Buying desktop computer

Next week i will be heading to computer shop and ordering a computer. I am not that good at computers and i need some help. So far i got offered few things:
- AMD Phenom II X4 940 Deneb 3.0GHz 4 x 512KB L2 Cache 6MB L3 Cache Socket AM2+ 125W Quad-Core'
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product...henom_quadcore-_-19-103-471-_-Product
-6K ram, though what brand ?
-geforce gts 250(cheap) or geforce gtx 295
Perhaps i should use my old dual slot video card? it still works fine or i can buy lets say 1 slot good card and add the old one for poker? (is it possible?)

So if i understand correct i have all set? motherboard, ram, video card... ?
I would appreciate if some commented/suggested something
Thanks in advance

what are you buying this for? seems like a really good computer ;0

There are alot of variables. What type of computer are you wanting to build? Gaming? Poker? All of the above? Whats you're budget? And it looks like your missing a power supply, which is depending on the type of video card your wanting to run, either 1, or crossfire (assuming ur sticking with amd processors, which are limited to ATI crossfire if your wanting to run dual video cards). you will also need a harddrive. Just make sure when seletcing the HD your getting 7,2000 RPM and no lower than 32mb cache.

Feel free to pm me if u have any questions or anything. and if you dont know how to put 1 together, I can probably assist with that too. ive helped people do it before who barely knew the difference between a mouse and a motherboard. and it was all done through VENTRILO. so lemme know.

i will mainly use it for poker, however i might get stuck with sc2 and diablo that's why i am buying a good one. I won't be building it myself i will just tell the main parts i want, they will do the rest. And i don't plan spending more than 1.5K$

A GeForce 250 would be a bit crippling with that system. Thats a budget card for an enthusiast processor. I'd go with a ATi Radeon 5770+ or better.

You said 6K ram, which doesnt make any sense. I assume you meant 6GB of ram, which is bad, as amd systems still use dual channel memory and this puts you in a tri configuration, requiring one channel of memory to operate in between cycles of the other. Just get 4GB or 8GB if you really want to.

Definitely tell them exactly what kind of power supply you want. I have a feeling these guys are probably gonna cut corners everywhere possible to maximize their profit, so if you dont mention it, they'll ignore it.

what power supply would you suggest?

Buy Intel CPU.

The bottleneck of any system nowadays is the HDD. Make sure you buy something good,
with large cache and, basically, as fast as possible.

Anything else does not make a big difference.

On December 31 2009 05:25 pluzich wrote: Buy Intel CPU. The bottleneck of any system nowadays is the HDD. Make sure you buy something good, with large cache and, basically, as fast as possible. Anything else does not make a big difference.

lol wut?

On December 31 2009 05:45 NewbSaibot wrote: Show nested quote + On December 31 2009 05:25 pluzich wrote: Buy Intel CPU. The bottleneck of any system nowadays is the HDD. Make sure you buy something good, with large cache and, basically, as fast as possible. Anything else does not make a big difference. lol wut?

OK, let me elaborate: I run on my 2-year old Dell laptop 2 SQL servers (MSSQL 2008 and Postgres),
I open the badass Visual Studio 2010 (up to 3 instances) and run CPU-heavy simulations
and in the meantime I can watch movies etc.
I do not see much of a difference when I unplug my comp from AC power. On battery it drops CPU speed
from 2.13 to 1Ghz or 700 Mhz. It has 2GB Ram, which has never ever
filled. On battery, only thing you can feel is HDD access slowdown.

If you have tasks which are heavier than this, maybe CPU speed/more ram/more cores will make a difference.

Well, he mentions playing SC2 and diablo, and I assure you video card comes first before HDD in this case. HDD is a type of bottleneck sure, but not one anybody typically cares about. What people want is a fast responsive pc in the app they are running. Gotta get a nice processor and video card (at least for games) for that. Running SQL servers and coding is not representative of anything anyone normally does on their home pc.

Besides, the best HDD in the world is only going to improve system performance by like 1% overall anyway, so getting the fastest with the most cache is really all in vain. Any typical consumer SATA harddrive will work fine, he doesnt need to go out of his way finding the most badass thing on the market.

