New Computer, What Should I Get?

nikki · Post by **nikki** » Sat Dec 20, 2008 7:18 pm

I'm going to get a new computer soon, a desktop. I'm thinking of what specifications I should get, like the CPU, GPU, monitor, sound card etc. Do you guys have any ideas/comments? Do tell me.

syedhs · Post by **syedhs** » Sat Dec 20, 2008 7:27 pm

Depends on what your pc will be primarily used.

If it is mainly used for C++ programming (like Ogre), then it is far more important to have fast CPU and RAM combo. I am using Core2 Duo E8400 (3Ghz) with 2GB RAM and pretty satisfied with compiler's performance. DDR2 2GB RAM is more than enough for me with XP Professional.

I like NVIDIA GPU, so get at least 9 series. And sound card is generally not very important - just use the built-in one.

Of course if money is not an issue, get the fastest for everything

Post by **haffax** » Sat Dec 20, 2008 7:27 pm

Didn't you get a new computer just two years ago? ^^

reptor · Post by **reptor** » Sat Dec 20, 2008 7:31 pm

At least a dual-core processor. Single core processors are not worth it to buy now, unless you are aiming to get a very cheap processor.

Get as big a monitor as you can. It has a positive effect on your productivity. But don't sacrifice quality. This is likely the most expensive component of your new computer system but I think it may well be the most important component.

jjp · Post by **jjp** » Sat Dec 20, 2008 7:31 pm

Without knowing your budget it is kind of hard to tell. For most value per buck I'd go for something like:

- Some Intel Core 2 Quad.
- ATI Radeon 4850 for best performance/price, or something in the same price range from NVidia if Linux is a high priority for you.. if you want to spend a lot of money get a 280GTX. Don't go dual gpu.
- 4GB of RAM.

Pretty easy, isn't it?

sivael · Post by **sivael** » Sat Dec 20, 2008 7:36 pm

I recommend an AMD64 for a CPU.
I've got one now(4850e) and it stays @~35-40*C (for those not born into celsiuses - 36.6*C is the normal warmth of human body)

And 2GB of memory+processor+mainboard+case cost me something like 300$. Totally cheap. And good. Note, that I have a graphic card on my mainboard - didn't have the cach to spend it on a good graphics card and onboard graphics with ~Radeon9800 pro I had is enough for me for now:P

As soon as I get the money I'm buying something better:P
Another thing - it's 64bit. And has virtualization support. Overall - very nice procesor.

Monitor - anything big enough to see pixels @ 1600xsomething - widescreen or not - personal preference. Very nice during programming. Also, I don't use the cleartype or anything like that. I like my fonts precise, not blurry:P
Depends on a person I think though.

GPU - what do You need? I'm a bit of a Radeon fan - history tells me that they had better visual quality than GeForces. Now - they're probably similar. But still I like Radeons a bit better. Sentiments, maybe.
Other than that I like that they work better when AA enabled - they mostly have less FPS loss when AA enabled.

Sound card - anything external - onboard tend to have a lot of noise.

It all depends on the aims You have - powergaming/powerbenching will give better results on intel's 32bit superclocked beasts. Programming is a lot nicer on the 64bit processors. Also, the AMD's cool and quiet. I don't hear my computer. at all. Well... maybe the HDD

Have a nice computer:P

nikki · Post by **nikki** » Sat Dec 20, 2008 7:49 pm

Gonna use it for programming and gaming (TF2) mostly. And haffax, this computer's around 4 years old. And its really crappy (AGP slot, Geforce FX 5600!).

I was thinking about Radeons but I'm scared because I've seen many problems regarding Radeon-compatibility, especially on Linux.

For CPU, I'll probably get an Intel Core 2 Duo, but sivael recommends AMD64, is that good?

Once I get a new monitor, I'll probably keep this one too and get a dual-screen setup.

KungFooMasta · Post by **KungFooMasta** » Sat Dec 20, 2008 8:19 pm

AMD ftl. Core 2 Duo or Quad core (Q6600 is best value cpu atm)

Probably safer to go with nvidia.

syedhs · Post by **syedhs** » Sat Dec 20, 2008 8:30 pm

I think AMD always provide better value. In the past, I always make sure I bought an AMD, knowing they gave me better value.

However, it *appears* that Intel has managed to bury AMD a little with its stream of DualCore/CoreDuo/QuadCore - so I tag along with the rest of the crowd and buy CoreDuo for my last two workstations.

I may need to revisit my thought.. hmm come to think about it - duopoly is better then monopoly!

nikki · Post by **nikki** » Sat Dec 20, 2008 8:37 pm

syedhs wrote:However, it *appears* that Intel has managed to bury AMD a little with its stream of DualCore/CoreDuo/QuadCore - so I tag along with the rest of the crowd and buy CoreDuo for my last two workstations.

Hmm... Guess I'll just get an Intel then, even KungFooMasta says so. Probably a QuadCore.

BTW, I miss your Samurai Jack avatar.

jjp · Post by **jjp** » Sat Dec 20, 2008 9:02 pm

GPUs in a nutshell:

ATI: better performance/price, better 8xAA performance, nice ultra high quality multi sampling anti aliasing modes.

