Opinions on part selection...

[Waylay00]

I've been running the system in my signature for three years now, and it's been great. I really only started noticing it's limitations in the past six months for the games I play. I want to build another system to last me another one and a half years. I primarily want to play Armed Assault, Medieval 2 Total War, Empire Total War, Operation Flashpoint 2, Armed Assault 2, and the next Battlefield installment at fairly good settings. My budget is around $1200, and here are the parts I've selected:

ASUS P5Q P45 Motherboard (ASUS boards have always been solid for me)
Intel Q9450
Corsair XMS2 4GB (2x2gb) DDR2 800 TWIN2X4096
eVGA GTX 260 896MB PCIe GPU
Western Digital Caviar SE 640GB WD6400AAKS SATA HDD
Corsair HX620 620w PSU
Windows Vista Home Premium 64-bit SP1 OEM

I'm currently using my Samsung 225BW 1680x1050 monitor.

For the case and ODD, I will either use my current ones, or I could grab an Antec 900 and a newer Blu Ray capable drive.

The total is about $1200.

Thoughts/opinions?

 

[DSF]

Do the games you're looking at playing actually take advantage of a quad core chip?

 

[Waylay00]

AFAIK, no, but I don't want to screw up like I did last time. Last time, the 3700+ was better than the 3800+ X2 at outright speed at games of the time. Everyone recommended the 3700+ over the 3800+ X2 and even the next fastest dual core CPU. However, even a year later, I started regretting it, as many more games with dual core CPU support were coming out.

So I'm pretty much set on a quad-core, UNLESS you have some unfathomably great argument that would otherwise persuade me.

 

[DaveSimmons]

I'm really not sure history is going to repeat itself. It's a -lot- easier to spin of single threads for big tasks like AI and rendering than it is to take those single tasks and parallelize them.

I suspect over 2 years quad cores will gain some slight use of cores 3-4, but only enough to help them catch up to a faster dual-cores. With a $200 E8500 you'll have a 3.16 GHz CPU so the quad will need to use 1 GHz of core 3 just to catch up.

An E8500 + GTX 280 will give you much more overall gaming power in at least the first year, and the faster video will almost cetainly still be more useful in years 2-3 than the extra cores.

 

[DSF]

Originally posted by: Waylay00
So I'm pretty much set on a quad-core, UNLESS you have some unfathomably great argument that would otherwise persuade me.

My unfathomably great argument is that you're only intending for this system to last a year and a half.

I guarantee my OC'ed E4500 will still be going strong in terms of gaming in a year and a half, and it only has 2MB cache.

If you were planning to keep this for three years like your old system my opinion might be different, but since this is a relatively short-lived system, save some money and put it towards your next build. I also wouldn't buy 8GB of RAM for a system that's only supposed to last 18 months. There's no gain in gaming going from 4GB to 8GB of RAM, and there are even a couple benchmarks that show a slight drop in performance, although I'm willing to ignore those as fluky. When you rebuild your system you aren't going to be able to carry DDR2 with you, and it's not doing any real good in the meantime.

 

[cusideabelincoln]

The system looks fine. Even the difference between quad and dual isn't the same as the difference between dual and single, I think in two years his processor is going to hold up fairly well. Not to mention if games do become more heavily multithreaded, within two years or after two years, a quad core processor will hold up much better if he still wants to use this system. A quad core will have a bit better resale value (not going to be that much) if he decides to sell it or give it to a friend or family member.

A quad would also come in handy if he wants to venture outside of gaming, or if he wants to do some serious multi-tasking. And isn't a quad core, under Vista, a little more responsive than a dual core? In any case, it looks like he's already missed out on the dual core era so I think he would be fine if he jumped to a quad core. Manufacturers seem to be embracing the multi-core era so he should too 😛

I think his choices look solid. My only tidbit is that he could also consider getting the Radeon HD4870, since it's about the same price as the GTX 260.