help on a gaming computer?

I would reccommend going with a i7.. but if you are set on a Phenom II go for something like this!

well ram will really depend on your mobo how about something like this?
Asus M3A79-T Deluxe
xGB's of ddr2 ram (4-6GB reccommended!)
its got 4 pci-e and 2 pci slots
6 sata slots for all your devices

and more... its worth checking out! its the same set up they have here! AMD Phenom II

alteranively you could go with one of our builds ( mine or jwc, we have the list of parts for our pcs above)

The Phenom II is a great budget CPU; in most tests, it performs somewhat worse than the i7, but for a gamer, it probably isn't bad. The 8 thread capability of the Core i7 is useful to me, but for gaming, it's useless. However, you might want to take a look at the cheaper Core i5s and do a comparison against them before you decide on a Phenom II.

Most mobos come with both PCI and PCI-e ports. I think I've seen a few that don't, so just check to see that the specifications list both ports. ASUS is a popular brand; you'll find lots of reviews.

The GTX 275, 285, and 295 are nVidia's best chips right now. However, since you're going for gaming, you should definitely be willing to spend a lot of money on the graphics card. I'm not saying that you should buy a 295; >$500 for a single card just isn't worth it in my view--it would be better to get 2 275s or 2 285s and put them in SLI if you really wanted to spend that much. But, if you're considering the latest games, you're going to need to cough up some money.

I'd also recommend using a RAID setup. RAID 5 balances speed and fault tolerance. It requires a minimum of 3 drives and if any one drive fails, all of your data is okay. With 4 or more drives, the speed boost is apparently spectacular compared to the speed of 3 drives, but I'm happy with my setup.

I use OCZ Gold DDR3 1600 RAM. It performs like a charm and I've gotten it up to 1800MHz without any issues whatsoever (I've been bumping up the clock speed on my system over the past day or so slowly... My CPU is up to 3.4GHz, but I'm probably going to bring it back down and run on stock voltages... I don't need blazing speed right now).

A few things I'd like to contribute to this thread:

Core i7's are absolutely fantastic. I've never used a faster processor in my life. They're really quite incredible, though they're something like $300 for the processor and $300 for the motherboard, so unless you have cash to spare, the phenom II is a very capable performer on a budget.

Nvidia still has yet to release a current card that impresses me. I have a GTX 260 in my work computer, though for pure gaming performance, a Radeon HD4870 blows it out of the water for a hundred bucks less. Lately ATI has been putting out some really kickass cards for a lot less money than nvidia.

As for RAID, yes, if you have some really critical data, it makes sense to protect yourself from hard drive failure, though of course this will increase the cost. For protecting your data, use RAID1, though pay double for drives. For performance, use RAID0, though you double your risk of losing data. For RAID5, you get a good balance of data protection and speed, though unless you shell out $600 for a hardware RAID card, expect that RAID5 will SEVERELY hit your performance. If you want a hardware RAID5 card on a budget, check eBay for old Dell Perc 5i's, they usually go for $125 or so, plus $25 for cables from dealextreme plus maybe $40 for a battery backup unit.. Software RAID5 is a horrible idea, never use RAID built into your motherboard for that or you'll slow everything down to molasses. If you really need to protect your data while getting proper speeds, you'll really need to get a hardware solution.

nvidia still has yet to release a current card that impresses me. I have a gtx 260 in my work computer, though for pure gaming performance, a radeon hd4870 blows it out of the water for a hundred bucks less. Lately ati has been putting out some really kickass cards for a lot less money than nvidia.

Click to expand...

WOO HOOO HD4890 FTW shizzel!!!

pseudolobster said:

For RAID5, you get a good balance of data protection and speed, though unless you shell out $600 for a hardware RAID card, expect that RAID5 will SEVERELY hit your performance. If you want a hardware RAID5 card on a budget, check eBay for old Dell Perc 5i's, they usually go for $125 or so, plus $25 for cables from dealextreme plus maybe $40 for a battery backup unit.. Software RAID5 is a horrible idea, never use RAID built into your motherboard for that or you'll slow everything down to molasses. If you really need to protect your data while getting proper speeds, you'll really need to get a hardware solution.

