Upgrade time again.

Just started the upgrade process again.Been like 2 years since the last time. I don't have fistfulls of cash, but I managed to scrape together these items so far:
Diamond ATI HD4870 1GB Graphics
Asus Maximus II Formula Mobo
4 gigs Kingston 1066 FSB HyperX memory
Next purchase will be the chip and a 1 gig power supply in December. Not going to spend a ton of cash this time around, but really, I don't need to.
Going for a Core 2 Quad Q9550 at about 300$ US. I understand Intel is coming out with a new architecture (I7) next year, but I can wait till that is a proven architecture before starting over again. So far , Far Cry 2 runs absolutely awesomely at 1920 X 1200 WITH 8X AA and everything else on "Very high".It's a sweet game. There are so many cool releases I want to try this year, but I still haven't even finished Bio-Shock yet. Fallout 3, and L4D will have to wait.

Wow, that's one nice machine you have there!

---

Aaron's Stuff

What is your total spent on this dream machine?

No need to overspend on the 'premium' boards - any of the P35 based P5K series are just as good (well, the black PCB models have uprated VRMs... usually 8 phase... which are definately worth it... obviously the max' is 16), or P45 P5Qs if you really care. The maximus II is priced very high for amid range chipset, and while its a nice enough board there are many X48 solutions out there for those sorts of prices... although unless you might be thinking about multiGPU there isn't much difference. Ditto 'performance' RAM and over-rated PSUs, all of which just cost you money for SFA.

High wattage PSUs are completely pointless. Most people with knowledge run Seasonic HX series 520's or 620's, which are rebadged Seasonic M1s with a 5year warranty, single 120mm design and lowest stress ripples you're ever likely to see.

The 1GB R700 models are a benefit at those sorts of resolutions, although the revised GTX260's with 216 SPs and 72TpC are very strong too. I do like R700's edge detect 4x/12x MSAA though... I think the IQ is exceptional given the same performance dropoff of traditional 4x MSAA. Still, nVidia's PhysX support is going to be an increasingly powerful point in their favour over the coming year.

Nehalem is absolutely stonking, and the NDAs expire very soon... although mainstream Bloomfield models will not appear until '09. While it brings a modest boost to IPC its improvements in extracting parallelism are vast over current yorkfields, which right now are considerably slower than higher clocked wolfdale's in all but some very specific apps such as certain x264 encoders. Still, you generally can get the best of both worlds as they all have bags of headroom on a P35. Not sure why you'd buy a Q9550 over a Q9450 when the only difference is 166MHz... both their upper ceilings are deep into 3GHz territory. TBH for most stuff the lower L2 on the 9300/9400 hardly matters much either... still clocking the buggery out of an 8400 is still easily the fastest and cheapest way to go for a pure gaming rig.

Larchy, I am a big AMD fan.. and nVidia.. can you look at newegg and post a good system that is mid range in price. I value your opinion.

Er, what is a mid-range price in the funny money you guys use? :P

Something like...

Mobo: A P35 chipset board like the ASUS P5K would be cheapest and do everything you need, they also overclock really well and there are fancier versions like the deluxe/wifi if you fancy something more flashy or want better overclocking/more SATA ports or something. If you are thinking about OC'ing (and the Core 2's obviously OC tremendously well) then something with a more advanced VRM would be better... usually the black PCB versions are at least 8 phase for ASUS. There are also the P5Q series based on the P45 chipset, which just has a bunch more PCI-Express lanes... but that makes bugger all difference unless you're kitting out a multi-GPU rig, so just grab whatever variant you like the look of tbh.. there are loads.

Intel is the only game in town chipset-wise. nVidia's attempts are consistently dire.

CPU: Basically despite the imminent release of Nehalem in the next few days, the current Core 2 series is still the best way to go. The E8200 is 2.66GHz to the 8400's 3GHz and the newegg price difference is $7, both have the same cache etc so tbh the E8400 is the best value of all the 8x00 models... haven't seen one yet that hasn't hit 3.6GHz even just on the stock cooling. They will potentially go much higher too.

Q9300/9400s are down on cache compared to the Q9450 and upwards, but the benchies show its not as big a handicap as you may expect and given the price grabbing a q9300 and ramming it up into the 3GHz range gives you really good value. Still, the duallie 8x00s have higher top speed potential and clockspeed is still king when it comes to performance. The yorkfields really are poor for desktop users because, honestly, there is bugger all that can make any use of all four cores.

