What operating system to use with a new rig?

[timholt]

Men, I am absolutely overwhelmed by these responses - once again many thanks.

I had a look the Mag Naz mentioned yesterday, went straight over to the right hand column titled 'the beast', glanced down the bottom and saw $1500 plus. Thought this is not bad and went one column left (the beastie) and saw $2,975, rechecked the right hand column (the beast) again and its $15,615.
When the palpitations ceased I had a slower look at the beastie column and, without the periphials that I already have it is thus;
CPU Intel i7 2600 $339 or AMD Phenom II x4 965 BE @ 3.4gh
Mobo Asus P8P67 Pro $239
Ram Corsair Vengeance 1600Mhz (2 x 4Gb) $149
Video Gigabyte HD6950 (1GB) crossfire $640 ( but I read somewhere RoF does not like crossfire???????) or a Radeon 6950 2GB
Power Silverstone Strider 850W Gold $229
Samsung SH-B123A Blu-ray optical drive combo $69 (do I really need blu-ray for 2 flight sims only)
Storage WD Caviar Black 1TB $120
Case Coolmaster CM690 II Advantage $140

The only item not mentioned is a sound card.

Look OK gurus?

I will still take the advice of waiting for some feedback on CoD after release and some user comments but at least I feel some headway has been made, rather than head done in as per the previous 2 days.

[naz]

That all looks pretty decent to me mate. I had a very quick look at the Intel CPU online and it looks to be quite bloody good (If anything its possibly a bit of overkill, and you could probably save a hundred or so by going one level lower with the CPU, for example an i5 2500, and using the extra $ on the video card(s) - kind of depends on how CoD actually performs on release I guess). I don't think you need the Bluray if your only using the computer for the two flight sims obviously. You could transfer over your existing drives (but as mentioned before, a new DVD/cd drive is basically spare change now anyway). Your current sound Card is a definite keeper though, hang on to it and transfer it over to the new machine.

Regarding the Video cards, I have always steered away from crossfire. The only reason being is I always tend to see people in forums having problems with it in various games ... but I have never looked into it properly to have a real opinion I must admit: - it may well work perfectly fine for ROF, IL2 and CoD? Perhaps the other lads can advise you on that. As I sort of mentioned earlier, I tend to just whore myself out to the biggest strongest video card on the market at the time I upgrade so I have no idea on how the mid-range cards perform in practice. From the little I have read though, they seem generally capable of holding their own in many games.

I've also noticed a few similar threads to this on this very website, so perhaps you should have a look through those to get some more ideas.

In any event, like you said, you seem to now have a good starting point and can take it from there once the performance reports of CoD start getting revealed by us all next week.

PS: - You know, i actually thought about mentioning the usual heavy price tag for the "beast" when I typed the message out yesterday, but thought, ...nah, he'll enjoy the surprise of seeing the price tag on his own lol

[Thee_oddball]

timholt here is what i posted for someone else..cheers



motherboard (i have this one ::::::) $90
ASRock 870 EXTREME3 AM3 AMD 870 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX AMD Motherboard $90
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813157198

CPU = $229 AMD Phenom II X6 1100T Black Edition Thuban 3.3GHz, 3.7GHz Turbo 6 x 512KB L2 Cache 6MB L3 Cache Socket AM3 125W Six-Core Desktop Processor
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16819103913

VIDEO= $210 SAPPHIRE 100314SR Radeon HD 6870 1GB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 2.1 x16 HDCP Ready CrossFireX Support Video
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814102909

RAM= $85 G.SKILL Ripjaws Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333 (PC3 10666)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820231311

PSU= $160 SeaSonic X750 Gold 750W ATX12V V2.3/EPS 12V V2.91 SLI Ready 80 PLUS GOLD Certified Modular Active PFC Power Supply
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16817151087

[Heliocon]

Originally Posted by timholt

Men, I am absolutely overwhelmed by these responses - once again many thanks.

I had a look the Mag Naz mentioned yesterday, went straight over to the right hand column titled 'the beast', glanced down the bottom and saw $1500 plus. Thought this is not bad and went one column left (the beastie) and saw $2,975, rechecked the right hand column (the beast) again and its $15,615.
When the palpitations ceased I had a slower look at the beastie column and, without the periphials that I already have it is thus;
CPU Intel i7 2600 $339 or AMD Phenom II x4 965 BE @ 3.4gh
Mobo Asus P8P67 Pro $239
Ram Corsair Vengeance 1600Mhz (2 x 4Gb) $149
Video Gigabyte HD6950 (1GB) crossfire $640 ( but I read somewhere RoF does not like crossfire???????) or a Radeon 6950 2GB
Power Silverstone Strider 850W Gold $229
Samsung SH-B123A Blu-ray optical drive combo $69 (do I really need blu-ray for 2 flight sims only)
Storage WD Caviar Black 1TB $120
Case Coolmaster CM690 II Advantage $140

The only item not mentioned is a sound card.

Look OK gurus?

I will still take the advice of waiting for some feedback on CoD after release and some user comments but at least I feel some headway has been made, rather than head done in as per the previous 2 days.

Not horrible but definitly overpriced. When you get a shop to assemble it for you, you have to know that you will most likely get screwed in some way. Also the ram is far too little -you want to aim for 6-8gb as the current sweet spot. I payed about over 3.3k for my machine and all its components about 5-6months ago and I have a i7-980x, 480gtx and 12gb of 1600mhz ram and EVGA 4 way sli mobo. So when I look at the cost of your machine to me it seems over priced (but thats why I didnt buy a pc off alienware also).

But overall I would say you should get minimum of 6gb of ram, might want to look at changing the gpu (I am not great with AMD gpus, so someone else should recommend) and check the RPM on the Hard drive. I was thinking of going either SSD or SATA2 raptors but instead I settled on a Western digital 2tb 7200rpm drive but with a 64mb cache, which makes it a really awesome harddrive for its size (its pretty fast).