Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Advice from Axiom Owners anyone up on the latest computer hardware?

I haven't kept up to date with what the latest is in hardware. It's time for a new desktop though. I'll be gaming with the machine, among other less intensive things. I need at least the following (Dragon Age Origins requirements)

CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo 2.4Ghz Processor or equivalent
RAM: 4GB (Windows Vista/Windows 7)
Video: ATI 3850 512 MB or greater
NVIDIA 8800GTS 512 MB or greater

I'm thinking I want to get a Core i7 processor. The biggest areas I'm not sure of are the motherboard and graphics card. What's a good MB that works with the Core i7?

For video cards, I want something good, but not so high end that I'll break the bank. I'd rather get something a little lesser now and have to get something again in a couple of years than spend a lot on a card now. I've had good luck with ATI cards, so would like to stick with one of them. I'm guessing the 5700/5800 is too pricey (haven't dug into prices too deep yet). It looks like a 4650 is only about $70 and gives me more than what the game needs and I assume will be good for games for the next few years. Haven't followed it enough to know what I'm missing out on with the better cards though.

I'm going to do a little research, but there's always some people that can help here. As far as research goes, not sure what sites are good currently. I remember checking out Tom's hardware (link directly to a mobo article) in the past.

The 5770 is relatively inexpensive, and is faaaar superior to the 4650. You could also go with a 4850 for about $110, and be way better off than with the 4650.

Tom's is not a great source at this point. Have a look at http://www.techreport.com. They have a very good guide out every month. I generally go off of their guides to some degree.

Then again, I'm bashing my head against a windows XP install on their base configuration tonight, so maybe I'm not the best person to ask... stupid XP.

You got me to price check the 5750...cheaper than I thought it would be. We may just have a winner as far as video cards go. DirectX11 support is a nice plus for the future as well.

Figuring out the mobo is next. Then of course, where to buy this from. I've built my own in the past, but might go the easy route and do Dell or a local clone box, [url=www.kehtron.com]Kehtron[/url]

Kehtron will be more customizable I suspect, but we'll see what prices are like between the two. With Dell I just get whatever mobo they happen to put in there. I'm assuming they'll let me upgrade the video card to the 5700 series.

I'm remembering why I normally custom build. Dell, HP, and Kehtron all won't let me customize a full machine exactly what I want without it getting real expensive.

I think I can do a barebones system from Kehtron and get the Core i7 860, 8GB RAM, 1TB HD, 5750 1GB ATI video for about $800. Maybe another $300 for a new monitor + a network card for it.

Forgot about the monitor for a moment...another thing I need to look into. I'll see what I can find...probably 23" with 2ms response time.

What else are you planning to use the machine more? Myself, I'd edge towards a better video card over more that much RAM, or even a slightly slower processor.

I am currently running a Core i7 in my rig, and I HIGHLY recommend this processor! I was able to take the Core i7 920 from 2.67GHz to 3.8GHz on a $25US air CPU cooler! The processing power is absolutely amazing.

Motherboards for the Core i7, I believe, are pretty much the same across the board...they all utilize the X58 chipset (unless things have changed, I've been out of the hardware loop for a few months now since I built my current PC). My last two motherboards were manufactured by EVGA. While this company is fairly new to the MB building business, their products are great quality and very friendly to the novice or power-user.

I use my desktop mostly for gaming, and I have a variety of games that all place different demands on the hardware. For example, MS Flight Simulator X depends heavily on the CPU so my video just sits there yawning. On the other hand, Crysis crushes the GPU and is not very dependent on the CPU. Then some games, like GTA IV depend on BOTH the GPU and the CPU for top performance.

The only hardware that does not get fully utilized in my PC is the RAM...I currently have 6GB (remember, the Core i7 is triple channel, so RAM has to come in multiples of 3). Like kcarlile said, spend more on the GPU and CPU and not so much on the RAM.

I have NO experience with ATI cards at all, I've always been a nVIDIA fanboy so I can't help you with your graphics card. I currently run a EVGA Geforce GTX 275 FTW and couldn't be happier with it...it crushes every game I throw at it! I don't know what the ATI equivalent is, but a card like that should do you just fine!

If you are comfortable building a PC, then I would highly suggest you purchase your parts from Newegg (www.newegg.com). Great prices, great service. I was able to build my current PC for about $1200, all parts from Newegg (this was in July, so I'm sure prices have dropped a little since then). Here are the specs so you get an idea:

Core i7 920 OC'd to 3.8GHz
Cooler Master Hyper N520 CPU cooler
EVGA X58 3-way SLI motherboard
6GB OCZ DDR3-1600 Triple Channel RAM
EVGA Geforce GTX 275 FTW
2 Western Digital Black 1TB SATA-II HDD
XClio 850W GreatPower PSU
XClio A380 Full ATX Case

Hope this helps, please let me know if I can offer any more help or information!

By the way, I just recently upgraded from Windows Vista x64 to Windows 7 x64. What a great operating system! The OS overhead is SO much lower on 7 than Vista...last night I checked Task Manager and I was using only 700MB of RAM to run the OS, it used to be 1.2-1.3 GB for Vista just to sit there!

Less OS overhead = more gaming goodness

Thanks. I may only do 4GB of RAM. I figured I'd probably go 64 bit on this machine, assuming no one has had issues running games in the 64 bit version of the OS, so I was going to take advantage of the extra RAM mostly because I could.

I'm leaning towards getting a bare bones system with the mobo, case, processor, power supply, and then buying the other parts to put in myself. Unless I can find someone that will let me customize enough to get what I want, I'll likely go that route.

I was reading more about the ATI cards last night. It seems like the 5700 series or I believe the 4800 was comparable to these performance wise or even slightly better. Slightly lower cost as well, but no DirectX11 support. Not sure how long it will be before we start seeing games taking advantage of Directx11.

I'm not planning on overclocking and was looking at the Core i7 860. LGA1156 instead of LGA1366 socket I believe. It looks like I may be pretty much topped out as far as what processor I can use if I go this route, but I also don't plan to upgrade to a different processor during the machines life, so I don't know that this matters. The Core i7 900 series seems to start using the LGA1366 socket.

The memory still seems to be in groups of 2 for the 800 series, then goes to groups of 3 for the 900 series. Processors

Not sure why, as both are DDR3. The little bit of looking I've done seems to indicate a big price jump to go to the 900 series, except for the 920, so that could be an option too. 920 is 2.66Ghz vs. 2.8 for the 860, so a minor difference there. Not sure that the other differences are between the 900 and 800 series besides the socket (and therefore mobo) it uses. I'll have to look more.

The next gen Core i7 and i5 (along with yet another socket change) are actually back to dual channel RAM.

I was considering an upgrade to components as well but considering how often Intel changes socket types, i'm actually pondering whether i might just go AMD anyway and chance a cpu upgrade with the same socket in two years.

Will probably ponder for another 6 months....