Been a few years since I played any computer games heavily, and my computer is now antiquated, so I think this week I'm gonna build myself a new one.

Specs:
i7-950
Asus Rampage III mobo
XFX 6870 Black Edition (maybe 2 and SLI)
8gb of either Geil, Corsair, or Kingston X 2200 or 2300mhz ram
Creative Fatality Titanium (or somesuch) sound card
128gb Solid State drive for my op system, which is going to be Win7 Ultimate
2x 75gb Raptor 10000rpm drives in Raid0 (already got 'em from old sys)
Corsair cooler for the cpu, semi-water cooling
Other stuff that's not important

Anyway, I'm getting Starcraft 2, Crysis, Medal of Honor, and a few other games right off the bat too, anyone here play?

Hell, I may even start playing WoW again haha. I'm bored.

 

^ Andrew do you not know gran turismo 5 just came out??? spend a little time with that game the Evo is a Premier car :P

 

Bought it last night lol and got Forza 3 last week, along with Fallout: New Vegas.

On another note, I'm either gonna build a new comp... or buy car parts and go to the gym. Hmm lifestyle lifestyle lifestyle....

 

\
Got bored and started WoW again.
Just bought a gaming laptop from ASUS since my desktop was on its way out.... I also have SC2 but dont play it much, Only got sucked into WoW again because I play @work all night.. nothing like getting paid to play.

 

I need a new computer, but I stick to games like Counter-Strike and the Battlefield series.

 

say no to medal of honor. really wasn't that great.

 

Just make sure your windows 7 ultimate is a 64 bit version or the 8gb ram will do you no good.

 

I wouldn't personally waste my money on Win7 Ultimate, but that is just me. The benefits with Win7 Ultimate are mostly for if you were managing networked computers but not much else. Also, MS won't support it as long as Win7 Pro.

Both Win7 Pro and Win7 Ultimate come with both x86 and x64 versions, so you don't have to worry about that. Just make sure you install x64 otherwise you won't be able to access more than half of your RAM. I haven't done a lot of compatibility testing with the newest apps/games, but that is something you might encounter.

For RAM, don't count out OCZ. They make good quality, fast, and usually better timed memory, and you can usually find it for cheap.

For audio I suggest going with the X-Fi Titanium; don't support the asshat known as Fatal1ty. The X-Fi Titanium gives you most of the actual needed features, in particular the X-Fi chip, but you don't pay extra to stuff the pockets of some l33t gamer.

Personally I don't even use the onboard or an add-in sound card as I have headphones that are their own sound device. E.g. - the G35 or G930 from Logitech. Plug them in and play, and never have to worry about cranking at 4 in the morning and your gf's pesky sleep schedule!

For your SSD, make sure you do plenty of research here as the drives are still relatively young and there are many pitfalls related to speed, longevity, etc. Personally I don't run anything but Intel or similarly-OEM'd drives. Intel are typically the fastest, and most of their drives clean up correctly after themselves which other manufacturers don't always do (basically the data you delete is marked for deletion but never actually cleared so you eventually run out of space and the drive starts working noticeably less efficient).

One other thing to consider - for your boot drive an SSD will greatly enhance boot times. It will do pretty well with the actual operating system but you likely won't notice the difference when an app takes 5 seconds to load instead of 6 or 7, and I'm guessing you won't be doing a lot of sustained random read/write operations. If you boot your system often then you will certainly see the benefit. If however you use standby or just leave the system powered on then obviously you won't see as much benefit.

I personally run a pair of Velociraptors, but I have run Raptors for a long time for the same reason as you - I already owned them. Velociraptors are badass, though.

For the case, I suggest looking into Silverstone cases. They improve their designs based on benefits to the user and have killer looking cases with plenty of room. For cooling, you mentioned semi-water cooling so I'm guessing you mean heatpipe based. That or a closed design just for the proc. If you have a well designed case, air cooling will get you most of the way there if you plan on overclocking. For heatpipe coolers I'd suggest Xigmatek (especially anything with their direct touch heatpipe design) or Noctua. There are other good heatsink/fan combos and if you want a lot of data to research I suggest looking at FrostyTech.

