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#1
02-22-2011, 07:00 AM
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get yourself a big power supply, pay for quality and make sure its at least 700w. Dont ignore this one, as it feeds your system. Dont try to fill a swimming pool with a drinking straw is the analogy.
hard drive is just storage, seek times and rpm make some difference, but forget a drive for anything but an electronic bucket until solid state drives get to hundreds of Gb for a few dollars. I can get a terrabyte drive here for about $60, so its just beer money really. AMD, Intel, meh. Theres always a price / performance trade off until it becomes obviously stupid to pay hundreds more for so very little. I like Intel, always have. Im sure AMD is just fine, and sometimes cheaper. Your budget will dictate your choices... RAM = good. 8 Gb is plenty. You could cut back to 4Gb and still have things running well. Make enquiries about dual video cards. You may get more out of a dual card system for somewhat cheaper than a single big card, plenty of tuning sites out there to get exact specs. The video card setup will likely be your biggest advantage with this sim, to get the jaw dropping goodies it will be able to dish up  .theres a site call tomshardware ive used for years, over a decade, never done me wrong. And NO im NOT affiliated. Just has good bar graph charts for simple comparisons. VIDEO CARD. DUAL. GO ! NOW !
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#3
02-22-2011, 08:08 AM
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I'm throwing myself into this thread, as I am in allmost the same situation as the thread starter.
Will a higher number of cores on the CPU be better than a lower one in the same price region? Last time I upgraded I bought a quad core running on 2.8GHz, and I suspect that I would have come out better if I had bought a dual core at 3.2GHz instead back then in 2006. They had allmost the same price those days. Any thoughts on this? Skarphol
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#4
02-22-2011, 08:19 AM
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Quote:
these days multiple core use is growing and regularly employed. i cannot say for COD, perhaps its in some obscure release somewhere. I suggest waiting, saving your money until the game comes out and you have concrete specs to build your system... release dates can and do change. computer equipment improves almost monthly. dont shoot until you see the whites of the packaging you hold in your hand. wait for it... waaaait for it....
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#5
02-22-2011, 09:55 AM
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More or less solid advice in this thread.
My opinions? 1)Motherboard: Your budget will determine your CPU price bracket and brand, which in turn will determine your motherboard. In that sense, while i can definitely say don't go cheap on the mobo, i can't offer anything more specific. Don't buy a mobo with features you are sure you won't use, but definitely don't go cheap on it either. In fact, if you are certain you don't need a certain feature it might be better to buy a mobo that lacks it but is overall better in its group, than spend your money on one that does. For example, if i have no intention of overclocking it's no use spending $200 on a mobo for overclockers when i can spend 150$ for one that offers the rest of the features i need and maybe done to a better standard as well. In regards to the amount of cores, it depends on what you want to run. If a game supports multiple cores it pays to have as much as you can afford, if not it's better to go for less cores but higher clock speeds for the same amount of money. This used to be a big deciding point a couple of years ago but nowadays more and more games and applications feature some kind of multi-core support. In regards to CoD specifically they said that it's going to make use of multiple cores, but we don't know exact details, so it's a balancing act between amount of cores and clock speeds for the money to cover all the possibilities. For example, it might use up to 4 cores. In such a case you'd be better off going for a quad at higher clock speeds than a hexa at lower ones, etc. The rest of the stuff that remains pretty much a constant for a good, mid to high range gaming PC is 2) Cooling, no matter if you overclock or not: There's no need for overkill, but getting a case with good ergonomics is a must, even if it's not a fancy, brand-name one. A roomy case allows you to install extra fans if and when you need to. Plus you can have some spare slots for extra hard drives down the road, so that instead of plugging them in one next to the other and creating a hot spot (some of the high speed/high RPM drives can run a bit hot) you can have a blank slot between them to help with ventilation. 3) PSU: I had a 700W heroichi cougar until recently, it came with a 3 year warranty and saved me a few times from power fluctuations and downright outages. In the end it died (less than a month ago) but it did its job, making sure that nothing else was fried. I took it back to my vendor and using the warranty i picked up another 700w one, this time a Thermaltake since the guy was out of stock on Cougars. I don't run dual graphics cards and i don't overclock, but there is a slight bit of gain to be had regardless: a PSU usually exhibits more energy loss the closer it operates to its peak. So, even if my total needs were around the 550W mark, it would be better for power consumption and bills in the long run to get a 700W PSU instead of a 600W one. This is important to me as my PC stays on for weeks on end sometimes, your mileage may vary however. In any case, a higher rating PSU will manage your energy consumption better and offer you some headroom for future expansion like a second graphics card or extra hard drives and so on. As for the RAM now, it depends on a few factors. For example, some CPU/mobo combinations require DDR3 RAM, others work with the cheaper DDR2. Also, some benefit from triple channel RAM while others work in dual channel mode. Suffice to say, depending on the channel type supported you might want to make your total RAM a multiplication product of it: if it works in dual channel get 2 (2x1Gb sticks), 4 (2x2), 6 or 8 GB, if it works in triple channel get 3, 6 (2x3Gb sticks), or 9GB, etc. I think anything higher than 6Gb is somewhat overkill for most current games. 4Gb is more or less the minimum adequate standard, 6Gb will let you run most games on top of the background processes and the OS efficiently. Unless you are into image editing or other professional software with high system requirements, i don't think you're going to see much use from 8GB within the next 6-12 months. For optical drives, a combo DVD/CD-R is enough and they are dirt cheap anyway. Hard drive choices depend on what you want to do and how much stuff you have on your PC. I have two drives of 1TB each and they were almost full at one point, now my total free space hovers around the 600GB mark. They too are generally cheap nowadays, unless you go for massive speed and massive storage at the same time (eg, a 2TB drive with heaps of cache at 10000 RPM). The ones i use are a seagate barracuda 7200RPM and a western digital 5500RPM. I use the slower WD one as storage (i also have the OS there when it would make sense to have it on the faster one, because i used to dual boot XP and win7, but that's another story), the faster one is where i install my games on. Finally in regards to the OS, getting the pro version of win7 would be nice if you also run older stuff. As far as i remember, the home edition doesn't have some of the compatibility functions that the pro edition features. The ultimate edition is overkill, as its simply the same as the pro with the added ability to change between languages on the fly. Hope it helps.
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