High-End System Recommendation

[sparhawk]

I was wondering, when I look at NVidias website, there is series 8 and series 9. I would have expected that 9 is the current topline, but from the prices, I see that 8 is more expensive. From the technical data it also looks as if 9 would be better.

 

Can somebody recommend me what the current high-end cards would be? Currently I have an ATI, but I'm considering for my next system an nvidia again. So what should I take?

 

Also for CPUs, I was thinking of AMD Phenom Quad Core CPU and I wonder which would be better. Intel or AMD? Since the prices of AMD are much lower, this would be better, and if there is only a small difference that doesn't matter so much to me. Depends on how big the difference is.

[Baddcog]

The 9 series are the new ones I believe, from what I've heard beter bang for the buck.

 

When I bought my tower I got an Intel Quad. I believe there was a better choice of Mobos for intel, that's probably your deciding factor. I don't think AMD even had a quad yet.

[Dram]

There is the overclocking factor to consider also.

 

The Intel Quad Extreme cpus have unlocked multipliers, which means you can really milk them for all they're worth. I have a QX6700, which is unlocked, and currently I got it running from 2.66ghz each core to 3ghz each core with just the multiplier without changing anything else. It's useful in the least.

 

I personally prefer Intel and NVidia, rather then AMD and ATI. This is due to past bad experiences. As for card, the best cards out today are the NVidia 2xx series, but are waaay too expensive.

 

As for motherboard, make sure you get one which matches the card you get, so if you choose NVidia, make sure it has SLi support, or if you choose ATI make sure it has CrossFire support.

[jdude]

My brother has an Nvidia 9600 and it performs just slightly worse than my ATI 3870. It pains me to see ATI already released a ATI 4870... but anyways the price differentiation between the Nvidia 9600 and ATI 3870 is huge when you look at regular retail outlets. For example, right now at futureshop you can gert the 3870 for 189 dollars [CAN] because they have a sale on [i've never seen it NOT on sale :| ] where as the Nvidia 9600 gt runs at 250 dollars. When my brother purchased the 9600 it was on sale 50 dollars off so we got both for roughly 200 dollars each.

 

The 9600 also has a smaller fan which I don't like because my old x1850 pro card was in the same format, taking up one slot and it overheated a lot! And I didn't even OC it or anything. My new card the hd 3870 has never overheated once but it takes up two slots [plugs into one, but is large], but I don't mind at all. However to be fair my brother's 9600 hasn't over heated once since he's had it either.

 

I find with these higher end cards, when your spending roughly 200+ dollars on them, it really comes down to how desperate are you to are for that extra 5 fps. Personally I'd rather keep my 50-100 dollars and have -5fps than the competition.

[STiFU]

A friend of mine has the 9600 GTX, which I would've bought too, if it wasn't too big for my case. He has the same case as me and had to take out his power supply unit, to get that card into his pc. But don't worry, we've got an Arctic Cooling case with "special air circulation" like this. Total Crap! So with a normal case, you woun't have any probs. Maybe there'll be a smaller version some day or I'll have to get me a new case. Apart from that, the performance is great with that card and btw: ATI sucks... :P

Edited July 27, 2008 by STiFU

[sparhawk]

So, now that I'm back from vacation IN fainaly managed to get a new machine as well.

 

I settled for a Q9450 with a 280GTS and an Nforce 750i SLI motherboard plus 4GB ram and 1000GB SATA Drive.

I hope this will last for the next few years.

 

The reason why I choose this CPU was for the price/speed factor. I was thinking of a Q9970 extreme, but this is also extremely expensive. Looking at the fps from the CPUs I didn't feel it worth to pay double the price for the CPU for an increase of about 5-10 FPS to the next CPU Q9550 and also the difference to the Q9770 is to small to pay 6 times more for it. I think with the SLI board I'm quite save for some time, because usually the grafic card is the determining factor for the speed (at least it was until now). So I can attach a second card if I want to improve my speed, and I can still upgrade the CPU later if I wanted to.

