Building A Crysis PC, Part 3

[tmeacham]

Article written by Rob Wright.

At last! After weeks of testing and debating, our Crysis PC project has finally turned a corner and entered the development phase. Here's a look at the specifications for our new $3,000 gaming system.

http://www.tomsgames.com/us/2007/12/19/crysispc_part3/

 

[enewmen]

The system looks good.
THG recommended Win XP with Crysis before for good reasons.
But when will THG start using Vista 64 and DX10 ?
I had to go through a lot of trouble to get Crysis to work well on Vista 64 (not blaming anyone)
Even after a simple hack to get near "very-high" DX10 graphics in Windows XP, the motion blur and depth of field still looks better in DX10.

Or Crysis will never be a mature 64bit - DX10 game?

I think Ben & Bob just want to get the game running because it's still JUST A GAME. However, the hardware needed and issues with Crysis in Vista 64 will pop-up again as other "high-end games" get released in the future.

 

[wirelessfender]

This is ridiculous... I don't see the need for the expensive hard drives, or the GTX's. 2 G92 GTS 512mb would be fine, no? You could overclock them probably better than a G80 anyway. $295 for 4gigs of memory?

http://www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/ProductDetail.jsp?ProductCode=10006489

And Q6700 is throwing $100 dollars out the window. Should be a Q6600 and Clock it up a few MHz if you think it matters.

 

[hixbot]

quick edit:
you mention you plan to use 4gb of RAM. but your list of parts show only 2gb of Mushkin RAM.

 

[enewmen]

This is ridiculous... I don't see the need for the expensive hard drives, or the GTX's. 2 G92 GTS 512mb would be fine, no? You could overclock them probably better than a G80 anyway. $295 for 4gigs of memory?

http://www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/ProductDetail.jsp?ProductCode=10006489

And Q6700 is throwing $100 dollars out the window. Should be a Q6600 and Clock it up a few MHz if you think it matters.

I think THG has most of these parts already. A waste to buy more parts.

 

[enewmen]

quick edit:
you mention you plan to use 4gb of RAM. but your list of parts show only 2gb of Mushkin RAM.

The photo showed 2 * 2x1gig. This makes sense.

 

[ben72227]

I think THG spent WAY too much on parts.

I mean, really, Raptors? 2 150GB Raptors? For that kind of money you could have gotten a 32MB cache terabyte drive.

And $300 on RAM??? RAM is cheap now - you can get 2GB DDR2 for less than $50...and you're spending $300?

I don't want to come off as a cheapskate or anything - but you guys could have built a decent Crysis comp. for under $2,000 (besides, it's not like any computer could break 60FPS on Crysis Very High DX10 settings anyway - with the exception of maybe a workstation....but that's a different league).

And another thing - what's with the 8800GTX??? Unless you're going to do that triple-SLI thing, you'd be better off just getting two 8800 GTS 512MB....

This article seems a bit...outdated.

 

[dmacfour]

unless I win the lottery, I will never spend 3k for the purpose of playing one particular game well.

 

[Luscious]

You guys might want to mention what size monitor you're planning to have and the resolution you're going to run the game at.

Personally, if I'm going to buy Crysis today, it would be for the eye-candy, and in that respect, I would shoot for two 8800 ultras (or two overclocked GTX's), both water-cooled, and an overclocked Q6600 with a Swiftech waterblock. It's just too bad that the nForce 680i chipset doesn't overclock very well with quad-cores, and until nvidia comes out with something better, the chipset here will be the Achilles Heel...

That issue aside, if the above setup runs the game at 1680x1050 at 30fps with settings just below the top end, it should still look amazing and make most users happy.

But since I'm not buying Crysis today, I'll wait for a better SLI chipset and the next top-end video card! By then Crysis will be on sale for $20

 

[karmikal]

Where did you guys find a Q6700 for $350 !?
Looking around online the cheapest I found was $537
such as http://twitchguru.pgpartner.com/search_getprod.php/masterid=43369634

 

[LAS_VEGAS]

Totally unnecessay article... Everyone who reads THG knows how to build a crisis PC with 3000$... It would be a much interesting article if it was a "How to build a crisis pc with 500$".

 

[robwright]

Totally unnecessay article... Everyone who reads THG knows how to build a crisis PC with 3000$... It would be a much interesting article if it was a "How to build a crisis pc with 500$".

$500? Interesting idea. I suppose it's theoretically possible, but I'm not sure how you could pull that off.

