OK Hivemind, it's another Critique My Build

The 5850 is a fair bit faster than the 4890 in some benchmarks; also consumes a lot less power at idle. Since you’ve got an 8800GT, I would hold out until you can find a 5850.

Thanks. Consuming less power is always a plus. Man, I tried searching and couldn’t come up with a link like that one. Thanks for making it easy to find. I really appreciate that.

Is this a situation similar to the 8800GT where they were such a good price/performance buy that people went apeshit and bought them all up so fast that the price skyrocketed?

No, this time it’s primarily a problem that the factory where the chips are made is having big problems in producing enough; it’s something with misaligned foozles. But the 5850 being such a sweet performer doesn’t help the card’s availability. Neither does the proximity of Christmas.

Word on the street is, the factory problem has been identifiied and fixed, and from this month on the amount of cards on the market should increase. Christmas hasn’t passed yet though, so its price may remain skewed upwards for another month.

I’ll probably have to wait until January at this rate anyway. The Dell won’t arrive until sometime around the week before Christmas, so I can live with the 8800GT through the holidays or even gut it out with that GT220 if I’m not inclined to rip open the box.

Sure will be nice to be far above minimum again, though. It’s been awhile. :)

I also recommend waiting for a 5850. I just got mine yesterday (after monitoring Newegg like I was trying to get a Wii 2 years ago) and it is truly an awesome video card. This past week, they’ve been in stock fairly regularly, for about an hour at a time - tops.

5850 in stock at time of this posting:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814161302&cm_re=5850--14-161-302--Product

Woah, hadn’t seen 58xx prices lately… I got my 5870 with exorbitant rush shipping for less than the current price the card without shipping.

Yeah the “standard” price is around $310-$315 for 5850s now, and 5870s are up near $400.

I believe the MSRP is going up slightly as well, although it’s still below these prices.

I’m going to wait for the prices to settle down. I paid top dollar for the 8800GT because of lack of stock everywhere at that time and I don’t feel like being ripped off like that again.

I also ran Dragon Age: Origins for the first time on my old box last night 3500+ w/2GB RAM and the 8800GT on Windows XP. I got great performance at 1024x768 (I know…) with everything set to “HIGH” and even with 2X anti-aliasing turned on.

I suspect when my new box arrives, and with the 8800GT in there, I’ll get satisfactory performance with that card at the new monitor’s native resolution that can hold me until 5850’s are more reasonably priced and available.

You probably already discovered that Dragon Age contains tons of text in fairly small print that doesn’t scale with the screen resolution. I actually went down to 1280x800 from my monitor’s 1920x1200 just so I could conveniently read the text… so you might not even want to run that game at your maximum resolution.

Ha! That’s funny. Lower resolution for the win!

I didn’t realize it wouldn’t scale as I just accepted the settings the game chose for me, figuring that my setup would be fairly low end.

When the new PC arrives, I’ll certainly mess around and check out the small text.

While I’m real happy I have a new PC on the way, I also think that people who are running high end single core processors should not think their machine is obsolete. Current games are more than playable on that kind of hardware provided your video card is relatively up to date.

I’m going to set up my current box for the kids and they’ll be able to play just about anything I throw at it as well as do school work, etc. This was a really cost effective PC I built four years ago now. I spent $1400 back in July of '05 to build the Athlon 64 machine and it’ll last at least another two years as a secondary machine if not longer. And I spent $350 on a 6800GT videocard back then!

OK, I’m going to necro this thread in order to get some opinions on a new PC that I’m close to pulling the trigger on. I budgeted $2,000 for this and it comes in right on the nose (it’s a Dell/Alienware). Anything look ridiculous here? Bear in mind that I’m getting this mainly to do work on so UnrealEd will be loaded most of the time and I’ll be doing lots of level rebulding and some coding here and there.

OPERATING SYSTEM Genuine Windows® 7 Professional, 64bit, English
PROCESSOR Intel® Core™ i7 920 2.66GHz (8MB Cache) Quad Core Processor
VIDEO CARD Single 1GB GDDR5 ATI Radeon™ HD 5870
MEMORY 12GB Triple Channel 1067MHz DDR3
HARD DRIVE 300GB - SATA-II, 3Gb/s, 10k RPM, 16MB Cache HDD
OPTICAL DRIVE Single Drive: 24X CD/DVD burner (DVD+/-RW) w/double layer write capability

The processor is slower than I would like but it’s hyperthreaded so there’s, like, 8 cores. Should be fine I think.

I haven’t comparison-shopped, but that seems high for those specs. No BD? No second drive? Is the memory driving that price?

That’s not all the specs, I just included the stuff that seemed relevant to performance/multitasking.

The memory/cpu/video card are the largest chunks of the cost from what I can tell. I actually downgraded the memory speed so I could still get 12GB but I could up the hard drive to 10,000RPM…

You have high end everything… and a shitty old 300gb 10k SATA drive as your IO subsystem? Pre-rebuttal: 10k is only 40% faster rotation than 7.2k, and the performance delta is more like half that.

I’d suggest the usual: an SSD for your OS, apps and active project(s), and a 1tb SATA for everything else.

If you need to scale back anything I’d suggest going from i7 -> i5 unless the idea of swapping out the CPU in a year for a six-core is something you’d consider. Pre-rebuttal: tri-channel RAM is no better than dual-channel.

Also, you might be able to survive with 9 (or 8 with i5) instead of 12. Depends on how many 32-bit apps or how hungry your 64-bit apps are. It’s quite possibly worth skimping on RAM for an SSD.

It is Alienware. Add 30% premium for the brandname & fancy case.

Depending on the model, the motherboard could possibly be more expensive than the CPU. And if there’s an option I’d try a fast SSD and big regular HDD combination. I got great results with that on my PC and it’s only marginally more expensive. Plus having 30 second boot times and nearly instant shutdown without a lot of tweaking is great.

His build doesn’t include a 1 TB drive so chances are he doesn’t need that much storage space, or already has a big drive he can reuse.

This board’s obsession with SSDs is rather silly. I don’t know what you people are doing on your systems but I hardly ever notice hard disk delays after Windows has finished booting. Also, Windows is pretty good at caching and prefetching any normal amount of data. So I certainly wouldn’t get an SSD while they still cost such a premium over regular drives, and while the technology is still so immature that you need to carefully research brands in order to get one that actually works as promised.

I’d get some input on whether your specific level-building workflow would benefit from an SSD. To an extent, having lots of ram alleviates the need. Ram for that cpu isn’t all that cheap of course. An i7-860 might lower platform costs a bit. (Alternatively, I think there’s also an i7-930 replacement for the 920 now, which was supposed to come in at the same price as the 920.)

If I didn’t mention the 1tb drive I’m sure people would complain “what, and he fits his 300gb of data on a 120gb SSD?” Mentioning the extra SATA drive is par for the course when recommending SSDs.

I hardly ever notice hard disk delays after Windows has finished booting.
I’m back on a SATA drive after my SSD crapped out on me. There is a BIG difference doing all sorts of stuff. It’s not wishful thinking on the part of people who dropped big money on them, SSDs really do make everything faster.

while the technology is still so immature that you need to carefully research brands in order to get one that actually works as promised.
You can’t just buy any old brand, so I suppose you might count that as immature. But the results of your research should be pretty simple: OCZ or Intel. (Some people mention patriot but they’re rare in AU so no comment on that.)