Gaming PC`s!

I have found a few PC gaming nuts out there recently in our club. Wanted to share my latest project and ask you guys about yours and what games you play.

I use my PC for Assassins Creed III, Battlefield III, Crysis 2 (can't wait for the next one!), and Skyrim.

I'm upgrading from my olde P45 chipset. A pretty significant upgrade since the inception of graphics accelerator on Intel CPU's, the elmination of north bridge processors, and TRIM support for SSD's in raid 0 configurations on the new SATA III plugs with Marvell controllers.

I've already got a pair of Plextor M5P 128GB SSD's but I'm only currently running one of them in my P45 system because of lack of TRIM support and the excess space this requires for sector alignment and data management w/o. So going to raid 0 with these SSD's is going to be freaking amazing!

I'm upgrading the case to a BIG mid size tower, the new Antec 1100 is getting rave reviews, and there's good space for beefy full sized GPU's, while maintaining good airflow.

I chose the Gigabyte ga-z77x-ud5p motherboard. I've always used Gigabyte boards, and I swear by them. They have dual bios (incase a flash goes terribly wrong), LOTS of copper which improves heat dissipation, and digital MOSFET (very stable power feed for CPU, not to mention much cooler capacitors than in the days of my olde P45 board). These new boards have 2x 16x PCI-E slots. Previously if you wanted to run multiple GPU's, the second one would be in a 8x slot and thus bottle neck both to default to 8x. New SLI systems are blowing old systems out of the water with this increased bit interface!

I've got a pretty solid GPU currently, but I'm going to switch to Nvidia in the near future. I don't use multiple displays (which is what radeon has really done a good job at targeting with their card features) Nvidia cards have been shown to have better texture filtering and AA characteristics. I'm trying to decide on what to do with my GPU on this next system. I currently only want to spend around $450 on a video card, and I'm trying to decide if I want to buy two GTX 660's and run them in SLI immediately (each is about $220), or I could spend the same amount on one GTX 680 now and get a pretty good improvement over the card I already own, then later down the line, maybe this summer, blow the lid off it by adding another GTX680 (hopefully price will come down on it a little bit as well by then).

What do you think I should do? I've been looking at the benchmarks between 2x GTX 660's in SLI vs. 1x GTX 680 and the 660's are a pretty clear winner over the 680, but the temptation is there for moderate performance gain now, and a mind boggling show stopper down the road in a few months. Decisions, decisions.

 

Wow that's pretty solid advice actually I think. My current GPU is a Sapphire Radeon 6870 HD Toxic version w/2GB ram. I hope the new mobo will breath new life into that GPU. I'm running BF3 at a mix of high and ultra high settings. Great point about refresh rates on monitors maxing out around 60hz, although I will counter you on SLI smoothness (nothing smoother than 140fps lol)

The extra heat I feel like I can probably alleviate with the new case I'm using, but although I have a OCZ gold 750watt PSU that should handle just about anything, I don't nessesarily want anything that is going to draw an excessive amount of more power which is probably just what I'd be getting myself into with an SLI set up.

Nice Doug! I didn't know you were into PC gaming at all! I'm also into Civilizaton V and a few others.

Dang tho man! I wish I would have gone with a 27" monitor. I got a 24" ASUS instead. It was impressively larger than my last, but I still want to go bigger. I think just past that 27" mark it gets too big for PC gaming!

 

I don't actually play that much. But I love when I do. Also I don't sleep /DesktopModules/ActiveForums/themes/_default//emoticons/biggrin.gif

 

New goodies are here! hehehehhehehhe



Next week i5 3570k ivy bridge cpu, and evga gtx 670 ftw gpu!

 

Nah I got 16gb ram there in just the two sticks! Lol usually you have to (or the mobo will automatically) adjust the effective ram clock in 4 channel mode. I've always used gigabyte mobos, corsair ram and coolers, corsair or ocz power supplies, ocz or plextor ssds, EVGA or sapphire gpus.