RAM: These are all on a 1066 bus, but tbh just grab the cheaper DDR2 800 and whack the FSB up to 400 and there are bugger all bandwidth issues.... everything is bottlenecked by the MCH (which nehalem is moving ondie same as AMD did back in 2003), so just bung it up to 400 and don't worry about it. Faster DDR2 might be better if you're going over the 400FSB mark and you want to keep the RAM at 1:1, but tbh there is very little performance drop in using a divider these days so its not a big deal. The P35 onwards doesn't suffer from the memory strap issue the 965P had so no worries there.

So yeah, if you can save some $$$ buy DDR2800, or 1066 if its only pennies difference. Corsair Value Select (or the XMS stuff is cheap these days too), crucial/micron, adata are all good.... too much potential trouble bothering with anyone else tbh.

Don't worry about latency, its largely irrelevant.

Graphics: Well the 4850s are kings at the moment in value terms. The 9800GTs are equivalently priced but they're just rebranded 8800GTs (well, there are minor differences) and can't quite keep up. The revised GTX260+'s are great competition for the 4870 but they probably wouldn't fit into a modest budget.

Going AMD over nVidia gains you DX10.1 support (which even the GTX series lacks), but loses you PhysX support. Due to Vista's WDDM requiring driver homegeneity you won't be able to pop a cheap geffer in with a Raddy for physics unless you're running XP... so thats one less option too.

PSU: anything Seasonic 400W range, Corsair VX series, HX520 if the budget is there for it although its total overkill.

HDD: Samsung Spinpoint F1s are the business for most people. Good alternative is the WD6400AAKS which are half the price and absolutely stonkingly quick, not far behind the F1 and way ahead of all it's 250GB platter rivals.

Gimme a rough budget to work to and I'll give newegg a once over and knock a quote up

There's also more blathering on component options here... its relatively up to date.

[Edit: Nehalem NDAs have expired ]

I rather recently upgraded myself. Im running a mid grade p-35(Asus p-5k), E8400, Visiontech 4870. 2 Gigs of 1066 (soon to be 4).

I run Far Cry 2 at 1440X900 at max settings (Including anti-analising.)
PS: Don't buy Far Cry 2. It sucks. http://www.metacritic.com/games/platforms/pc/farcry2 A 87 from critics (witch i think were bought) and a 6.1 from the users. Witch is about were i stand.

Larchy knows what he talking about. Unless you plan on running 2 or more gfx cards stick to p35. If your using the comp for gaming mostly don't bother with the core 2 quads. The E8400 is $180 and it can be overclocked to 4 Ghz if you spend $50 more on cooling.
http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/desktop-cpu-charts-q3-2008/World-in-Conflict-1680x1050,820.html
Look and were the E8600 sits in the chart. You can oc a E8400 well past that.
I don't know what exactly what your buying but the last time i bought Kingston it ran so hot it nearly burnt my finger. My Patriot run almost cool to the touch.
And yes, getting a 1000 watt PSU is a wast of money. i have a 750 and i know its overkill. A 550 should be fine. If you plan on adding more to the rig later go for a 650 if you like.

Hope that helps.
Hear is a review for Far Cry 2 that i agreed with.

