help me waste my money

ruuman

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Right the time has come for me to upgrade my PC.

I want to base it around one of the new quad core extreme intels.
At least 2 gig ram (expanding to at least 4gig)
duel head card (moving to SLI later because I want to run 3 screens)
Good quality sounds card

Games I play:

Armed Assualt
BF2
Fear

Software I use:

Cubase
Adobe premier/after effects
Maya
Photoshop
lightwave

Budget 1500GBP to 2000GBP

What would you get?
 
I don't think any of those games support dual-core or even quad-core. I mean, they'll run nicely but won't take total advantage of the CPU's multiple cores. Now, if your programs support a quad-core CPU, go for it. If not, I would get a cheaper CPU like a Conroe (Core 2 Duo) and save some cash for the other components.
 
yeah the software I use supports quad core, I do tons of video rendering and it's killing me at the moment because it takes so freaking long to do anything!!

I thought I'd list the games to get a feel for what people think a good graphic's card is, processing power is the most important aspect though. I probably play 6 hours of games a week. probably 20hours a week doing "other" task (no it's not just porn :))
 
Don't think you need SLI for third monitor. I think if you were looking for just ok desktop performance, you could just stick in an old pci card (like a geforce2 pci) and have windows extend the desktop to it on monitor 3.

But I could be wrong.
 
Don't think you need SLI for third monitor. I think if you were looking for just ok desktop performance, you could just stick in an old pci card (like a geforce2 pci) and have windows extend the desktop to it on monitor 3.

But I could be wrong.

you are correct, but doing this can get seriously annoying in comparison to using matched cards. I may not bother with the third monitor and go for another widescreen monitor, not decided yet.
 
I imagine you'll be using a lot of RAM, this is as fast as ****

Corsair 2GB DDR2 XMS2 Dominator PC2-9136C5 TwinX (2x1GB)

MY-127-CS_400.jpg


BUT EXPENSIVE!:|
 
Right the time has come for me to upgrade my PC.

I want to base it around one of the new quad core extreme intels.
At least 2 gig ram (expanding to at least 4gig)
duel head card (moving to SLI later because I want to run 3 screens)
Good quality sounds card

Games I play:

Armed Assualt
BF2
Fear

Software I use:

Cubase
Adobe premier/after effects
Maya
Photoshop
lightwave

Budget 1500GBP to 2000GBP

What would you get?

I would get exactly what i have now:
Core 2 Duo E6600
ASUS P5B Deluxe
OCZ Platinum DDR2-800
XFX GeForce 7950GT XXX (it ROCKS, 5-10% faster than a stock 7950GT)
Case, PSU and harddisk to be added to your own taste.

Oh, and matched cards only matters when it comes to using them in SLI (you'll be needing IDENTICAL ones, down to BIOS revision). If you want 3 screens, just stick a GeForce 7300GS or similar in the second x16 PCIe slot (as long as you don't try to combine ATi and nVidia, you're good AFAIK)

cvg, on that budget, Kentsfield is out of the question, as it alone costs over $1000
 
I would get exactly what i have now:
Core 2 Duo E6600
ASUS P5B Deluxe
OCZ Platinum DDR2-800
XFX GeForce 7950GT XXX (it ROCKS, 5-10% faster than a stock 7950GT)
Case, PSU and harddisk to be added to your own taste.

Dude you stole my computer! :p

About SLI on Nvidia; you do not need identical cards. You only need identical cores. BIOS-revision etc are not important, if they did matter you'd be hard pressed to run anything in SLI (manufacturers upate the BIOS _often_). They dont even need to have the same ammount of memory.

Still, if you have the money, a 8800GTS outperforms two 7950 in SLI. The GTX is just mindblowing.
 
The QX6700 costs a $1000 not over, plus his budget is 2000GBP not USD, makes a huge difference. Around 600GBP for a CPU does not sound to out of reach.

I would think about it though, I do a fair amount of video processing on Premiere and have not really observed much of an improvement between top of the line P4 and an overclocked 920. Thou I'm all for raw processing power, I seriously doubt a QX6700 will be (much) faster than an E6700. There are several bottlenecks that will keep your potential down.

The area where I did see huge improvement in 2-core vs 1 though is multitasking, i.e. rendering a 20 min scene while doing all kinds of other stuff like Office or net. With a single core the whole damn thing would just freeze. In that respect a quad-core will be killer, which I guess could improve things as CPU cycles are not wasted doing something "else". Will it zoom by though? I wouldn't count on it. By their (Adobe) own admission programs like Photoshop is not optimized to take direct advantage of multiple CPU cores as most graphics operations are linear and 1 core or 10, the data still runs thru the same bus and memory controller.

But hey, if I had the money, Kentsfield, here I come.

I have 2 eVGA 78000GT's (not in SLI) running 3 monitors ( 24 + a pair of 20's) and the 7800 ran games pretty much maxed out at 1920x1200 with an average of 30~35FPS. Not awesome, but not bad either. Today, I would probably get an 8800 for main, and something like a 7800/7900GT for the second to run second and third monitor.
 
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I forget who it was, but some company made a special box that made it possible to run 3 monitors in games.. if you want to do that kind of thing. Might have been Voodoo or one of those old video card companies.
 
cool, thanks everyone, this great stuff. I'm going with the quad as most of the software I use is multi CPU compatible and the bit's that aren't will be soon. I also have azerus constantly running as well so I will genuinely us the power.
I think graphics wise I'm going to stick to 2 widescreen monitors for the sec but spec a motherboard which supports 2x the super fast PCI standard (the name escapes me at the moment).

question is do I go for vista or stick on XP pro?
 
May as well take the Vista plunge.
 
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