[COMPUTERS] Building a Gaming Machine

I didn't really want to mention it, but I felt I should since it is kind of important. Granted, things do move fast in the industry, but something like the R600 (codename for the DX10 ATI card) would be a little different than some other video card releases. As mentioned, it would support DX10; DX9 came out in 2002. Shader Model 4.0 would also be supported; SM 3.0 came out in 2004. And unified shaders...well, that's kind of hard to give a comparison to. Plus, it will have the usual spec increases. Granted, it won't be cheap though. I'm not sure how they'll do things, but I imagine they could just offer one card with that GPU, and that would be their top-of-the-line card with a top-of-the-line price tag (see prices for 7900 GTXs and X1900 XTXs). Even if it was available now, it wouldn't necessarily be an easy choice to make.

I'm not necessarily trying to discourage you on building a new PC now. I just wanted to give you all the details. Note that I knew about this stuff, yet I didn't wait for DX 10 cards since I really wanted to play Oblivion and a few other games. It isn't like these “older” cards won't be able to get the job done during the next few years. Considering the circumstances, waiting may not be an option, especially since there could still be delays with DX10 cards and/or Vista.

You might still want to consider waiting until the Conroe line is released, which gsr108 mentions in his post. Waiting ~2 months is a lot different than waiting ~7 months.

 

Even SLI'd units have problems running games like Oblivion at full settings. If you're going to SLI, then SLI now. Don't buy one card and say you can add another card 2 years down the road. In 2 years your card is going to be old news and probably won't support much of the latest and greatest rendering techniques, acceleration methods, etc. Not to mention in 2 years 1 card will probably run circles around your 2 cards.

Get a case with good cooling if you're going to SLI.

FYI : I have an X2 3800+, but in most current games an X2 running at the same clock speed as a non dual-core version runs slower by a bit than the non dual-core version.

 

Again on the Conroe processors, so far I've heard of two people (beta testers) who've been able to get the E6700 (which normall runs at 2.66 ghz) up to atleast 3.6 ghz on air cooling.

 

Why get a USB ethernet adapter instead of a card?

 

I had one for a while. It was just one more thing cluttering up my area and one more cable adding to the rat's nest behind my computer. I never had any problems with the way it operated though. When I upgraded to 802.11g I decided to clean things up a little by getting a wireless networking card to keep it all internal. There is nothing wrong with using a USB connection AFAIK, I was just curious.

 

wait for conroe!!!!!!!