As I stated in the article, the point of the project is to give people an idea of what kind of money you would need to spend to build a rig that could adequately run Crysis. We could have gone cheaper, but it would have taken more time to find better deals. And we could have gone for a higher cost rig, but that seemed to defeat the purpose of the project. We had lots of gear in our lab, and we have some truly insane PCs, too -- like a 3-way SLI system from Falcon Northwest. So we'll run Crysis and other games on those high end beasts. The point, again, was to build a totally new system, which included buying new gear the same way a reader would.

As for where we purchased the items, we got the bulk of the products online from places like NewEgg, TigerDirect, and even Amazon.

 

[enewmen]

$500? Interesting idea. I suppose it's theoretically possible, but I'm not sure how you could pull that off.

As I stated in the article, the point of the project is to give people an idea of what kind of money you would need to spend to build a rig that could adequately run Crysis. We could have gone cheaper, but it would have taken more time to find better deals. And we could have gone for a higher cost rig, but that seemed to defeat the purpose of the project. We had lots of gear in our lab, and we have some truly insane PCs, too -- like a 3-way SLI system from Falcon Northwest. So we'll run Crysis and other games on those high end beasts. The point, again, was to build a totally new system, which included buying new gear the same way a reader would.

As for where we purchased the items, we got the bulk of the products online from places like NewEgg, TigerDirect, and even Amazon.

This is not difficult to understand. (no sarcasm)

 

[NoNigDK]

Silly article, and a silly rig.

I recently put together a PC, with a total price at approx. $ 1.100,- or 6.000 Danish Kroner.

I contains:
Q6600
ASUS P5N-E SLI
2x 2 GB OCZ PC2-6400 5.4.4.15 2T RAM
2x 36,7 WD360 in a RAID0 config
1x 250 GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.10
1x HD 3870 512 MB
ODD, PSU and a Zalman CNPS9500 LED nVidia something (Green LED :-/ )
Vista Business (MSDNAA) 64 bit

All above, is running at stock-speeds. I'm currently gaming with a avg. frame-rate of 30-40 FPS, 64 Bit, DX10 all settings @ 'High' (except phys, which is set to 'very high').

And still, I get a decent framerate. My monitor is a Acer AL1916W@1440x900 and my Cat.-driver is set to 'balanced'.

So please, tell me why I should choose a PC with a total cost of 2.800 USD ?! I feel, that my computer is running 'Crysis' very well. And in the future, it would be considered a minor investment, to get 'Crysis' running with a frame-rate above 60 FPS@'Very high'.

It just seems silly to me, that THG.com sugest, that one should go out and spend more than $ 2.000,- or what would be more than 15.000,- Danish Kroner. It's just insane.

Seriously, guys. You (THG) are considered one of the top-most-state-of-the-art Hardware-sites where I come from (Denmark), and you pull of a stunt like this.

A bit embarresing, at least I think...

Regards, Allan, DK

PS.: Sorry for bad English-spelling...

 

[NoNigDK]

$500? Interesting idea. I suppose it's theoretically possible, but I'm not sure how you could pull that off.

"... We could have gone cheaper, but it would have taken more time to find better deals. And we could have gone for a higher cost rig, but that seemed to defeat the purpose of the project. ..."

- Not wanting to sound like a wise-ass. But I assembled my new within 14 days. I only had a Toshiba Sat A100-886 (with 2 gigs of memory), three weeks ago. Still, within 14 days, I collected all the parts for my new rig. Within my budget and time-frame (it is Christmas time, so some money have to go around for presents).

'Crysis' was released November the 15th in DK. That's little more than a month ago up and until now. Again, I started from scratch, and the best you guys can pull of is this (very unfortunately) expensive rig. I have higher thoughts of you, than this. So saying, that it would have taken more time to finde better deals. True, but not more time, than you could have made an adequate (?) gaming rig, to a cost of ~ 1.000-1.500 USD

Regards, Allan, DK

 

[cronus98]

just curious...why are you getting 2 relatively expensive hard drives? i mean this is a rig just for crysis. you could get a 320gb for a fraction of the cost. just seemed a little frivolous to me...

 

[randomizer]

I don't think the rig is ridiculous, at least they didn't buy one of those $150 razor keyboards :lol:

However, I think a Q6600 would be just as good as the Q6700 even without overclocking, and you could save some money there. The hard drives are what really bother me, did you really need to get the raptor X? As far as I know the only difference is a window, and you are gonna be playing crysis not looking at your HDD platters spinning. If there is something different that justifies the extra money then I stand corrected.