Even if I had ample of money I wouldn't have bought a mouch more expensive setup, as the speedifference is to small. And I don't like screwing around with my hardware, because I tend to damage it. So I'm not an overclocker.

[Domarius]

Yeah the 8 series will give you better performance. The 9 series is wierd - some newer features (that are not used yet) but not enough power to run the latest games as good as the 8 series.

 

Ahhh I'd watch it with the 4 gig. There are some games, even new ones (Eg. Bioshock, Crysis, Grid) that actually crash on systems with 4 gig. People have reported removing a stick so they're down to 2 gig and the crashes stop happening.

That's why the pre-built systems I was looking at use dual channel 2 gig - that's 2x1 gig sticks in "dual channel mode", so that it performs twice as fast as a single 2 gig stick. I have two spare slots so I could always up grade to 4 gig later.

[sparhawk]

Not sure if it's dual channel, but it's two sticks. I read that two sticks give better performance than a single stick. If that also helps games stopping from crashing, that's good.

 

*SIGH* I new that going to 4GB might cause issues. It's always like that, though I don't understand it. If developers would take better care, this shouldn't happen. And it's not as if developers don't know that system specs are increasing all the time.

[Domarius]

Yep 2 sticks - it uses them in paralell, that's called dual channel.

 

You're right - it's always the way... I guess the developers can't afford a system high end enough to test on or something... but the good news is I heard you can map the available memory the game is allowed to have, so it doesn't crash. But I know nothing about doing this, or if it maps it in a way that still makes the game access the memory in dual channel mode (which would suck if it didn't)...

[Tels]

Yep 2 sticks - it uses them in paralell, that's called dual channel.

 

You need two sticks of the same size and speed for dual channel - or four sticks where two are paired with each other.

 

Two sticks are faster than one. Two dual channel and a third stick are a bit faster, and 2 x 2 sticks is fasted.

 

Download an Ubuntu Life CD and run the memory test it will tell you how fast you CPU is able to access the memory and the cache.

 

As for 4 Gbyte:

 

32 bit operating systems are only able to adress 32 bits or 4Gbyte. On the PC, you also need to subtract from that amount the video memory and other memory (like AGP buffers and assorted stuff) and since a 32bit OS only has 4Gbyte adress space, this gets subtracted. So your available memory is always less than 4Gbyte.

 

If you have a 512 Mbyte graphic card, you will have less than 3.5 byte available.

 

There is a further complication on 32bit: each process can get at maxiumum 2Gbyte (windows) respective 3Gbyte (linux).

 

To avoid all these problems, you can run a 64bit OS. This is easy under Linux, but under Windows you get then other problems - not every HW has a driver for 64bit and you can't just use 32bit drivers. (You might be able to use 32 userland software tho).

 

However, all these issues have nothing to do with dual-channel or not. The latter is just the access speed for the memory - and in most cases, it is not really relevant, anyway. Video memory speed, IO speed and CPU speed and memory size (how much you can use for IO cache) are much more important.

 

As for games crashing: This seems to be a typical (windows) programmers fault: They always add hardcoded constraints to their programs, and never ever consider that a future machine might have more memory, more than one CPU, more than one user etc etc.

 

It is really sad that even today you have some programs that are not able to write to "Programme" on a german windows system, and instead create a new "Program files" on your C: drive (never to mention how many programs refuse to run if Windows is not installed on C, has no pagefile, or other nonsense, like always using C:/temp even tho your temp directory is on D etc etc.

 

My hopes where that these things would be gone with Vista, but it seems that just brought us other issues

[sparhawk]

I agree with most of that. The only thing I adisagree is the number of CPUs. It's VERY differnt coding for one CPU or more, so I'd say it's understandable if software doesn't work on multicore CPUs if they were written with a single CPU. However, it shouldn't matter if you write software for two CPUs or more, because then there is not so much difference. Of course some special requirements may apply, but I doubt that games need to move in this area.