Help Me Build a New $2000 Gaming Rig
A friend and I are both in the market to build some new gaming PC's. We both last got new machines 5 years ago around the release of Warcraft III, and it's high time we invest into some new-fangled technology.
Neither of us has been too vigilant on PC parts in several years since our rigs held up surprisingly well, so I reach out to the GWJ community for suggestions in crafting a new joy machine. I know there are many PC gamers and experts around these parts, so any advice that can be spared is much appreciated.
Our price range is around $2000 for the machine itself. We will be buying flat panel monitors as well, on a separate budget. Suggestions for those are also welcome. Ideally, these machines will be built to last us another 4-5 years.
Thanks for reading!
"People in general have no principles, they do not believe in property rights (except as those rights apply to them), and they will steal all they want as long as they stand no risk of getting arrested for it. -GreatAjax on Piracy
Look at the $1500 thread and upgrade from there.
IF had to spend $2000 on a gaming pc I guess I would go with what matters the most first. And that's the vidcard. And so $1100 worth of dual 8800 gtx cards and a necessary $200-ish 1kw-ish power supply would be my starting point.
Add in $150 sli motherboard, $100 on a hard drive and dvd recorder together, $70 for 2 gigs pc6400 memory, $200 for an e6750 intel dual core 2 cpu, $100 on a case and $100 for an xfi soundcard.
HOnestly though I'd probably build a $1000 computer and use your $1000 savings and the interest to upgrade your rig every year or two.
Another note is that ATI announced the 2900 pro ($250, 512mb, faster than an 8800gts according to initial tests on one site) and Nvidia is probably due to refresh their lineup with a modest upgrade. Then again what's new right? This (cheaper faster tech) is always coming out. Still I'd probably sit on a $1k pc for now.
Here are some quick specs I posted in another forum for someone who wanted proof that homebuilts PC's can save you $1000's over Macs. Note this is a quad core processor which doesn't give you much advantage for games. And when the 2900 pro comes out, I would definitely get that in place of the x1950xtx. All these prices are from newegg as of last week.
$110-250 motherboard
$250-280 Q6600
$132-160 (800-1066 speed) 2GB Crucial tracer DDR2 memory
$150 seagate 500GB sata 720 rpm hdd
$259-279 radeon x1950xtx
$139 antec 900
$100-150 650w power supply
-------------
$1140-1408
$289 viewsonic 22" widescreen LCD monitor
$1429-1897
Starting about a year ago, the price/performance ratio of PC's skyrocketed. You can get an unbelievably powerful computer for dirt cheap these days and its only going to get better. (i.e. more powerful computers for less)
Being fangoriously devoured by a gelatinous monster.
Now I agree on a pure mhz basis you can build a cheaper pc, but that doesn't mean you're getting a better computing experience.
I build my own pcs and I own a Mac. I think the Mac is the best computer I've owned. There's many advantages to owning a Mac that do not show up in the specs.
In that price range, you can get the 8800GTS instead of the x1950... the speedwise, the 8800GTS spanks the 1950 and makes it cry. IIRC, it's faster than the 2900, too.
Seconded. Boo-Ya, grandma!
It's all the games, right? Or are you referring to the snotty attitude and the assumed "hipness"?
I kid. I'm riled up by a whiny art director who constantly spouts Mac superiority, but doesn't know how to do anything on his, and has spent the last two days bitching that our Windows environment isn't conducive to his shiny new $4K Mac. Keeps bitching that I expect him to use the VM I set up for him to use some of the IE only applications in the building. Mactards, can't live with 'em, can't shoot 'em.
Hypatian wrote:
From the sound of it, the new Parallels can probably embed IE into his Mac so that he barely knows he's running Windows at all. I think it calls it 'Coherence mode', and it unifies the clipboard and gets rid of the Windows desktop entirely, unless you want it. Basically, it figures out what Windows apps are trying to display, intercepts the calls, and shows it directly on the Mac desktop instead of on a Windows subscreen.
It's pretty clever, and might make your Mactard happy.
(I like Macs, but I'm not a zealot about any operating system. Hmm, well, that's not true. I'm an anti-Vista zealot, because I'm an anti-DRM zealot.
)
I put this together at the beginning of June.
Asus Striker Extreme motherboard - http://usa.asus.com/products.aspx?l1=3&l2=11&l3=397&l4=0&model=1439&mode...
Kind of a "ricer" motherboard, it has some features of dubious utility, like the LEDs that light it up so you can work in the dark. It's great for overclocking, and the blue LEDs in the rear match the blue LED fans that came with my case. With two video cards taking up two slots each, there aren't any accessible slots to take a sound card, but I've used the onboard audio with my last few machines, and the onboard with one seems fine to me.
Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 CPU
The E6750 CPU is out now and a pretty good deal.
2 pairs of OCZ PC2-8500 RAM - http://www.ocztechnology.com/products/memory/ocz_ddr2_pc2_8500_sli_ready...