Omer E gave it a 5:
This is a very average game. The 'professional' reviews above really don't give a good idea of how mediocre in quality this game is. The environments are not as lush and beautiful as they were made out to be. The graphics are nothing spectacular. The AI is incredibly iffy in both its mechanics and its intelligence, and the open world philosophy is not implemented as well as one would think. The graphics are on par, if not a little worse, than CoD4, just on a larger scale. The worst thing of all is by far the character models, although, there is a lot of variance, and doesn’t matter whether it’s one of the main characters or the common enemy. Some of the models are rather decent and others are just horrid. One of the nicer visuals in the game comes from fire effects, which can be amazing at night, and there is a degree of fulfillment to be had when setting an entire grouping of bushes and grass ablaze. The graphics in general are bearable though, but it’s just not that fantastic for a game that has been building itself up so much through hype. The storyline hardly motivates one to play through the game. The character interactions are stale and can sometimes feel weird and incomplete. The missions are essentially the same thing over and over again. Destroy this convoy, get this item or kill this guy – over and over again. Fine, there is only so many types of missions one can engage in with regards to a shooter, but put some imagination to it. There are definitely more creative ways to have these tasks complete. The biggest problems arise from the game mechanics with regards to the AI. It is just much too aggressive. Going to complete a mission will have you going through multiple militia outposts that will automatically attack you for no given reason, and these outposts will respawn quite frequently. The aggressiveness of the outposts is quite a hindrance, and will really get in your way. You will get really tired of having to deal with them all the time. Enemies can somehow magically see you behind thick bushes and plants, and will shoot quite enthusiastically. The firefights are just not as intense as most reviewers have made them out to be. Lacking in the ability to lean out from behind walls makes this more frustrating, and the enemies can just take way too many bullets. There are hints and glimpses of good ideas here and there, like having to unjam, repair and maintain weapons, or having to treat wounds during a firefight, but they are implemented rather poorly and don’t add that much of a significant angle to the gameplay. After playing for a while, the animations for these tasks become rather repetitive. Some of the tasks should have more variation in the animations. This is particularly true for repairing your car. You will get bored of having to do this so many times over and over again. Destructibility of the environment is rather iffy. Crysis, in comparison, implements it much better than this game does. The trees just don’t break down well at all. When a portion breaks off, it sort of just falls vertically in a somewhat slow speed and just plops to the ground. The whole idea of ‘open-world gameplay’ is cut short by lack of variance in the environments. Every area pretty much looks the same. There are too many ways in which this game drones into a series of repetitive patterns. All the safe-houses have pretty much the same two guys guarding it that you must kill to unlock it, and they all have the same bed and shelf where you will find some ammo. The weapons shops and armories are the same, the outposts and enemies – the same. In the end, I wouldn’t pay the $50 price tag for this game. I can see that the developers have put a lot of work into this, and looking at all the aspects of the game separately, one would think that you’d have an amazing game in the end, but each feature just seems so detached and unnecessary. It just doesn’t work well as a whole. There is still some fun to be had. I say pick this up in a budget-game bin a couple of months down the line.

---

Reality has become a commodity.

Thanks for your thoughts on matters Larchy. You have given me food for thought on my CPU choice, however, being a vanilla user, I could sure use a decent "idiots" step by step guide to overclocking. I get confused by core voltages and memory timings. My chip right now is a Core2Duo E6700. The reason for the upgrade is simply that I am building a hand me down machine out of the old parts for my step daughter, so I get the upgrades.

There ain't nowt wrong with getting a quad, but certainly the Q9450 would be a better model choice. I'm running one and it's oc'ed like a bitch, but I honestly couldn't tell any difference between it and my old oc'ed E6600 in gaming, photoshop or even encoding apps tbh

If you get a P35/45 based board then to overclock all you have to do is raise the FSB speed. By default its at 333MHz for the E8x00 CPUs (1333 effective as its quad pumped for data) - just raise it to 400MHz and you've got a 1600MHz bus (and tbh these systems are handicapped by the FSB bandwidth more than anything else, so thats a big improvement) and your RAM/CPU speeds will just sort themselves out.

DDR800 will just run 1:1, but its no big deal with a P35/45 and you don't really need to touch RAM settings.

The CPU... well you can force the multiplier to get a particular clockspeed. For the E8400 its stock 3GHz, which means the multiplier is 9 for the 333FSB. So, at 400FSB, it would be 3.6GHz - you can back the multiplier off the 8x for 3.2GHz is its too hot/unstable, 7.5x for stock 3GHz speed if you don't want to oc the cpu.

Tbh its all so fast anyway it might not even be worth the hassle overclocking.

The point about the wolfdales (thats the 45nm E8x00 CPUs) is that they're so easy to oc, and hit massive speeds without having to fiddle with voltages... just bump the FSB and thats it, plain sailing.

Its best not to fiddle with the voltages anyway as they have variable VID's which change under load. ASUS actually overvolt them slightly to combat a current drop issue (vdroop) anyway - my oc'ed yorkfield (thats the 45nm 9x00 series) is actually undervolted on my P5K-E Thingummy edition

If you feel like giving it a go then you can easily push over the 450MHz FSB mark on most decent boards, and the quality ASUS boards get up to around (and over) the 500MHz mark, although you sometimes will need voltage fiddling and third-party cooling to get to that level, which ain't really worth it unless you happen to enjoy messing around with that stuff.

Kingston is well regarded, but I've never personally liked it. Adata is an excellent cheaper brand (its really superb, I used to sell it... I owned a chain of PC stores ), but the corsair value select or even the fancy XMS is real cheap here in the UK right now on places like ebuyer. Lifetime warranty and no hassles.

The Nehalems are certainly not worth it. They're fast, but in single threaded stuff (ie anything short of enterprise server workloads) they're not appreciably faster than the C2Ds and the platforms are far more expensive right now.

nVidia is due to refresh its GTX2x0 series with die shrinked parts soon too... rumor has it they're making a loss on the 260's to compete with the 4870s!