Hi everyone,
My name is Julien and I live in Quebec city. As you may know, winter is rather rough up here so I enjoy spending quite a lot of my spare time on video games, until summer (6 months later) finally arrives. I'm a die hard fan of Blizzard's titles and I play fps on the sides (those that I can run atm anyway).
Since neither you nor I are here to hear about my life story, I'll cut things short by saying I'm currently browsing around to build a new system, pieces by pieces. My old and current system is an AMD 64 2200+, it lasted for a while but it's clearly not enough for my current needs or the games that are released now or in the past 2-3 years.
The first time I decided to build my own, I browsed this website (not the forum) for benchmarks and price/performance comparison over NewEgg. This time I thought it was a good idea to get an input from this place, as many if not most of you are more knowledgeable than me. The building part poses no problems, but I dont feel confident enough to do any tinkering (overclocking, high tech cooling etc.) So I'm looking for a rig that will be very fast but not the best, enough to last a couple years (2+ ideally) and run games at maxed settings (current and future).
I'm aiming at paying about as much as I did the last time, around 1500-1700 USD not including monitor and such.
What I came up with so far are these:
-HD
1 or 2) Western Digital Caviar Black WD6401AALS 640GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s
-Vid. card: EVGA 896-P3-1267-AR GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 Superclocked Edition 896MB 448-bit GDDR3 PCI
-PSU:FSP Group Everest 800 800W ATX12V V2.2/EPS V2.91 SLI Ready CrossFire Ready Modular Active PFC
-Ram:CORSAIR DOMINATOR 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 1066 (PC2 8500) Dual Channel Kit (probably overkill as I dont plan to OC)
-Mobo:ASUS RAMPAGE FORMULA LGA 775 Intel X48 ATX Intel Motherboard (I've browsed around for a more affordable SLI supporting Mobo but they all have poor ratings)
-CPU:Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550 Yorkfield 2.83GHz LGA 775 95W Quad-Core Processor Model BX80569Q9550
The case I found is an ANTEC p182 (hopefully it has enough room? I'm buying the case locally to save the shipping costs), sound card is a no brainer, they cost around 40$, same with dvd burner etc.
Now I know about the GTX 260 versus ATI's HD 4870 dilema, but I've always found Nvidia's game compatibility and support to be better altough things might've changed. I'm willing to swap most of the things around aside from the CPU, I want to build around the Q9550's capacity. I'm willing to go the extra mile for superior quality, I'm not trying to squeeze out every penny's worth as quality and value dont always come hand in hand.
Sorry for the long read but I usually do my best to make sure that I end up with what I'm paying for.
Thanks in advance,
J.
My name is Julien and I live in Quebec city. As you may know, winter is rather rough up here so I enjoy spending quite a lot of my spare time on video games, until summer (6 months later) finally arrives. I'm a die hard fan of Blizzard's titles and I play fps on the sides (those that I can run atm anyway).
Since neither you nor I are here to hear about my life story, I'll cut things short by saying I'm currently browsing around to build a new system, pieces by pieces. My old and current system is an AMD 64 2200+, it lasted for a while but it's clearly not enough for my current needs or the games that are released now or in the past 2-3 years.
The first time I decided to build my own, I browsed this website (not the forum) for benchmarks and price/performance comparison over NewEgg. This time I thought it was a good idea to get an input from this place, as many if not most of you are more knowledgeable than me. The building part poses no problems, but I dont feel confident enough to do any tinkering (overclocking, high tech cooling etc.) So I'm looking for a rig that will be very fast but not the best, enough to last a couple years (2+ ideally) and run games at maxed settings (current and future).
I'm aiming at paying about as much as I did the last time, around 1500-1700 USD not including monitor and such.
What I came up with so far are these:
-HD
1 or 2) Western Digital Caviar Black WD6401AALS 640GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s-Vid. card: EVGA 896-P3-1267-AR GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 Superclocked Edition 896MB 448-bit GDDR3 PCI
-PSU:FSP Group Everest 800 800W ATX12V V2.2/EPS V2.91 SLI Ready CrossFire Ready Modular Active PFC
-Ram:CORSAIR DOMINATOR 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 1066 (PC2 8500) Dual Channel Kit (probably overkill as I dont plan to OC)
-Mobo:ASUS RAMPAGE FORMULA LGA 775 Intel X48 ATX Intel Motherboard (I've browsed around for a more affordable SLI supporting Mobo but they all have poor ratings)
-CPU:Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550 Yorkfield 2.83GHz LGA 775 95W Quad-Core Processor Model BX80569Q9550
The case I found is an ANTEC p182 (hopefully it has enough room? I'm buying the case locally to save the shipping costs), sound card is a no brainer, they cost around 40$, same with dvd burner etc.
Now I know about the GTX 260 versus ATI's HD 4870 dilema, but I've always found Nvidia's game compatibility and support to be better altough things might've changed. I'm willing to swap most of the things around aside from the CPU, I want to build around the Q9550's capacity. I'm willing to go the extra mile for superior quality, I'm not trying to squeeze out every penny's worth as quality and value dont always come hand in hand.
Sorry for the long read but I usually do my best to make sure that I end up with what I'm paying for.
Thanks in advance,
J.
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