On December 31 2009 08:13 NewbSaibot wrote: Well, he mentions playing SC2 and diablo, and I assure you video card comes first before HDD in this case. HDD is a type of bottleneck sure, but not one anybody typically cares about. What people want is a fast responsive pc in the app they are running. Gotta get a nice processor and video card (at least for games) for that. Running SQL servers and coding is not representative of anything anyone normally does on their home pc. Besides, the best HDD in the world is only going to improve system performance by like 1% overall anyway, so getting the fastest with the most cache is really all in vain. Any typical consumer SATA harddrive will work fine, he doesnt need to go out of his way finding the most badass thing on the market.

No you're wrong. HDD is a mega bottleneck in today's world for many apps such as MySQL/pqSQL due to caching the data from the HDD.

SSD will improve performance enormously over space sacrifice.

edit: Wait, but isn't a Poker playing running PT3 want it to be fast? And PS too saving the HH's? Starcraft and Diablo will run adequately on any standard gfx card unless it's the new ones.

On December 31 2009 08:13 NewbSaibot wrote: Well, he mentions playing SC2 and diablo, and I assure you video card comes first before HDD in this case. HDD is a type of bottleneck sure, but not one anybody typically cares about. What people want is a fast responsive pc in the app they are running. Gotta get a nice processor and video card (at least for games) for that. Running SQL servers and coding is not representative of anything anyone normally does on their home pc. Besides, the best HDD in the world is only going to improve system performance by like 1% overall anyway, so getting the fastest with the most cache is really all in vain. Any typical consumer SATA harddrive will work fine, he doesnt need to go out of his way finding the most badass thing on the market.

CPU is several orders of magnitude faster than RAM.
RAM is several orders of magnitude faster than HDD.

(HDD is the only mechanical part of your PC. )

Any time any application need 3-4 HDD non-sequential reads, the whole uber-fast
CPU with its mega-cash and dual-channel bus and whatever is waiting for those
3-4 pages like infinitely. In that time, the CPU can do millions of operations, which it
does not because it needs the data from HDD. It waits. You wait.

With a faster HDD you boot faster. Any application (Office, games) will start faster.

If you take a typical desktop computer for a "home user", and, say, put a 2x faster
processor the user might not notice any difference at all. If you put a 2x faster HDD
(assume you can) you will see a HUGE difference. Like everything will become almost
2x faster

Indeed it also depends on which kind of applications you use. But when not sure, take
the best HDD you can.

And yeah, SC2 and Diablo will run on like almost any VC you can buy. I would actually bet
it would run on most Onboard cards (not that I recommend onboard VC).

On December 31 2009 09:30 genjix wrote: Starcraft and Diablo will run adequately on any standard gfx card unless it's the new ones.

PT3 will run adequately on any standard harddrive. But when he realizes he just sacrifices 10-15fps, lower resolutions, and 2-3 years of future off his video card just so postgres loads faster, he'll probably be kicking himself in the ass. Especially if he doesnt have any complaints about how his poker databases respond right now.

On December 31 2009 10:11 pluzich wrote: With a faster HDD you boot faster. Any application (Office, games) will start faster.

Who cares if it starts faster only to run like crap once it has started? I dunno about you but I can wait the 30 seconds for a huge app to load if it means I'm gonna get top performance once it has loaded. The bulk of pc use is spent during the use of software, not the load times.

Like everything will become almost 2x faster

The only thing that will become faster is startup times of applications, and in particular instances things like SQL queries (PT3 sorting, importing, loading). These represent a small fraction of what most people will actually be doing with their systems and care about.

Indeed it also depends on which kind of applications you use. But when not sure, take the best HDD you can.

hell no, when i doubt, make sure your system can run its software as best as possible. The avg application on any non SSD system is only going to take like 10 seconds to load anyway.

And yeah, SC2 and Diablo will run on like almost any VC you can buy. I would actually bet it would run on most Onboard cards (not that I recommend onboard VC).