Click to expand...

Maybe 10 years ago software RAID sucked. Now, most experts will say that software RAID is as fast or faster than hardware RAID because systems are powerful enough to handle the throughput. There's absolutely no need to get an external card unless you plan to put like 10 drives in RAID.

from my experience, usde msdn to get windows 7 profesional with genuine key for free.

just joing IEEE for instance gives you access.

I still have to make sure about how many times from msdn a key can be activated, but in case I have some extra activations I'll let you know

@Pseudolaser: it's not pirated software. It's the real software. and the key is neither pirated, there are no keygens. It's just that people get keys from msdn or similars and take benfit from it. You choose: 500$ to M$ or 20$ particular. Same software

Don't go with the GTX 275, as said before, ATI makes cheaper and more powerful cards.
For example, GTX 275 costs just over $200, while Radeon HD4890 costs just under. Still, HD 4890 performs much better.

See here: http://3dcompare.com/hw/3DComparison_4.1mini.xls

Grix said:

Don't go with the GTX 275, as said before, ATI makes cheaper and more powerful cards.
For example, GTX 275 costs just over $200, while Radeon HD4890 costs just under. Still, HD 4890 performs much better.

See here: http://3dcompare.com/hw/3DComparison_4.1mini.xls

Click to expand...

alright so ATI cards sound quite promising.. but what's the difference between the Radeon HD4890, the Radeon HD4870 X2, or the 2 Radeon 5800 series cards?

o and another thing... there's so many video cards that have the same name, I have no idea which to choose from. there's multiple 4890's.

Newegg.com - radeon HD 4870

Newegg.com - radeon HD 4890


I'm making my newegg wishlist right now..

The 4870 and 4890 are single cards, the 4870x2 is two cards on one board, running internal crossfire. The 4890 is faster than the 4870, and the 58XX series are faster still. The 4870x2 is often faster than anything else, but if your game doesn't fully support crossfire, it'll drop down to the speed of a single 4870.

As for the different versions, they're made by different manufacturers, ATI only supplies the chips and the reference design.. Some manufacturers will tweak the card, giving it more RAM or overclocking it. I'm a bit of a purist and I like to buy ATI cards that are the stock reference design, though often the modified cards run faster. Sapphire is a good company for stock cards, and I dunno, I hear HIS and BFG make good overclocked cards.

jwc said:

Maybe 10 years ago software RAID sucked. Now, most experts will say that software RAID is as fast or faster than hardware RAID because systems are powerful enough to handle the throughput. There's absolutely no need to get an external card unless you plan to put like 10 drives in RAID.

Click to expand...

I have some recent benchmark numbers which beg to differ.

ICH10R under server 2k3 running software raid, writing to a RAID5 array with 5 drives takes over 35% CPU, whereas my Perc5i idles at 3% or so CPU usage, also writes are 20% faster on my hardware RAID, plus I can install any OS to it without having to lose my data and rebuild the array, as far as the OS is concerned it's just a regular harddrive. I've dual-booted linux from my array plenty of times, never had a problem. With software RAID that's simply not possible. I've done windows repair installs on my array, with no data lost.. If it were software, the windows installer would simply see it as five unformatted drives and offer to wipe out all your data for you.

As far as I'm concerned, software RAID is still crap.

So is crossfire only when there are 2 video cards on the same board? or can that refer to having 2 video cards in a computer?
Will some things not support having 2 video cards? (just like the x2 cards) (A better way for me to ask this... is it better off just to get 1 good video card rather than 2 good ones?)

