$2500 for a gaming machine...WHAT TO GET!?

[Amused]

Originally posted by: owensdj
Using SCSI drives like AmusedOne suggested would be a bad idea for a gaming machine(or almost any workstation) in my opinion. The very, very small performance increase wouldn't justify the extra cost of the SCSI drive and the SCSI controller. I've never seen a game that was disk I/O intensive. Seems like you'd be better off using the money you save from going with IDE to get a much larger drive and/or more memory.

I've had the pleasure of fooling around with two nearly identical P4 machines at a local mom-n-pop computer shop, one with a WD IDE drive, the other with a Seagate 18 GB 15K RPM drive. The difference was very noticable to me. But then, I am very annoyed by load times and seek times, so I may be biased that way. Others may not be as annoyed.

BTW, when playing single player Half Life or WTCW the load times between levels (and in the middle of levels for HL) is annoying as hell. The Seagate x15 SCSI drive cuts these in what feels like half or more.

What benchmarks can't show you, is just how much snappier one of these drives makes your machine feel, especially a freshly booted machine that hasn't had any programs loaded to memory yet.

 

[desktopsilver]

ive got a p4 @2.26..with the p4t533-c,,,a 4600ti vid card,u160 card,15,000 cheetah 18 gig hard drive,1066 ecc mem -512mb,,,i also have a ibm 30 gig deskstar foir vid work or as backup and for general horseplay..................i would sugest the epox board from what ive heard ,because this p4t533-c board has verry limited oc'ing capabillitys,,,,,,,,,,i would suggest this scsi set up with the cost being watched by buying a card of of these forums or from ebay,,,,,,card 129+ x-15 drive from frys 220$ ,total price 350$ that is roughly two times the price of a wd caviar ,,,but a performance increese none the less,,,and a hard drive is the heart of your system,,,i would get the 1066 memory as any time i run benchmarks i smoke any other memory that it compares with,,,,ithink i would go with the radeon 9700 card as well as it incorparates the new technolegy were the 4600 ti is old hat stuff,,,

 

[bjc112]

2. Why do you all recommend LCD monitors, if you use them for gaming they blur, besides your stuck with 17" unless you want to spend a fortune, and I mean a fortune for a larger LCD monitor. A nice 19" CRT is way more suited for games and much cheaper.

A good quality LCD will not Ghost....

Look for about 20ms or less...

 

[JJ650]

Was walking around Best Buy the other day and noticed a nice 18" Mitsubishi LCD. It looked blurry but they all do since they are run off of a signal splitter and the image quality blows on all the monitors connected to it.
Anyone know how the Mitsubishi monitors compare to other nice LCD's?

 

[Sevenhunt]

i would sugest the epox board from what ive heard

And which epox might that be????
The ep 4g4a+????

 

[BLiT45]

There is a review on another website, reviewing the new ASUS P4S8X motherboard with SiS 648 chipset. Now the way the board is designed, it increases the performance of an IDE drive almost to SCSI levels. Plus the memory bandwidth difference using DDR over Rambus isn't as significant anymore. I'll let you read it for yourselves, but what it boiled down to is Rambus is a waste of money, and SCSI isn't much better. Think about the cost of the SCSI controller as well. Not only that, the drive sizes are wierd with SCSI, they go to 36 GB then jump to over 70 GB with no sizes in between, however your price literally doubles when you get the 70 GB+ size, unlike with IDE drives which only go up a small amount of $$$ between sizes, with exception of the newest 180 and 200 MB drives of course.

Ok, granted, perhaps LCD's don't blur with top end stuff, but how much $$$ is the high end one going to cost you? I don't mean a dinky little 15" either. I'm guessing triple what a high end CRT costs. Sure, I can see it with the LAN parties if your into that...maybe just pick up a small LCD to carry around and a CRT for the home.

P.S. here is the link to the review of the ASUS I mentioned earlier...

http://www.ocworkbench.com/2002/asus/p4s8x/p4s8xgallery1.htm

FYI, I'm looking for upgrades too, and am not terribly concerned about the $$$ aspect, although I'll stay under a couple thou hopefully...however I find it hard to not carefully consider what I'm getting for my money...I'm willing to spend a little more, but there is a limit. So I would find it difficult to recommend say a P4 2.8, when the P4 2.53 can be had for half that price of the 2.8...it's not like the 2.8 is twice the processor! It's just 300 mhz more. Same goes with SCSI vs. IDE...if SCSI was twice the speed, I'd say go for it, but for twice the price...I can't, unless your really justified and run a server, say...or have more money than most.