The $500 Gaming PC Upgrade 215
sand writes "Building a powerful PC for gaming doesn't have to be expensive. In this article, FiringSquad spends $500 on a gaming upgrade, and compares its performance to that of a high-end Core 2 Extreme PC. The Core 2 Extreme rig is faster, but you may be surprised by how well the $500 PC is able to hang with it in Crysis, Call of Duty 4, and Unreal Tournament 3."
Unimpressive (Score:4, Informative)
A big HOWEVER, perhaps... (Score:4, Informative)
From TFA:
"The GPU of choice in our upgrade article is without a doubt the recently announced GeForce 8800 GT from NVIDIA. ... ... ... Most of the online retailers sold out of their inventory of GeForce 8800 GT cards within hours of the GPU's release, but hopefully they'll be restocked shortly. EVGA is a great brand, offering goodies like a lifetime warranty and their Step Up trade-in program. We've reviewed their cards in the past quite extensively and always liked them.
Keep in mind that NVIDIA is producing all of the early GeForce 8800 GT cards for their board partners like EVGA anyway, so regardless of the brand of card you choose they're all coming off the same production line. This includes the factory overclocked cards.
Alternatives: Until AMD ships their upcoming RV670 chip, the Radeon HD 3800, there really is no viable alternative to the GeForce 8800 GT that we'd recommend. If you want to save a little money the Radeon X1950 Pro would be an excellent alternative though."
Re:It's an upgrade I guess.... (Score:4, Informative)
NVidia 7600GT with 256MB: $99.99
Asus M2N-E motherboard (4 PCIE slots, 3 PCI slots for my existing cards): $96.99
AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400+ (Brisbane/65 watt version): $84.99
1 GB Corsair RAM: $44
Seagate 250GB SATA drive 16MB cache: $69.99
Lite-On SATA DVD burner: $36.99
Thermaltake 430 watt PS: $39.99
Total: $472.94 not counting the $40 in mail-in rebates
That's basically everything but a case and peripherals... and my focus was getting the best bang for my buck (while being able to retain things like my PCI SCSI controllers), not trying to keep under a certain amount.
* My computer started randomly rebooting and the other night, I smelled that wonderful joy of electric melting plastic. Turns out all the 5 volt lines connecting the power supply to the motherboard melted their connectors. I cleaned the melted plastic out the matching pins on the motherboard side, connected it to my backup power supply and things have been running fine since... though I wasn't sure if it was going to work at all when I ordered my new parts last week.
Re:Duh (Score:5, Informative)
As in, only desperately lobotomized morons would buy an Intel Extreme for $1000, when there are Intel Quads with as much cache and the same FSB for one fourth that, and frequency means zilch when the price difference allows you to buy liquid cooling. Now how's that 4x 4,8 GHz with 2x 4Mbyte cache sound?
As for GPUs, well, just buy the last-gen Ultra. An ATI X1950Pro 256M is now $200, anything really more powerful is at least $500. And it will run any recent game at decent speed.
Re:It's an upgrade I guess.... (Score:4, Informative)
I recently went through having to upgrade, and I have 4 IDE drives I wanted to keep. I found most new AMD based boards only had one IDE channel. Meaning, I get to keep my DVD drive and one HD.
Most intel based boards had more. Usually 2 to 3. Not sure if this is because of the reference designs for the chipsets or not. But a lot of searching led to that conclusion.
The ASUS I just grabbed had 3 IDE channels. And 6 SATA connectors.
I got a thread on here detailing what I picked up for $450 shipped last week. It's inline with what they're showing in the article. Nice full-size ATX towers can be found for $75 and less, with a power supply. Add a single 500 gig IDE drive, $100. That's how much I paid for one a few months ago at CompUSA even. DVD R/W Drive, $30. 17" flat screen LCD, $100. Find a decent one onsalse at CompUSA or BestBuy. Heck, I walked into a 21" View Sonic on sale a few months back and grabbed it for $250. Mouse and keyboard, wireless optical 2, $40.
So you're looking around $800 for a comparable system, but including everything built from scratch. Of course, you still need an OS, and since you're talking games, you're going to be paying for that too. So you're looking at a grand total IMO.
But it would be a rather nice system.
Re:Duh (Score:3, Informative)
GPU bound (Score:3, Informative)
What about a game like Supreme Commander? Which can bring a quad core processor to its knees.
Re:Duh (Score:5, Informative)
In many cases, such as Quake 3 and, more recently, Crysis, it's because the game engine is designed as a licensable asset that will be reused by other game studios for a number of years & they want it to remain relevant. Game engines are expensive to produce so once you've written a good one, there's few reasons not to license it out. If you plan on licensing the system & you want it to be relevant in 2-3 years, you not only need to be able to support todays top-of-the-line hardware but also be able to produce respectable results in two years when derivative titles are being released.
The other case is when you anticipate games to be played for long periods of time. A great example of this is Everquest 2 - SOE knew that they could expect the game to be actively played for 5 years or more. Given an anticipated lifespan like this you face 2 options - produce an engine with room to grow or plan on rewriting the engine so that 3 years in you can continue to meet player expectations.
Re:Duh (Score:3, Informative)
OpenGL features have four phases, but sometimes skip some of them. The first is vendor specific - e.g. NV, ATI, Apple, SGI, etc. These are written specifically for a type of hardware and are not agreed upon by anyone but the vendor. The second phase is extensions (name has EXT in it), which are again not officially a part of OpenGL, but name and parameters have been agreed upon by most vendors. EXT extensions are NOT required and sometimes not even implemented for that version of OpenGL - for instance, the ATI 9200 line of cards had ATI's proprietary form of pixel (fragment) shader and not the EXT version approved for the 1.3 standard, mostly because the version approved was created by arch rival nVidia (and Microsoft, iirc). The next stage is ARB - this is where the feature has been approved by the majority of vendors and added to the standard, but is in an initial testing phase. Features at the ARB stage still do not have to be implemented to officially meet the standard, but generally are - unless something horrible is discovered with that feature, it will likely migrate to core, and this allows for a driver-level update to give core support for a new version of OpenGL. I'm not sure how important that is these days, but some vendors still do ship software drivers that intermixed with hardware, if configured and desired (e.g. Apple). The final phase is core, where the extension is dropped and the feature is considered a part of OpenGL - at this stage, the feature is required to be considered a part of that OpenGL version.