsche Black Automotive Paint
Silver Falcon Logos
LaserWorks Two-Color Lit Falcon Eye
I couldn't get the Sound Blaster X-Fi Fatal1ty FPS because it wasn't available yet, so I'm picking that up and installing it myself when it is available. I'm going to call Falcon tech support and have them walk me through how they would install it and route whatever cables I need to route so it looks like they installed it.
While I could've easily built my own PC, I wanted a Falcon because I've bought from them before and was very satisfied with the people and the product. Plus, I had them paint my new PC and put in a light box, two things I couldn't have done myself.
Other people will tell you they are overpriced, but I think they are worth the money.
BTW, you may want to think twice about getting a dual-core CPU for gaming. I've come across a few threads about games crashing on AMD64 X2 CPU's seemingly because the two cores aren't running at the same clock speed. The suggested workaround is to disable the second core in the BIOS, which makes buying a dual-core CPU kind of pointless until this can be fixed.
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Krom
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Games aren't going to see much benefit from going to dual core for a while, a fast single core is better for pure gaming.
Also, something to keep in mind when getting your memory, if you want 2 GB use two 1 GB sticks. While the newer Venice/SD/X2 cores resolve some of the problems with running a system with all 4 memory banks full, running with all 4 still often causes a latency penalty and reduces the maximum clock speed potential. Just two sticks are better especially if you are even thinking of overclocking. Not to mention much later in the life of the machine you could find two more 1 GB sticks of memory and up the system to 4 GB.
As for the DVD RW and CDRW/DVD-ROM drive, just get the DVD-RW drive, they do everything. Just get a recent 16x burner from plextor, pioneer, or nec with Dual Layer support, it'll burn virtually anything you throw at it from CDRW media to DVD+/-R DL media.
For the hard drives, booting off a RAID0 is not a good idea. RAID0 is very good at great big sequential reads and writes, it is not very good at a whole bunch of smaller random accesses. RAID0 in my experience comes with a heavy latency penalty that costs a lot of performance in random accesses, just the kind of disk access your OS will use. Boot off the single drive, it will be faster and use the RAID0 just for mass storage. That is how I use my system, [250 GB IDE: <C: OS> <D: Programs>] [800 GB SATA RAID0 <E: Everything Else>]
PSU, pick a good brand like Fotron Source, or OCZ, especially if price is not an issue.
Also, getting a SLI 7800 GTX system means you should have the monitors to back it up. You should either have a high quality LCD that runs 1600x1200, or a CRT that can run 1600x1200 or higher at a refresh rate you like, otherwise you will be wasting the video cards.
Also, something to keep in mind when getting your memory, if you want 2 GB use two 1 GB sticks. While the newer Venice/SD/X2 cores resolve some of the problems with running a system with all 4 memory banks full, running with all 4 still often causes a latency penalty and reduces the maximum clock speed potential. Just two sticks are better especially if you are even thinking of overclocking. Not to mention much later in the life of the machine you could find two more 1 GB sticks of memory and up the system to 4 GB.
As for the DVD RW and CDRW/DVD-ROM drive, just get the DVD-RW drive, they do everything. Just get a recent 16x burner from plextor, pioneer, or nec with Dual Layer support, it'll burn virtually anything you throw at it from CDRW media to DVD+/-R DL media.
For the hard drives, booting off a RAID0 is not a good idea. RAID0 is very good at great big sequential reads and writes, it is not very good at a whole bunch of smaller random accesses. RAID0 in my experience comes with a heavy latency penalty that costs a lot of performance in random accesses, just the kind of disk access your OS will use. Boot off the single drive, it will be faster and use the RAID0 just for mass storage. That is how I use my system, [250 GB IDE: <C: OS> <D: Programs>] [800 GB SATA RAID0 <E: Everything Else>]
PSU, pick a good brand like Fotron Source, or OCZ, especially if price is not an issue.
Also, getting a SLI 7800 GTX system means you should have the monitors to back it up. You should either have a high quality LCD that runs 1600x1200, or a CRT that can run 1600x1200 or higher at a refresh rate you like, otherwise you will be wasting the video cards.
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Krom
- DBB Database Master
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- Location: Camping the energy center. BTW, did you know you can have up to 100 characters in this location box?
- Contact:
No good, you will still need to copy the ISO to the hard drive first anyway.Nexus_One wrote:I had considered using a pair of 74GB Raptors for the OS, and at least 250GB for a back up drive.
I want to have both a DVDRW and a CDRW/DVD-ROM so that I can burn DVDs without having to use the hard drive, a more direct approach to it.
And even raptors in RAID0 are going to have a huge latency penalty, just get one if you are going to boot off it.