Gaming Rigs

SmokingKills · 4 May 2009 at 13:50

Its time for a treat after many years in education and now actually having some money to spend. My seven year old, beige monstrosity mocks me with a faint aroma of ozone from the corner so while i'd like to have a really nice new rig I must ask, just how much do you need to spend?

Crysis with 1KK barrel explosions on a 30" monitor on max settings is the thing of super rigs obv, but to play new games with good settings on your average 22/24 widescreen, whats the damage? This is what I had window shopped while I waited to be activated on teh forums but can I get a great gaming rig for 1/3 the price?

I will be keeping my MIC and my speakers which are both still top notch everything else bar OS is needed. If its your thing please feel free to spec me your 'waste free' builds and/or comment on/respec my 'ooh shiny' build.

Finally a few technical questions as i'm woefully out of touch:
- One card or two in XFire (ie 4870 X2 Vs. 2x 4870 )
- Windows 7 Beta OK for most stuff? (can I avoid buying vista?? XD)
- Monitors, twice the price = twice as good? (people seem rather fond of that NEC gaming monitor as opposed to a classic dell at half the price)

Many Thanks,
SK

reflux · 4 May 2009 at 14:05

You could definitely save a fair bit of cash on that spec if you're willing to compromise a bit. The 4870X2 for example is unnecessary; going for a single HD4870 or a GTX260 would save you £150 or so.

The screen is probably very nice, but £400 is a lot of wonga to be spending and you could save quite a lot of cash here.

Also bear in mind that blu-ray drive will not burn anything, so if you haven't got a DVD burner already you might find yourself caught a bit short.

SmokingKills · 4 May 2009 at 14:13

DVD's are p.dead in my mind, I just switch HD's in an external caddy to back stuff up. But while were on the subject of storage, fast access times are important to me but i've heard nothing but ill talk of SSD drives currently but yet all the specs I see are only using a single 1TB drive as opposed to two drives in RAID 0 which is what id expect. Any reason for this?

StevenRaith · 4 May 2009 at 14:23

Here's a starter for ten:

That's a full system. Moniter, keyboard, mouse, the whole lot.

I dare say you could pick and mix some of those components, but it's plenty quick for me.

Haven't had a chance to see if it runs Crysis though - my ISP is bitching about data use and if I download the demo, I'll be sitting at 128k for a couple of weeks :rolleyes:

Really must go to a better ISP. 50gb a month is sod all when you stream a lot of video and download Linux/BSD distros.

Oh, I'm running Win 7 64bit with 8Gb of RAM. Working for me, only issues I have are unsigned drivers [you can hit F8 at boot time and tell it to allow those if you wish] and the usual 64bit gripes where software isn't available properly. Win7 as it is though, is not bad at all. Although I do intend to wang Ubuntu 64bit on here again, I miss my multiple desktops.

Audigex · 4 May 2009 at 14:29

Are you going for "best to fit a budget of x pounds sterling" or "best to do y task under x pounds sterling"

If you want the best for eighteen hundred quid you're in the right direction - if you want the best to play a certain game you can do it for not much over half that.

cmndr_andi · 4 May 2009 at 14:29

For the price, thats a nice spec there StevenRaith.

Here is a refined system around the pricepoint your initial spec was at:

Thats with the same NEC monitor (very nice piece of kit btw), if you wanna cut some costs - this is a very nice monitor. It uses an e-IPS panel.

Cristian · 4 May 2009 at 14:30

higher chance of failure and loss of data?
monitor may look expensive, but with that panel it will look awesome as well...
le: late again, I'd still get a 1tb hdd, perfectly agree with the monitor suggestions.

StevenRaith · 4 May 2009 at 14:34

Cheers Andi.

I was looking at speccing a basic I7 system, but I just couldn't justify the extra expense - and it needed to be a complete system as my old machine is just bloody knackered!

Was more concerned about the ability to play 1080p AVIs than BluRays, and not a massive gamer [mainly thanks to the old machine being a bit rubbish] hence the mid range GPU.

I also have the Noctua cooler and TRad+noctua fans now, so the system is practically silent, loving it!

cmndr_andi · 4 May 2009 at 14:37

RAID 0 may have a 2x higher chance of failure, but if you back up all your vital stuff onto a dvd, external, or other internal drive regualarly then the damage done can be almost fully mitigated. Furthermore, the speed you gain is definitely noticeable.

SmokingKills · 4 May 2009 at 19:05

Well initially I was interested in just how cheap you could get a decent gaming rig for, however having looked at the other spec threads and got my initial load out down in price a bit i'm quite happy with my budget.

This is what i've got sitting in my basket now

Some final questions before my money does an impression of alien blood:

-The overcloked bundle is pretty nice as while i'm sure I could with the help of the internets overclock myself, id rather just plug it all in when it arrives and go crazy straight away. However when people spec the same thing out in components they often use the same branded RAM but 12/16000 varieties. Is there much extra oomph from them?

-Apparently the Noctua cooler is huge, anyone have any experience fitting in the Lian Li case? I prefer this one over the 900-2 and while I know Lian Li are know for good airflow i'm also concerned only the two fans wont be sufficient?

-As previously mentioned my last PC was a beige monolith so cable etiquette wasn't very high, cables were quite tight in length though so anything I should plan for/buy for a nice tidy machine or should the included cables and a packet of ties be sufficient to see this built proper?

After waiting a bit for any final feedback i'll be off to get this (pics I promise XD) making it simple by saying budget £1500, anyone would do anything different?

Again many thanks for the input, one excited and soon to be poor guy XD

cmndr_andi · 4 May 2009 at 19:25

Okay dokey m8, here is my 2 pence.

The overclock bundle is interesting, but you are paying £29 for an overclock. Furthermore, they only use the standard i7 920, not the D0 (which is better to use for overclocking). The RAM they use is great, it will clock past 1600MHz no problem. You don't get massive boost from faster RAM on the i7 platform, the memory bandwidth is massive to start with.

One thing I need to highlight- that Blu Ray player does not write any DVDs or CDs. You would be better going for this.

Oh - go for 2x 640GB WD Caviar Blue - not much money for much better drives. Check this review out.

Not exactly a scientific evaluation - but that Lian Li case looks Plenty big enough to fit the noctua.

If you want some easy cable management get this. Really easy to use and everything is so tidy now.

Have fun building it

Audigex · 4 May 2009 at 19:25

Raid 0 for system drives, raid 1 for storage drives should be optimal, but in practice many motherboards don't allow you to. Add in the fact you then need 4 drives and the cables getting in the way and why bother?

For me I'll likely end up with a system drive and two raid1 larger drives for storage - does the PC good to format every 6 months anyway.

D D Danneh · 4 May 2009 at 19:32

Here's what I went for. Got it and built on Friday, and it runs like a dream. Really pleased with it. I've only downloaded Crysis Warhead so far, but it runs great. Next is the valve pack.