Dropped a grand on components

[Curtis Lemay]

Hi, this is my first real post despite reading anandtech for a while now. I'm in grad school and don't really upgrade my computer like I did in the last 48 hours. Check out the specs and tell me what you think.


4870 X2 $399 AR
24" Acer monitor $289
2 500 GB 7200 Spinmaster drivers $110
Raid Card $18
Bluray Drive 80$

I already had a E8400 that is stable at 3.6 ghz on the stock cooler that came with it, but hope that my zalman cnp9700 will get it up to 3.8 or more once I put it on. I also have 4 gigz of fast ram, 8000 speed ddr2. I just have a 8800 gt right now and can't wait for slow UPS guy to deliver my equipment. Playing games at 1920 x 1200 with AA/AF sounds nice, not to mention blueray.

So what do you guys think? I know its not like a quadfire system, but I just want it to max out games that I like playing such as Devil May Cry 4 and GTA4 at a high resolution and have a good gaming experience when im not bombarded with readings and papers.

 

[zerocool84]

GTA4 won't be able to be played at high rez without a quad. It's one of the few games today that needs a quad to be playable with everything turned up.

 

[Blain]

Originally posted by: zerocool84
GTA4 won't be able to be played at high rez without a quad.

His monitor doesn't support a resolution of 2560x1600.
If he can't play GTA4 maxed out at 1920x1200 using a 4870x2 and C2D running 3.6GHz...
It's time to give up on gaming.

 

[Curtis Lemay]

I'm sure it'll be fast enough.

 

[Curtis Lemay]

Why am i black?

 

[Eeqmcsq]

Originally posted by: Curtis Lemay
Why am i black?

Haha, I noticed the same thing when I first joined this forum. It's because the African American icon is alphabetically the first on the list, thus ends up being the default.

 

[Ika]

The RAID card will probably not be any good - if you have a decent motherboard, it should have built-in RAID options that will probably be just as good as the so-called "RAID card". It's all software RAID anyway, unless you drop a couple benjamins on a hardware RAID.

Speaking of RAID, if you're really sure you want to use RAID, go ahead- but most people here will warn against it. I personally have two single-platter Seagate drives in a RAID 0 config and I'd say it wasn't worth it. It's technically fast as all get out, but I don't notice a speed difference in what I do, only HD Tune benchmarks. For the $110 price, I got a 1.5tb Seagate drive that performs just as well as my RAID array (which is faster than most disks), and has more storage to boot.