New gaming system for Age of Conan

Yay, you still have money left, let's spend it quickly

Good choices, in general.

Upgrade the video card to 8800GTS G92 512MB. You definitely want a video card with a dual-slot cooler, otherwise that Sonata III will have a difficult time cooling it. It's also faster than the 8800GT and overclocks better.

Hard disk: get a WD6400AAKS or two instead of the Samsung.

I'm assuming you don't intend to overclock the CPU, otherwise the case is a bad choice and you'd need an aftermarket cooler too.

Top 5 heatsinks:

http://www.frostytech.com/top5heatsinks.cfm

Go for the Antec 900. Buy a separate power supply (~500W). Corsair is a good brand.

Top Tier PSU:
http://www.tomswiki.com/page/Tiere [...] ngs?t=anon

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forum [...] p?t=108088

http://www.jonnyguru.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1460

Silent PSUs
http://www.silentpcreview.com/article699-page1.html

AMD Certified PSUs (Single+Crossfire):
http://ati.amd.com/online/certifiedpsu/index.html

Certified SLI-Ready Power Supplies
http://www.slizone.com/object/slizone_build_psu.html

For optical I recommend Samsung SH-203B or N.

I don't want to ship the case, and want to buy it locally. What would you suggest from this list:

http://oemexpress.com/items.asp?MajorCat=CASE

The Antec Nine Hundred for $130 but that would put you at a budget of around $220 (for PSU and CASE).

@aevm
Giving excellent advice again I see.
I agree on everything.

Why, thanks, but I did mess up. See, the OP is in Canada, and all those newegg links are useless

@aevm
The value of the advice still doesn't change. It just gets adjusted for Canadian retailers.

@molts
Looks good. I'd still take the XIGMATEK over the Noctua,
just because I know it's 30 EUR more here.

For performance go with XP. For eye candy go with Vista.
The same rule applies to games. But it's a new system so I would vote for Vista.

I wouldn't say the Noctua beats the TRUE at the Anandtech review, re page 7: http://www.anandtech.com/casecooli [...] i=3268&p=7 but rather that they are equal. And I found a TRUE for a few less dollars than the Noctua. I did, use a Noctua NF-P12 fan combo for the silence, and to my ears, silence is golden.

I tried hard to figure out if the Noctua or the TRUE was best. Not that it matters, since they're so close, but I was curious. The only difference I found was in the temps of the X6800 overclocked at 3.94 GHz under load. Noctua 55 degrees, TRUE 59. OK, I can't just declare the Noctua the winner based on a single difference, but still I'm very impressed with it.

The Xigmatek is only $36 at www.ncix.com. Yeah, I think Andrius is right, at these prices it's better value than others.
http://www.ncix.com/products/index [...] e=Xigmatek

The Noctua comes with its fan, the TRUE doesn't. To get those nice numbers with the TRUE, Anandtech included a SFF21F fan, which is $19 where I live. Sailer, did your slightly cheaper TRUE include the cost of the fan? Anyway, you guys in the US are so spoiled, you've got a lot more good retailers

Vista has DirectX 10. That makes Crysis and FSX look somewhat better. IMO it's not very important - who sits and enjoys the scenery when the aliens are shooting at you or the plane is crashing? Still, I'd go with Vista just because it's guaranteed to have patches for a long time.

AOC doesn't support DX10 yet because well, there isn't any hardware out yet that will even run the DX9 version 16AF/AA and high in game settings. Reason why they're delaying DX10 until August: well nvidia releasing 9900s

AoC runs DX10 on Vista 64, just fine.

I'm playing with an c2quad 6600. As long as you don't seriously multitask while the game is running a dual core is fine but you want a little extra speed.

I seem to be hovering just above what I feel should be the recommended minimum platform. I haven't hit a situation with lots of players yet and get a little jerkiness every now and again.

4 gigs is definite recommended minimum as Vista 64 is a mem hog. Once you start getting into AoC it will helpfully load in your favorite areas, which eats up space but makes zoning ultra fast. Especially if you turn of the paging file (which is safe and highly recommended when you have enough ram). If vista gets above 3.2 gigs of ram in use it will occasionally ask you if it can shut down program x. It won't force a program shutdown until you hit about 3.8 gigs with no paging file and there is no worry about crashing the system. And the more ram you give Vista 64 the better it runs (especially if you DO multitask).

Oh and as soon as the quest is done for an area...I sit there and enjoy the scenery....okay sometimes I stop DURING the quest as well. It really is quite pretty.

Intel c2quad 6600
4gb Corsair dominator
8800 GTS 640
Creative X-FI
WD Raptor X

I'm running vista x64 SP1 as well on my machine, Athlon x2 4800+ Ocd to 2.7, AMD/ATI 3870, 4 GB of DDR2 800, using a 2 WD 7200 rmp drive RAID 0 for a boot disk, and a 4GB iRam card set as the swap file. Running video at 1900x1200.

DX 10 is looking good, last night I was pulling 92 FPS in an instance dungeon, about 34 - 38 average running paths and open air missions, and at worst about 22 - 25 in town. So far a good launch as far as I've seen, and I was on Star Wars Galaxies at launch so I've seen the worst lol.

My wife's machine is running vista x32 sp1, on an older 939 board. Athlon x2 running OCd at 2.2 (I forget which model), 2 GB of DDR 400, ATI 3870, a WD raptor boot disk and a samsung 7200rpm game drive. She runs video at 1440x900. In the same instance with me was was pulling about 38fps, 25 - 28 in open air, and at worst 16 - 19 fps in town.

We both like taking the senic routes. The game is undeniably beautifully done, and doesn't take extreme machines to be playable.

The problem with DX10 and AoC is that it doesn't exist yet.

DX10 won't be in-game until around August.

I'd also go with 4gb of RAM with Vista 64, esp since it doesn't sound like your bro will be using any weird programs that aren't yet updated with 64-bit drivers.

Another thing to consider Molts is that DirectCanada.com has free shipping on orders over $500 (that or $300, I forget), so you could grab it all from them. Their prices are generally lower than NCIX's as well, but NCIX has always been excellent at matching prices too Also, be sure to check out the NCIX sales on the banner on the main page; a lot of the sales lately have had nVidia gfx cards on sales with Free Shipping for the entire order.

I was pretty excited too until I read [this]

FYI I installed and played AoC for about a half hour this morning. With my setup below, clip plane distance set to max, quality set to max, gaming at 1680x1050 I was around 30-50 fps. I didn't have bloom turned on, I only had 30 mins to check things out. I'd say I averaged about 38fps.

This game takes more horsepower than I expected, my rig is running it fine, though I'd prefer to be averaging over 50fps.

This, of course, is on DX9.