I guess this thread reminds me...Tyler, send me a PM if you want to get your build going again.

 

Hey, I'll buy SC2 from ya if you want to sell it. Assuming I will be able to use it online without Blizzard pitching a fit.

 

Cant its tied to my battle.net account and WoW account

 

Good lookin' out! I was not aware, and had decided on Ultimate mostly cause it sounded cool

As for the OCZ, yeah I've had good luck with them in the past, and currently what I'm running in my old gaming comp that has been running overclocked for the last 6 years, very stable.

The comp. is getting put off until after Xmas though, I just bought a cast IM and fuel rail

 

WOW is the devil, I will never touch that thing again. Too much of my time was sucked up by WOW haha...

 

Funny... never thought of touching on the gamer question on this forum, but YEAH, I'm a gamer

I hear the warnings about the SSD but so far, no issues here. Just don't reformat, use the stock setup they drives come with and all is well.

My game machine specs are:

ASUS Formula IV MB
AMD 970 3.5 gig
Water Cooled on Zalman Reserator with blocks on the CPU, GPUs N&S Bridges with forced air radiators between the GPUs and CPU. +/- 40 at full load.
Antex 1000 w Power
200 side fan for ambient inbound airflow, 140 exhaust fan on the top of the custom case.
Crossfire 5850s at 16x each
RipJaw 1800 OC at 8 gig
Win 7 64 bit
OCZ 120 gig SSD

Desk/Office Machine (also gamer)
ASUS 98TD EVO MB
AMD 955 3.2 gig
Water Cooled on G70 +/- 50 at full load.
Antex 650 w Power
2 front mount 140, one side mount 140, 1 bottom mount inbound airflow; 2 rear mount 140, 1 top mount 140 exhaust fan on the top of the Antec 200 case.
2 470 GTX in SLI oc'd
RipJaw 1800 OC at 4 gig
Win 7 32 bit
Raptor 300 GB HDD

I honestly play my office machine MORE because of the Mult-monitor display and NVidia Real 3D imagery. Adds a killer dimension to some game

FOR THE MONEY SPENT, focus your dollars in the Video Card. You will get more out of your gamer by focusing your attention and buying power on a solid video card setup than almost anything else.

2nd most important factor, Memory. Fast, stable, Reliable. Make sure you configure properly to get your dual or triple channel mode running. Biggest gains are there.

AMD offers amazing threading capabilities for far less money than Intel. My advise, SAVE your money by buying AMD and getting 5200 mts mainboard transit speed and direct threading and use that extra money on killer video cards. i7 is cool but will bleed your budget dry and in the end... I think you get just as much speed out of an AMD quad core.

There are some KILLER prices on ATI's 5770 video cards right now and slapping a couple of those in Crossfire mode for less than $250 beats the hell out of a single GPU card at $260. Although I am completely bias towards nVidia (because ati drivers SUCK and nVidia has killer 3D), for the money, there are alot of ATI cards that kick along pretty good. Add to that, AMD ownes ATI so their MBs can be purchased to optimize for Crossfire pretty inexpensively.

As for games... pretty much anything in the Battlefield line is gold in my book. Yes, even the mew Medal of Honor. Short, smaller but some really great graphics and the multi-player games are pretty fun. I'm totally Jonesing for BF3

A bunch of us get together every Friday Night (from about 9 PM tp 4-5 AM) and play BC2. SOOO fun. If you want to join our (cough) clan and help cover server costs, you can have your very own place to play (and kick noob tubers). Plus, we have our own Ventrillo server too, so playing with realtime voice over is pretty killer. Granted, most of us are 30 - 40 but our resident 25 year old is a National Gaming competitor and will guaranteed SPANK most anyone on line.

Scott
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esea?

 

Question for you sir, you have a amd chipset with sli? How did you do that? (I don't usual care about sli but i wanna have surround 3d haha