What Motherboard/Graphics Card?

[Skott]

Rumor (read 'rumor') is that the new DirectX10 cards will be power sucking monsters so make sure the psu you choose has plenty of stable amperage on the rail/s. Also check out which psu's are noisey and which arent. Most are decent but some are quite loud. But its subjective so not sure what your noise tolerance level is. For dual card configuration I'd say you are looking at a psu in the 600w range. That'll also give you some upgrade futureproofing.

 

[Bobthelost]

Originally posted by: Skott
Rumor (read 'rumor') is that the new DirectX10 cards will be power sucking monsters so make sure the psu you choose has plenty of stable amperage on the rail/s. Also check out which psu's are noisey and which arent. Most are decent but some are quite loud. But its subjective so not sure what your noise tolerance level is. For dual card configuration I'd say you are looking at a psu in the 600w range. That'll also give you some upgrade futureproofing.

At least one of those rumours is bullshit. The Inq came up with 300W each. Which is twice as much as a Pentium 965EE ever drew, over twice what the current high end consume and which would make almost every PSU out at the moment useless as they limit the rails to 240VA. If the power was that high they'd be shipped with a seperate power brick as the old Nvidia SLI precursors to the 7950GX2 design did.

 

[Bako Bitz]

Hi there,

I stumbled on this thread while trying to put together a system of my own, much like CrudOfCrow's. I was swayed by the Intel Core Duo argument and its slight lead in many of the TomsHardware.com benchmarks. But, if you include the cost of getting a motherboard with the chipset and features they use in their benchmarking, the price/performance ratio seems to shift hard toward AMD, and I wanted to ask whether you guys still thought it was worth it to go Intel.

The chipset tomshardware uses for the conroe setup is Intel 975x; getting a motherboard with that chipset appears quite an expensive prospect, but with earlier chipsets, I've seen evidence of significant performance declines, especially with the 945 budget boards. With the processor, you're looking at spending $413 to get even a 965 board, which at least has 800mhz memory capability, as in the benchmarks. I'm not sure of the performance difference between the 965 chipset and the 975 used in the benchmarks. But compare this to the X2 4600+, which can be had with full-featured nForce 550 chipset motherboard for $335. This setup has every reason to perform up to tomshardware.com specs, using the same chipset and memory.

On the other hand, I hate to sacrifice performance, but when the difference is close to $100 for a potentially very small difference (esp if the 965 isn't as fast as 975), I start to reconsider. Any thoughts?