Need a little advice, or a lot

[Erydin]

I am looking at buying a new system. It is hopefully looking at being in the $2000 - $2500 range. What I have been looking at currently, is a motherboard supporting SLI (not real specific here yet), 2G of ram (DDR2 I suppose), probably going to just run a single NVIDIA 7950 X2. Power supply, case, etc, added later to make it all nice and compatible with everything else. The big stopping block I have right now is of course, AMD or Intel. In the $2300 range, I can get the whole package with a dual core FX 5200+. Intel I have not really looked to much at until recently. I have however been reading a lot of the posts here and now I have a doubt this will be the best way to go. The computer would be to almost exclusively run games, such as upcoming ones like NWN2, BF 2142, etc. The goal I am going for is to be able to run any game that comes out in the next year or so and not have to worry about about my FPS, and in the second year some tweaking but still able to run most games at lower settings, in 2 - 2 1/2 years I will be looking at replacing this system. Suggestions, recommendations greatly appreciated as well as why you would change something or keep it the same, figure I might as well learn as much as I can about it Thanks all.


Erydin

 

[Gautama2]

Intel Core 2 Duo 6600 definately.

 

[myocardia]

Originally posted by: Gautama2
Intel Core 2 Duo 6600 definately.

Definitely. The E6600, plus a decent overclocking motherboard is ~40% faster (before overclocking) than an X2 5200, yet costs the same. AMD is fine, if you can barely afford to get a dual-core, but that's about all.

 

[Erydin]

Which motherboard would you recommend then? I have never done any OC on any computer I have owned before, but it would seem that with the E6600, everyone seems to agree that 3.0ghz is "safe".

Erydin

 

[Corporate Thug]

with that budget, you can get the asus P5W or wait til the nforce 680 hits (its supposed to be right around the corner)

 

[Erydin]

I have been looking into the P5W. There are a lot of posts on BIOS problems specifically campatibility issues with C2D and having to flash the BIOS and other fun stuff. I have 0 experience with doing this kind of thing. If the P5W works out of the box, which there are also a lot of posts on it doing just that, seems like it would be a great board... but I hesitate due to the negative posts, any other suggestions/comments?



Erydin

 

[myocardia]

If you plan on overclocking any motherboard, it's fairly normal to need to flash the BIOS to the latest version. And you have to flash the BIOS with any 975x-based motherboard, before they recognize a C2D. Only the 965-based motherboards don't need to be flashed to recognize a C2D. Of course, they have to be flashed to get any decent overclock.