Buying a new computer

Well its time to get a new computer and get rid of the useless shell that used to be my computer until it fried, and I was just wondering if any of the more tech headed people here at the pit could lend me a hand and tell me if the computer I'm putting together is going to be good, or if its going to be bottlenecking or overkill. Keep in mind this is a gaming computer. Advice much appreciated and thanks in advance. Here are the specs:

THERMALTAKE SOPRANO BLACK WINDOW Tower Chassis MODEL :VB1430BWSA

LG 18x DVD+/-R LIGHTSCRIBE BLACK Burner Dual Layer Model GSA-H42L OEM With NERO Software

AMD Athlon64 x2 6000+ 3.0Ghz 1MB Cache AM2 RETAIL BOX 211

Western Digital 500 gig 7200rpm SATAII KS 16meg Cache

CORSAIR TwinX 512meg x 2 (1 Gig) DDR2 XMS2-8500 1066mhz Matched Pair

ABIT AN9-32X nVidia nForce 590 Dual Channel DDR2 SATA Raid Dual GBLan 7.1CH HD Audio

ZALMAN 600watt HEATPIPE COOLED Power Supply Model: ZM600-HP

INNO3D NVIDIA 8800 GTX 768MB 384Bit GDDR3 Core Frequency 575/1800Mhz SLi-Ready

1GB of ram really insn't enough if you are a gamer, especially if you decide to go with Vista. Go 2GB!

Are you an overclocker, or do you plan on overclocking? If yes, then I would recommend the core 2 duo's over an AMD x2.

Ya, i also sagest you go with 2 gigs of ram. and yes, amd is falling behind. I would probably go with Intel at the point in time.

---

Reality has become a commodity.

Woops put 2 x 512, meant to be 2 x 1 gig. Anyway if i was going to get an Intel Core 2 Duo for gaming what one should i get and what motherboard do you recommend?

---

Reckless disregard for childrens well being, women and nothing but utter contempt for other cultures.

I would go for the Core 2 Duo E6750 (2.66 GHz, FSB1333) with a P35 mobo.

tomshardware said:
Consider the FSB1333 CPUs as pathfinders for the next processor generation. In any case, the Core 2 processors were and still are the fastest processors available - in terms of performance per clock - and Core 2 Extreme with four cores clearly is the fastest x86 processor on the market today.

If you are about to purchase a new platform, we recommend going for one of the latest chipsets (Intel P35, G33, Nvidia nForce 6 series) and probably one of those FSB1333 processors. The average performance advantage of 1% when compared to FSB1066 shouldn't be the reason; the attractive pricing of $163 and $183 for the E6550 and E6750, and the fact that you'll get the latest G0 stepping are highly appealing.

Crono etc, would you agree? I'm looking for a new system too, before october 8th.

Well. It's up to the buyer really. If you want technical mumbo-jumbo Intel's dual core stuff is "faster" than AMD's dual core stuff mostly because of the FSB speeds. The internal stuff is most likely very comparable. Intel's chips are sporting much faster FSB's than AMD chips right now.

But, with that comes an added cost. You should also ask yourself if you actually need that computing power (chances are the answer is no and it wont be yes for several years). With transport speeds on the bus up to 1.3GHz to utilize that you have to have memory running at the same speed, otherwise the bus will be going slower. On NewEgg (arguably one of the cheapest hardware sites) only sells two types of 1333MHz memory (they are different sockets or something and since you didn't list a board I don't know which socket it would be) They're in 2GB kits of 2 1GB sticks and go for anywhere from $380 to $450 USD. Which is a lot for speed that you're really not going to utilize. It would be nice while you're doing stuff and you would notice things going faster, it isn't actually necessary.

Most games (coming)out (save something like Crysis) can be ran with memory around the 400MHz mark. 800MHz memory would make these things run just fine. (Quick note, the memory that goes 1.3GHz is not DDR2 memory, but DDR3 memory which actually has a different timing than DDR2, this also means that even if you don't want to get ram that fast because of it's price you still have to fork out for DDR3 memory, which is, obviously, more expensive right now, but all boards and chips (etc) will be using DDR3 by this time next year when it makes more sense)

While Intel processors are more expensive than AMD processors, the price difference is only moderate (less than $100 USD as far as I know), but the implications of the chip requiring a bunch of new hardware specifications will make the resulting system much more expensive.