NVidia: slightly better texture filtering, driver allows for super sampling anti aliasing (nice for old games), historically better Linux and OpenGL support.

If gaming relatively new and not extremely old games with Windows is the priority I'd get ATI. If working with Linux is - NVidia.

CPUs in a nutshell:

Except for low end CPUs Intel is the better choice. Phenom 2 will probably make AMD competitive again but I would not suggest to hold your breath for new CPUs - don't expect any revolutionary improvements (from either Intel or AMD). Right now Core 2 Duo will get you the most for your money in regard to games. But if you don't plan to upgrade the CPU again in a year or two a Quad probably will pay off.

And apart from that:

Fuck DDR3 (at least for the moment). Don't waste a lot of money on hard disk performance. But don't be too mean on the power supply

sivael · Post by **sivael** » Sat Dec 20, 2008 9:08 pm

Yes, Intel Core Family is in the end - faster - for 32 bit processing. The question is - will You need that 15-20% more(look at the price as well - AMD's are cheaper:P) 32bit horsepower without having the 64bit support?

We have quite a few servers running now, and mos of them are 64bit AMD's on Gentoo. And they work *really* well with that. in some cases of extreme cryptograhy 64bit OS with 64bit app can be up to 4 times faster than it's 32bit counterpart. But these are extremes. Most of the time complicated computing problems on 64bit are only 50-60% faster(no extra source-code level optimization for 64bit architecture and its' 8 extra 64bit registers(apart form extending the existing registers to 64bit).

Also, 4GB of RAM means You're dancing on a thin line - If I remember correctly in Windows memory access to the higher parts of this memory is slower in 32bit than it is in 64 bits.

Also, my proc is dual core as well so it's not like it's some single-cored crap:P

Extending the 4GB of ram into more is easier too. I prefer AMD64 simply because it's a more versatile solution.

Stil, Cores have heir advantages(could use the integrated memory manager though - it seems to speed up the processing speed quite well:) )

Post by **CABAListic** » Sat Dec 20, 2008 9:29 pm

You do, of course, realise that the Core2Duo supports 64bit operations as well? Which nullifies your argument kind of.

sivael · Post by **sivael** » Sat Dec 20, 2008 9:47 pm

Oh. Sorry. I read a bit more and it seems that I was wrong:P

There IS 64bit support on the C2D processors.

I couldn't find any benchmarks showing the speed of said processors though. I mean - the first implementations of EM64T were much slower than 32bit counterparts. Apparently my info gets deprecated pretty quickly:P

Could anyone provide some benchmarks on 32 bit and 64bit systems? (preferably Gentoo and cryptography - game benches are everywhere(and games are mostly 32bit))

nikki · Post by **nikki** » Sat Dec 20, 2008 9:52 pm

These guys need to adopt a proper naming convention. Especially Intel. I can't understand a thing.

jjp · Post by **jjp** » Sat Dec 20, 2008 10:04 pm

sivael wrote: I couldn't find any benchmarks showing the speed of said processors though. I mean - the first implementations of EM64T were much slower than 32bit counterparts. Apparently my info gets deprecated pretty quickly:P

The slow EMT64 was with the last Pentium 4 cpus. "Pretty quickly" means in this case that your information is about 2.5 years old

sivael · Post by **sivael** » Sat Dec 20, 2008 10:37 pm

So the speeds are comparable? (pure 64bit with the same freq)

What about the increased efficiency of processor-memory bottleneck in AMD64 processors? (I'm talking about the built-in memory controller) - how much of a difference does i make?

I've had limited experience with C2D.

What about stability of these processors? We're using AMD processors for our servers and we didn't have any problems with them. Ever.

I tried to search the net for some benchmarks but all of them were at least 2.5years old:P Lately the processor battle seems to have stopped:P

Post by **Kojack** » Sun Dec 21, 2008 2:43 am

I just bought a new system (about 4 days ago).

I jumped ship from amd to intel. I generally dislike intel (due to their business practices and crappy tv commercials) and haven't owned one since the Celeron 300A (awesome chip. Very cheap, stable overclockable from 300MHz to 465MHz with default cooling and voltage, double the speed of the cache of the equivilent Pentium chip). The Athlon X2 (my last chip) was far better than the first intel multicores. But amd have been slipping lately, and the whole amd/ati merger thing still leaves me a bit put off (I don't like ati either). So in the end I decided to give intel a try and bought a Core I7 940. If it sucks I'll go back to amd on the next one.

Ram depends on what operating system you are running. If it's a 32 bit one, you will be limited to 4gb - size of video card. I bought 6GB of ram (tripple channel DDR3) and a Geforce GTX280 (1GB ram), but Windows XP 32bit can only see 3GB of ram (the video card's memory has to map into the 4GB address space too, so it overlaps and replaces part of system memory). In a 64 bit os all 6GB would be accessable (as long as your motherboard bios doesn't suck, it performs the mapping of video ram over system ram).
I'm using Vista 64 at the moment (I've just spent 3 days to get it to accept both keyboard and mouse input at the same time. Vista, you really make it hard for me to give you a fair go), so it's all accessable. If it pisses me off again I'll put on XP64.