Merry Christmas!

 

YOU WISH! Have you got like an Ultrabook or somethin Mike? Ultrabooks are nice, I was looking at one before I got into this project, but I've got a little netbook that I swapped an SSD into, and popped 4gb ram into with Win 7 home premium.

The one thing about those Ultrabooks is that they have a "dedicated" Intel/Nvidia 4000/3000 graphics, but it's actually just that a LARGE portion of the i5 and i7 processors has parts of each core dedicated to video accelleration. This was an integral part of Intel's design plan that manifested in the employment of the PCH and CPU Central hub system that replaced the South Bridge and North Bridge functions previously in all LGA 775 mobos. The nice thing about the new layout is that the PCI-E functions have been reassigned to being handled by the central hub, rather than the South Bridge/PCH. This way even if you have a dedicated graphics card in a PCI-E slot, the CPU can accelerate data more directly and effectively than the two part South Bridge/CPU soln of chipsets past.

Another big part of this build (besides the overclocking CPU and ram (gonna have sic CAS latency timings with that 1866 ram @ 1600, I should probably be able to hit 6-7-6-20)), a big component is using a pair of Plextor M5P 128gb ssd's in a raid 0 configuration. Not only does it improve read/write speeds (up to an actual 1000MB/s (board controllers have nominal "6gb/s" ports, but the effective speed is NEVER higher than 1gb/s with a PAIR in raid 0 (average 250-400mb/s with a single ssd)) So not only are the read/write rates going to be more than TWICE what a single SSD is capable of, but also the access time drops significantly to 1/3-1/2 (I'm expecting 0.005ms access times).

SO.....I hope you believe me when I say: this machine will eat your laptop/ultrabook alive!

 

Thinking of the SLI/gpu choice debate, I also read recently that many games aren't even poised to take avantage of SLI/Xfire set ups! SO! I've decided on a EVGA GTX 670 FTW Signature. It's going to be SWEET!!!! Stay tuned, the end of this week I should have pix of some more goodies!

 

Some of it is just plain "future proofing" too. So the overkill is something like preventative maintenance. We go overkill with everything tho, you should see my reef tank!

Thinking of the SLI/gpu debate, I've read recently that many games can't actually take avantage of SLI/Xfire setups! So I've decided to go with a singleEVGA 670 FTW Signature (OC'ed)!

 

ASUS is making some GREAT Ultrabooks, their line is called "Zenbooks." Those are the ones I've been looking at actually. I used to really dig their mother boards, they're still one of the big custom mobo mfg's but I found their boards run quite a bit warmer than Gigabyte boards do. Hard to argue with the specs and speed on their x79 Maximus boards tho!

One of the BEST, absolute essential upgrades you can do to a laptop is put an SSD in it. No moving parts= no heat, lower power consumption=longer battery life. 5-8x faster read/write speeds, 20x faster access times!


Speaking of replacing hard drives/reinstalling OS after format, I've found an easy way of doing this using disc imaging software: EaseUS Partition Manager is the best! Since I'm installing a second SSD and setting up this raid 0 config,(TRIM support for ssd raid 0 a new feature of the z77 chip BTW) I will need to wipe the current SSD I already have in use. SO, I've made a disc image of my current SSD onto a partition on my 1TB seagate barracuda HDD, and then I'll boot from that, and re-copy the image back to my new raid array.


The best thing about EaseUS Partition Manager, is that I can select WHAT I want to do with the drives/partitions, and then execute the functions, restart, and it completes the task without any questions or bull **** in the middle of the set up, so I can walk away and the computer shuts down when it's complete! Very nice!

 

$#@%! man how much was that monitor anyways? I was looking into 3d monitors and then remembered what you said here and those are ALL in the $600+ range. I would have to "see it to believe it." so to speak. What I mean is, I would have to see it in person to decide if the difference justified the cost!