I also would have spent $250 less on RAM, but that's just me :lol:

 

[pcwlai]

Why not sound card included such as Creative X-Fi? As this can offload some CPU cycles for the game.

 

[ben72227]

Why not sound card included such as Creative X-Fi? As this can offload some CPU cycles for the game.

+1

They throw in two Raptor hard drives (might as well throw in a tri-SLI setup and the kitchen sink :lol: )...yet can't manage to get a sound card???

I have to agree with the other posters - this is kind of frivolous article and has been done to death (as if a typical THG reader wouldn't know what it takes to run Crysis by now :lol: )

I'd be much more interested in seeing how well they can tweak a $1000 machine so that it can play Crysis with FPS on par with some of these $3000 machines.

 

[JCCIII]

Tom's Crisis

Hello, the point is in the name:
A Crysis Rig

Dear Tom's,

Truly disappointing, and I waited for this! Are you guys taking a break from reality; are you testing us to see if we are paying attention, or is this simply and tactically an effort to sell parts for your advertisers?

No one should spend any money on or waste any time building a rig for Crysis that cannot produce at least 60 frames a second, minimum, while running Crysis-- Crysis is the demand of the future, and why, why, use an antiquated NVIDIA 680i? Have not you people heard everything has changed and NVIDIA has not caught up? Does the bandwidth of DDR3 mean anything?

Wait for the right mainboard, a scalable one, or you will have people wishing that they could benefit from next year's high-bandwidth cards in their yesteryear's bottlenecked PCIe slots, please.

What good is it to review or give statistics about performance without being dictated to by the maximum hit? Pointedly, if the time that you guys and gals invest in building a Crysis rig ever sees a frame rate below 60 running the title's effects maxed, (at 1920 by 1200, or higher), and the slowdown was expected, not only have you wasted your time, you have wasted mine; and I thought only funny dogs and puppies chased their tails. I was waiting for something more attentive from Tom's research.

Everyone should put on the brakes until the technology is available. For instance, AMD's Spider platform is remarkably intelligent in many ways but not quite there performance wise, yet! Therefore, I think NVIDIA's delayed next-generation mainboards will be the ticket, or hopefully ASUS has purchase, like Intel did, the right to make an SLI board. Either way, one need only wait several more weeks before much more scalable platforms are available, new mainboards; plus, where is NVIDIA's next-generation GPU, just around the corner is where! And as a note, DirectX 10.1 cards' higher efficiency is an essential formula toward maximum performance.

To Tom's and everyone, have a blest holiday.


Sincerely,
Joseph

 

[enewmen]

I don't think the rig is ridiculous, at least they didn't buy one of those $150 razor keyboards :lol:

However, I think a Q6600 would be just as good as the Q6700 even without overclocking, and you could save some money there. The hard drives are what really bother me, did you really need to get the raptor X? As far as I know the only difference is a window, and you are gonna be playing crysis not looking at your HDD platters spinning. If there is something different that justifies the extra money then I stand corrected.

I also would have spent $250 less on RAM, but that's just me :lol:

I mostly agree. For example:

I spent near $3k on my rig. Of course I use it for more than Crysis. I also do real work on it that requires some horsepower.

 

[hixbot]

The photo showed 2 * 2x1gig. This makes sense.

Yes, but the text says only 2x1gig.

 

[enewmen]

Yes, but the text says only 2x1gig.

This must be a typo. I'm not loosing sleep over it.

 

[KekaiGenkai]

In my opinion, these are some of the most enjoyable Tom's Hardware articles. What are the chances that a particular person is going to do the same in building a computer? Not good. But that's not the point, is it? My rig is in my signature. I didn't spend $3K on a computer, but this stuff is fun to me, and probably to a lot of other people.

Also, what are the chances that any computer anyone builds right now is going to play Crysis at 60fps at 1920x1200 with settings on very high? Also, not good. It really doesn't matter how much you are willing to spend. Other places have tried with similar builds, some much, much more expensive, and have failed to do so.

As far as quad crossfire spider, I'm sure we'll see a 4x3870 playing Crysis in the future, when this technology is viable (ie driver/game updates). I will also enjoy reading that article.

In the mean time, sit back and enjoy an article written by a bunch of guys who have the time/money to spend on something that is a pipe-dream for the rest of us.

 

[hixbot]

This must be a typo. I'm not loosing sleep over it.

d'uh, that's why i mentioned it. so the author could fix it.