Honestly, I'm sure what you're really trying to go for is a nice fast system that can destroy most all of the games coming out for the rest of this year and part of next year, right? In that case, remember that you WILL be spending a large chunk of money on your graphics card and you really don't want to skimp there. Any Intel or AMD processor you purchase will be good, but that doesn't stand for motherboard or graphics card manufacturers (and Power Supply manufacturers either, seriously, it's sort of an important piece of equipment). Take note of the manufacturers listed in the first post for the motherboard, power supply, and graphics card. (I don't know what Abit is like now, at one point they were good, then they were God awful)

Weigh the options and see what sits best with you. Put together a couple systems based on how much you can find the parts for and so forth until you find a configuration that satisfies your need for awesome and makes your wallet not so sad.

Also, just buyer beware. The AMD quad core chips are superior to the Intel chips because of their ground up design. Unless Intel changes their quad core configuration (two dual core chips linked together: yeah, that's efficient) AMD will have something substantially better. Perhaps something else to keep in mind is that Intel has a much larger market in satisfying business partners rather than common consumers. In both camps of processor manufacturers what we're currently buying is ancient compared to what they're working on.

I hope this helps you, if you want my direct personal opinion. I personally go with AMD and Nvidia almost every time. Both of the companies continue to deliver substantially beneficial hardware and seem to genuinely want to push the hardware forward rather than banking on old techniques. I was surprised to see that the Intel core2duo actually has 64-bit support. (Intel-64, I think they call that instruction set)

Until Intel comes out with affordable chips (that use their light-technologies) I'll probably go with AMD until they steer me wrong. Because at this point, it's not like one works better than the other. Both companies are incredibly good at what they do.

---

Blame it on Microsoft, God does.

Dam my message got deleted because i took too long to write it. Well will 800MHz be enough for games like Crysis and Bioshock and future games for about a year? Also I'm leaning towards AMD right now sinch in the benchmarks I've seen the Intel and AMD x2 cores have very slight difference in performance between the two plus I've never had an AMD cpu and I'm curious. Thanks for all advice so far.

What you need to focus on for games is the graphics card. All the other things are important, but when it comes to games (especially the ones you listed) so much is actually being done on the GPU that the memory speed won't impact the overall performance that much. 800MHz memory should be fine.

The only problem is Crysis. Apparently it's a beast. Even the demo versions they've been letting people play aren't cranked all the way up and those machines are far more extravagant than what you're listing here. (Most of the videos of the game are it running on "moderately high" settings, as has been described a few times by people who played it at E3).

BioShock has relatively low requirements. Sure, you should play it with a dual core CPU, but it isn't necessary to make the game run at full capacity. The main thing you need to make that game run is lots of graphics memory (512MB minimum). In fact you'll notice MANY games running much faster with more graphics memory ... since ... as I said before ... more and more things are being done on the GPU.

I think a better game to test your machine against would be Crysis or even UT3. But, really, as far as I can tell there will be no bigger power hog coming out this year than Crysis. In fact, I'm nearly 100% positive that almost no one will be able to crank that game all the way up. (And I don't mean like in Far Cry since there's no limit on the number of particles you can render)

Keep in mind, also, that a lot of the games coming out are being designed to not be PC exclusive. Many of them are coming out on X360 and PS3 ... both of which can be annihilated with the setup you listed before, graphically. (Assassin's Creed, Gears of War, Medal of Honor Airborne, Unreal Tournament 2, etc)

---

Blame it on Microsoft, God does.

Wow Crysis sounds like a real resource
hog. Although it comes out in november I think and I dont know if it
has been optimised yet. Also does crysis have dynamic fluids?

---

Reckless disregard for childrens well being, women and nothing but utter contempt for other cultures.

I know that the oceans and clouds are some form of volumetric. But, I don't know why kinds of fluid dynamics they have implemented (if any).

The reason why the game is so tough to optimize is that there's so much going on at any given time. Considering everything they actually are packing into the game at any given moment it's amazing how efficient it already is (Way to go dynamic occlusion).

Considering the game has dynamic occlusion, dynamic light maps, an advanced physics and particle system, as well as the slew of various visual effects, you'll most likely need something beefy to get it looking like the videos. However, Crytek has stated many times that the game will run on three year old machines. How well has yet to be determined.

---

Blame it on Microsoft, God does.