2 BFG 8800 GTX OC video cards - http://www2.bfgtech.com/bfgr88768gtxoce.aspx
Cooler Master Stacker 830 case - http://www.coolermaster.com/products/product.php?act=detail&tbcate=168&i...
Very modular case. You can change which side the motherboard is mounted on, which way the door opens, etc. A bit on the large side, but it's aluminum, so it's not too heavy. Comes with a blue LED fan in the front. I added 5 more blue LED fans (4 on the side, one on top).
Thermaltake 850W power supply - http://www.thermaltakeusa.com/product/Power/ToughPower/w0131/w0131.asp
Modular, so you don't have extra power cables hanging around.
Western Digital Raptor 150GB 10k RPM SATA hard drive - http://www.wdc.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=189&Language=en
Depending on preferences, you might want to go with bigger drives in a RAID config.
Depending on the video cards you get, make sure the case can accommodate them. The 8800GTX cards are really long and won't fit in some cases that claim to take full-length cards.
WAR: Isembold (Volkmar)
Like DDR2 clocked at 667mhz? That totally bummed me out when I found that out about the mac pro's. 1066 or 1366 vs. 667 will make a huge difference.
And I know about the included iLife apps that essentialy double the value of the macs. However, both the mac and the homebuilt pc were priced w/o any bundled software.
But I really didn't want to get into a flame war there or here. I just wanted to help someone out that I thought was looking for help pricing homebuilt components.
Being fangoriously devoured by a gelatinous monster.
clock speed alone isnt the issue with Mac Pro's memory bandwidth "faults"
In fact for the most part clock speed for memory in anything but synthetic memory bandwidth tests is a minor boost in overall system performance.
Aint nothing new about the world order..it's been playing since the day they put George Washington on a quarter
85's face the truth you're too dumb.
http://www.myspace.com/armyofthepharaohs
Ha ha-ha ha. Happy!?! That's a good one! I've contemplated Parallels, but some of this IE stuff is really poorly written vendor supplied stuff. Add Office 2007 with lots of LiveMeeting and a parent company oblivious to anything not MS, and I am hesitant. Macs in an all MS environment tend to need a certain technical finesse, which he does not have.
I'm not anti-Vista per se, I just haven't seen a point yet on the consumer side. DRM is made to be broken. . . it will just take time for it to be abandoned.
So true. Right up there with most (not all) CPU and GPU overclocking. A whole lot of "hey, my framerate at 19542 x 13854 went from 46 to 48!!!!"
I'm starting to wonder if HDD performance is going to increase fast enough to offset the coming day where everything is just run temporarily in RAM, which would make bus speed a bigger factor.
Hypatian wrote:
That's a pretty hefty machine there deftly - may I ask how much dough you dropped on that? Also, how's the machine running?
Lag used to be a lot worse back in the day. Hell, it took Jesus 3 days to respawn.
Quintin_Stone wrote: The typical American eats 3.5 bigfoots in their sleep each year.
PSN: x93_confirmedx (message me for Socom!)
Well, remember that the Mac Pro is interleaving its RAM. I'd have to go back and look, but I remember figuring that it would have no trouble keeping the FSB on both CPU dies stuffed. And FB-DIMM channels are bidirectional, meaning that some cores can be writing while others are reading, and they all run at full speed. You do sacrifice some latency, which slows things down, but the large caches on those CPUs helps hide that.
I've switched away from running Windows on the Mac Pro because of the heat issues I had with the Accelero cooler on the x1950, but it was monstrously fast at every game I tried. The Supreme Commander demo ran like liquid no matter WHAT I did.
Doh! I thought it came in just under $2k, which is why I thought it would be good for the thread. But I just found my invoice, and it turns out it was almost $3k at the time. When I was pricing parts, I was waffling between keeping it reasonable and going all-out. It appears that the hit to my wallet has provided me with selective wallet-amnesia.
Dropping one of the video cards would bring it closer to $2k. My original intent was to just go with one card and add a second later if I needed more horsepower. Going with a more typical 7200 RPM drive would probably take the price down the rest of the way, and actually give you more space.
As for how it runs, it's great. I was in the same boat; it had been quite a while since I'd built a new machine. I've played Supreme Commander, Bioshock, TF2, World in Conflict, and WoW on it, and they've all been great. I should probably note that it's running XP, as I wasn't quite ready to make the jump to Vista at the time.
The only wierdness I've had is that after playing some games, playing a Quicktime or WMV results in a movie that's almost completely black. A reboot fixes it. The symptoms tell me it's not a hardware issue, but I haven't tracked down the cause yet (and haven't really tried).
WAR: Isembold (Volkmar)
Come to think of it, unless you're going to try overclocking pretty much everything, you could go with a cheaper motherboard as well. I'd still go with the Nvidia 680i chipset though.
WAR: Isembold (Volkmar)