I'm thinking about the Radeon 5850, as it's still in my price range, around the $250's, yet i know NOTHING about it. there isn't even a youtube video or anything. Probably the most common I see on youtube is the 4970, 4890, and 4850. Basically I just wanna play Crysis at the best possible framerate I can achieve using the Phenom II 4x 3.00ghz

edit: well the reviews on the 5850 sure do look nice.. seems promising:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductReview.aspx?Item=N82E16814102857

mikeeey said:

So is crossfire only when there are 2 video cards on the same board? or can that refer to having 2 video cards in a computer?

Click to expand...

No, crossfire usually means two or more ATI boards linked together.. The x2 boards run internally using crossfire technology, yet most times people say crossfire they're meaning two or more boards. In the world of nvidia, this technology is called SLI.

mikeeey said:

Will some things not support having 2 video cards? (just like the x2 cards) (A better way for me to ask this... is it better off just to get 1 good video card rather than 2 good ones?)

Click to expand...

Nothing "won't support" it, as in, everything will run using it, but some games won't take full advantage of it, limiting your speed to that of a single board... Even the things that do take full advantage of two cards, only give you about 1.5 times the performance of a single card. It's always more cost effective to buy a single more powerful card than it is to buy two cheap cards and run them in SLI/crossfire.

pseudolobster said:

I have some recent benchmark numbers which beg to differ.

ICH10R under server 2k3 running software raid, writing to a RAID5 array with 5 drives takes over 35% CPU, whereas my Perc5i idles at 3% or so CPU usage, also writes are 20% faster on my hardware RAID, plus I can install any OS to it without having to lose my data and rebuild the array, as far as the OS is concerned it's just a regular harddrive. I've dual-booted linux from my array plenty of times, never had a problem. With software RAID that's simply not possible. I've done windows repair installs on my array, with no data lost.. If it were software, the windows installer would simply see it as five unformatted drives and offer to wipe out all your data for you.

As far as I'm concerned, software RAID is still crap.

Click to expand...

And that was all in Windows, right?

In Linux, the story is pretty different. Linux software RAID algos are spectacular. I haven't done any full benchmarks, but I recently found a throughput of about 120MiB/s with 3 drives consistently using less than 5% of a single core at a time. This is on my home partition which uses the XFS filesystem (which loves large files and hates lots of little ones, which my benchmarking software was using--I haven't done a balanced set of tests yet). My ext4 filesystem (for /) showed a throughput of around 160MiB/s with less CPU usage.

I apologize for not clarifying that I meant "in Linux" in my earlier post. I often forget that I'm dealing with people who use other OSes here... I'm used to the ArchLinux forums.

so here's my list so far:

Newegg.com - Once You Know, You Newegg

I'm unsure what to get for Ram, and I'm not sure what Hardrive to get. In my current computer i just have a 150gb hardrive, I've never had a problem with it, it doesn't make loud noises, there's nothing wrong with it, it's never crashed. Now when I read some reviews on the 1TB hardrives I hear of some of problems I've mentioned above.

edit:
So I have the choice between these 3 for Ram:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231122
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231145
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227269

Is there any way to know if the ram is compatible with my motherboard or processor?

From the mobo specifications:
Memory Standard DDR3 2133 OC

So, you need to get DDR3 RAM. 2133 is the clock speed of the RAM that the motherboard can handle, but you'll find that DDR3 2133 RAM is pretty darn expensive. So, I'd recommend getting 1800Mhz RAM instead; it's much cheaper and if it has heat spreaders, you can overclock it a bit.

jwc said:

From the mobo specifications:
Memory Standard DDR3 2133 OC

So, you need to get DDR3 RAM. 2133 is the clock speed of the RAM that the motherboard can handle, but you'll find that DDR3 2133 RAM is pretty darn expensive. So, I'd recommend getting 1800Mhz RAM instead; it's much cheaper and if it has heat spreaders, you can overclock it a bit.

Click to expand...

thanks jwc! so these should work fine then?
Newegg.com - Kingston HyperX 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1800 (PC3 14400) Desktop Memory Model KHX1800C8D3K2/4G - Desktop Memory

if it says it uses 2133 OC and I use 1800 it's not overpowering the 1800 ones right?