[dellnomore]

What do you think? I'm not a HUGE gamer but I'd prefer to be able to run most of them and have a quick pc at that

Motherboard - nForce 780i SLI FTW
$205

CPU - Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550 Yorkfield 2.83GHz 12MB L2 Cache LGA 775 95W
$320

Video Card - EVGA 896-P3-1264-AR e-GeForce GTX260 SSC Edition 896MB DDR3 PCI-Express 2.0 Graphics Card
$300

RAM - Kingston HyperX 4 GB (2x 2GB) PC2-6400 CL5 240-Pin DIMM Kit KHX6400D2K2/4GR
$65

Power Supply - Thermaltake W0116RU Toughpower 750W Power Supply with Active PFC
$180

Fan - Zalman CNPS 7700 CU LED - 120mm LED Fan Pure Copper CPU Cooler
$55

Screen - ASUS VH226H Black 21.5" 2ms(GTG) HDMI Widescreen 16:9 Full HD 1080P LCD Monitor 300 cd/m2 1000:1 (ASCR 12000 : 1)
$200

Misc $300/max

Totals to about $1,625 USD ($1,944 CAD)


So what do you think? Is there anything you would add/take away/change?

[tardster]

Have you checked tigerdirect for any of this? They have the 780i mobo for 189.00 after the mail in rebate of 30 bucks. So you might be able to find some of it there cheaper, I got the system in my sig from tiger for under 1000 bucks. You will need a bigger PSU if you plan on doing the SLI. You will need atleast the the Thermaltake Toughpower 850W if you just plan on running two of the 260's and the 1000W Thermaltake if you have plans on running 3 of the 260's. Go to this link ( http://www.slizone.com/object/slizone_build_psu.html) and it will help you decide which PSU you will need depending on what your plans are. I ran into this problem myself because my PSU is SLI ready, but its only ready for 8800's and not the 9800's or 260's.

[Carbon]

Overkill, will have inferior performance to a E8500/P45 setup, as well as give you headaches with the chipset. Spend your money investing in a GPU and monitor, not in a (worthless for gaming) CPU, and save the rest for another build. That heatsink is also not very good, look at the Xigmatek S1283.

The graphics card is good though, as is the monitor (but you may want to go ahead and just get a regular 24" monitor). I'd also get 4GB of DDR2-1066 RAM just for overclocking headroom.

Also check out the 650W Corsair.

[tardster]

Originally Posted by Carbon

Overkill, will have inferior performance to a E8500/P45 setup, as well as give you headaches with the chipset. Spend your money investing in a GPU and monitor, not in a (worthless for gaming) CPU

Thats funny, comming from someone who scored 9369 in 3DMARK06. The system this person is looking at is almost the same as mine and I scored 13081 with a 2.66Ghz CPU, so he would score abit higher than me so I guess that scoring 3685 points higher is inferior performance right?

[Carbon]

What the hell are you talking about? I don't run a E8400 and synthetic benchmarks are worthless. Don't derail this thread just because you were offended in another one.

[tardster]

This has nothing to do with the other thread, this has to do with you constantly dogging any set up that has a Quad or SLI involved. You are a smart person, but your answer to any post like this one is always E8500/P45 when in all actuality your wrong. I used our 3DMARK scores as a referance. I figured you have a E85/P45 set-up since thats all you ever suggest to people to show the differance in our systems, since my system is basically the same as the one this person is asking about.

[Carbon]

The Q9550 is $320 on NewEgg. It gets 150FPS in Tom's Hardware CPU benchmarks for WiC 1650x1080.

The E8500 is $189 on NewEgg. It gets 142FPS in the same benchmark. Clocked to 3.33ghz, a relatively meager overclock, it gets 153FPS in those benchmarks.

The Q6600 is $189 on NewEgg. It gets 115FPS in the same benchmarks.

This pattern is across the board on every quad core processor in the market today. They do not score above E8500s in any reasonable benchmark, they lag behind dual core processors that can overclock much better than they can, and they are twice the price. This is not a very difficult conclusion to make, seeing as how Tom's Hardware has had a CPU chart up for at least the last six months, even including dynamic prices.

As for SLi, the choice between the extra expense of a high-wattage PSU, paired with an unstable and hot nVidia chipset or a stable single-card system with no multi-card overhead, chance for microstuttering or application compatibility and better performance per dollar should be relatively easy to make.

I recommend these parts because I actually do research and price/performance checks. I would appreciate if you attempted at least to google before recommending people spend thousands of dollars on hardware that will give them no perceptible advantage. It does a disservice to both the people posting here and their wallet when those giving advice don't bother to inform themselves.

[tardster]

Wow by overclocking your E85 you get 3 more frames per second than the NON overclocked 9550 (which can still be overclocked) hhhmmmm. Yes it may be more expensive but what if there are other things this person plans on doing besides just gaming, did you think of that no you just dogged it because it is not your precious E85. You told me the same thing when I asked about my system but not only do I play games I also do alot of work useing word processing, graphic designing, video editing, ect. but you really don't need to know all of that, you just need to tell me if its a decent system. If the 3D MARK 06 wasn't a decent benchmarking tool for gaming systems, why is it used? When I looked at futuremark at similar systems to the one you suggested they rarely scored over 10,000 and the system this person is asking about scores in the 13-14,000 range but thats not good enough for you is it. Just because a system is not of your preferance does not mean it is worthless, so stop being a fanboy of the only set-up you choose.

[Carbon]

Word processing, graphics design, and video editing are all singlethreaded, so will be even more biased towards clock speed and therefore the E8500.

[tardster]

Also just so you know I didn't just pull any of this out of thin air. When I did research on cpu benchmarks this is what I found, and these results were updated as of Jan. 09







according to the info on their site it looks as if they do quite abit of testing on these cpu's but I'm sure you will find something wrong with their system of testing since the results of their testing shows the E85 is not as good as the quads.

This is from their website;

CPU Benchmark results (“Baselines”) were gathered from users as well as from internal testing. PerformanceTest conducts eight different tests and then averages the results together to determine the CPU Mark rating for a system.
To ensure that the full CPU power of a PC system is realized, PerformanceTest runs each CPU test on all available CPUs. Specifically, PerformanceTest runs one simultaneous CPU test for every logical CPU (Hyper-threaded); physical CPU core (dual core) or physical CPU package (multiple CPU chips). So hypothetically if you have a PC that has two CPUs, each with dual cores that use hyper-threading, then PerformanceTest will run eight simultaneous tests.