I was going to buy a bluray burner, until I realised that blank blurays cost 100x the price of a blank dvd but only hold 6 times as much (25gb vs 4gb) and I'd have to order them from another state because I can't find them around here. Ouch.

Monitors are tricky. I've yet to find an lcd I like, so I still use dual screen 19" crts. If I do find a good 24" lcd which doesn't have much input lag, can handle true 24 bit colour, and has a dead pixel policy of "1 is unacceptable, free replacement" I'll grab two of them. Or maybe three and get a matrox tripple head adapter for some 72" WIDE screen gaming.

Add the free MPCL plugin to Visual Studio to use all of your cores for compiling, better than the built in visual studio method.

JohnJ · Post by **JohnJ** » Sun Dec 21, 2008 6:18 am

Ram depends on what operating system you are running. If it's a 32 bit one, you will be limited to 4gb - size of video card. I bought 6GB of ram (tripple channel DDR3) and a Geforce GTX280 (1GB ram), but Windows XP 32bit can only see 3GB of ram (the video card's memory has to map into the 4GB address space too, so it overlaps and replaces part of system memory). In a 64 bit os all 6GB would be accessable (as long as your motherboard bios doesn't suck, it performs the mapping of video ram over system ram).

Yeah, I have 4 GB of RAM and a 32-bit OS, and it's true you can't use all 4 GB, but I'm very sure this has nothing to do with your video card's memory (I don't think VRAM is mapped to RAM-type addresses). Instead, I think this memory is simply mapped to misc. hardware items on your computer (I don't know what exactly - the video card could be one, but it's definitely not mapping VRAM).

The reason I say VRAM isn't mapped into memory space is I have a GeForce GTX 260 with 896 MB of RAM, and I have 3.25 GB of RAM available to windows. 4.00 GB - 3.25 GB = 0.75 GB = 768 MB, which means there's no way it could be mapping my VRAM into memory space, otherwise I'd have <3.13 GB available to windows.

P.S. Sounds like your new computer's pretty nice

(Core i7 940 + 6 GB DDR3 RAM + GeForce GTX 280 1GB? Wow

)

Post by **Kojack** » Sun Dec 21, 2008 8:42 am

I read a big article on it a while ago, stating it was video card memory and giving various examples. It might have been wrong, but the numbers made sense at the time.

Some quick googling:
http://addressof.com/blog/archive/2007/ ... 2E00_.aspx
http://www.ookii.org/post/why_cant_my_c ... b_ram.aspx

P.S. Sounds like your new computer's pretty nice

It's not too bad.

Asus P6T Deluxe motherboard (14 usb, 6 sata, 2 sas, dual gigabit ethernet, mini internet capable operating system with firefox and chat and 5 second boot time built into the bios), two 1TB western digital hard drives, a 1KW OCZ/PC Power & Cooling psu and a Lian Li A70 case (awesome case, well worth the price).

It's fun watching Ogre compile with 8 cpu core meters in task manager jumping up and down (4 core cpu, but hyperthreading tricks windows into thinking there's 8 cores).

Edit: Full release mode build of ogre 1.6 (all demos, etc. 50 projects) takes roughly 4 minutes (building from a ram drive)

KungFooMasta · Post by **KungFooMasta** » Sun Dec 21, 2008 9:31 am

If you want to read up on reviews, benchmarks, and other hardware info, I usually check these sites:

http://www.tomshardware.com/
http://firingsquad.com/

nikki · Post by **nikki** » Sun Dec 21, 2008 11:27 am

How's nVidia GTX 280?

_tommo_ · Post by **_tommo_** » Sun Dec 21, 2008 12:10 pm

Costly

It's one of the most powerful cards, but also the "hottest" one and it's really energy-hungry... I wouldn't go with that, if you aren't a "hardcore gamer" you can have only problems from it, IMHO.
Super-cutting-edge components have a bad quality/price ratio and are most likely to fail... try always to get revision of things and second versions to have a solid and cheap PC.
Anyway there's HD4870X2 that is even more powerful.

I'm quoting jjp, just get an HD4850 (and change its BIOS)

For the CPU, i think that you can find a Core2 8400 around 100$, but the performances aren't low end at all... and if not going for that one I would go for a Core2 anyway.
I7s are too new, and AMD can't really offer what intel does today...

nikki · Post by **nikki** » Sun Dec 21, 2008 12:24 pm

There's no real budget actually. My dad said he'd buy a new computer for me, and when I asked him about a budget, he said, "No budget for you!".

So, I was thinking about getting the best CPU, GPU and RAM (well, he asked for it

) and a 'reasonably big' hard drive, a 'cool' new monitor, and probably sticking with the old keyboard and mouse.

Don't want to ask for too much though, you know, me being a nice guy an' all.

jjp · Post by **jjp** » Sun Dec 21, 2008 12:26 pm

nikki wrote:How's nVidia GTX 280?

How about taking a look at some reviews yourself (but don't take tomshardwareguide seriously)? If you want to spend that much money there is nothing wrong with it.