Budget build to play Supreme Commander

bob the destroyer

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Jun 30, 2009
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I'm building a budget (~NZ$ 1200) PC in the next couple of weeks. The most important app is Supreme Commander. I also want to use Ubuntu. I think these parts have good linux support--the Radeon 4000's seem well supported by ATI.

SupComm seems to multicore well, judging by benchmarks, so I went quad core. The Phenom X4 looks like the best quad core performer at my price range.

Other than that I've gone for what I think is a reasonable gaming PC for my budget.

Does this build look good? Any bottlenecks? Anything too excessive? Will it handle Supreme Commander?

Phenom X4 9950 -- NZ$275

ASRock 790GX -- NZ$225

2x2GB DDR2-1066 Kingston HyperX -- NZ$140

Radeon HD 4850 1GB -- NZ$210

LanCool PC-K56 -- I might have trouble sourcing this -- ~NZ$200?

PSU: TBD -- ~NZD200?

And I have monitor, hard drives, keyboard, and mouse

I'm going to use pricespy.co.nz to find the cheapest sources once I decide what I'm getting.
 

royalcrown

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That'll play it fine...It played reasonably well on my xp2800+ with a gig of ram and 7600 gs. It played well until unit numbers were maxed, so this shoukd handle it no sweat. OH, also ram very well on my 5400 x2 64 /8800gts 512 after that :)
 

ill b ben

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Also not a huge fan of asrock (bad expierence)
and go for pc 6400 (800mhz) mem, since 1066 just is overclocked 800 ram
and please dont go cheap on the PSU you will regret that, try brands like corsair, antec you dont need that many watt if you go for quallity 400-500 watt should do you fine
 

rockyjohn

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Here's a good PSU from the list you cited:

Corsair 450W VX-450 ATX Power Supply 120mm fan PCI-E Graphic $121.78 OCZone Auckland, online, pick-ups ok, shipping charged per item. 12 Jul 03:41 -$5.88 on 10 Jul 09, 11AM

Note that it is listed by several other vendors at slightly higher prices. I am not familiar with the vendors on the list at all.

This will handle the system you listed very comfortably. Should you wish to step up to have more power for major enhancements later, you can get the 550w version of the same model. On the same shopping list - prices for the 550w start at $169
 

bob the destroyer

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Jun 30, 2009
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Phenom X4 9950 (2.6 GHz) AM2+ -- NZ$275

Phenom 2 X4 920 (2.8 GHz) AM2+ -- NZ$325

How much more performance am I going to get from a 2.8Ghz Phenom 2? Is it worth the NZ$50?

I could also go for AM3:

Phenom 2 X4 810 (2.6 GHz) AM3 -- NZ$290

But if I go AM3 then the motherboard costs more and I might need to go to DD3 RAM.

Will a Phenom 2 2.6GHz AM3 run much better than a Phenom 1 2.6GHz AM2+?

I'm going with ASRock because I've had many bad experiences with Gigabyte. Can you recommend some good motherboard manufacturers?