For the games he mentioned probably yes. But if he's going to drop $1500 on a rig im pretty sure he's going to try some of the higher end games too. So he loads FarCry2 up, oh whoopdie do it took 3 seconds, too bad the game runs like ass now that it is loaded. Much better than waiting the 20-30 seconds on a normal harddrive than to enjoy beautiful high resolutions, silky smooth 60fps, 16xAA/AF.... i digress.

So according to you the only applications that do I/O are SQL-based ones?

Most apps do I/O. Loading is the most I/O intensive phase usually. But accessing HDD does not end when you load the crap into RAM. You need more as you work/play, or you need to write things. If you don't believe me look at your computer's HDD access light for a minute.

AND

Most apps use very little CPU time overall, because they are waiting for something. For user input, for instance. So pimping your CPU does not change almost anything: CPU is like idle 99% of the time.

There are applications where CPU speed has direct impact. Like chess engines, where everything is in cache/RAM, CPU speed increase brings linear speed increase in calculation. Or when you are doing some scientific computations, like solving huge differential equations. This requires little I/O and a lot of in-CPU computations. But for a desktop user-the bottleneck is always the HDD.


Think this way: HDD is the only mechanical part of your computer. There is the moores law for CPU/RAM which is that they become two times faster every two years. This is exponential. HDD is mechanical, it is always the slowest part. Any time new technology comes, it makes HDDs 10% faster, not twice (Moore's law does not apply to mechanical things ).
This brings HDD further and further behind the other components of the computer.

This isn't the best place to ask. You get a lot of conflicting and bad responses from people who think they know what they're talking about but really don't. That may not be true for everyone who responds, but if you're clueless yourself it's hard to know who to listen to, because you don't know well enough yourself to know who is right, who is wrong, or know if their reasoning makes sense, is applicable or is even true. I would probably hand out advice if I knew what I was talking about myself, but I don't so I won't try, unfortunately there are others who like to just chime in with what they think they know anyway and you end up getting bad advice.

I'm not singling anyone out with this, I haven't read the replies because like I said I'm not an expert so it's not even worth me reading and criticising what anyone may have said, but I've seen a lot of these threads pop up here and on various other video game related sites and frankly a lot of the advice I've seen has been very poor, inexperienced advice that people shouldn't be handing out at all.

With all that said, I recommend a specialised forum, I personally used: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/forum-13.html when I last bought computer components a couple of months back and believe I got a great price/performance deal purely because of the many many threads that I read posted by people asking the same thing as I wanted to know. I'm sure there's a ton of these types of forums on the internet and the advice there is going to be far better than the advice you'll get on a computer build here, if you were looking for poker advice would you search for it on a Diablo forum? You'd get a whole bunch of uninformed people who think they know what they're talking about telling you your mistake was that you didn't limp minraised your AA UTG or something stupid, it's a similar principle here - this is just not the place to be asking for this sort of advice. That doesn't mean that everyone is clueless, but like I said you won't necessarily know who to listen to.

You're spending a decent amount of money, don't rush into it and get a bum deal just for the sake of haste. Seek advice from specialists and people with a lot of experience and knowhow, go read some websites like the one I linked or something similar and invest wisely.




Also, I'm kind of fed up of seeing these threads. I've made a thread like this in the past and realise how stupid of me it was to do that when I didn't get any advice I could have faith in, I think it's time people started posting things where they should be posted.

hey i just bought a new one coupel days ago they are still building it

coolermaster HAF922 case
core I7
asus pgt or something liek that motherboard
6GB DDR3 1600mhz patriot ram

WD Black Edition main hard drive
Solid state corsair 2nd hard driver to run HEM off

Sapphire HD5770 Vapor-X 1GB video for my 30 and 24 inchers

i dont play any games so its just for poker and porn

i appreciate all the discussion in this thread even if i can't be certain that anybody actually knows what they're talking about. at the very least, i can learn what variables i should consider and do my own research if i'm skeptical

looks like my next desktop will have a SSD for HEM along with top-of-the-line everything else

Im not gonna argue this point anymore, but the idea that you should sacrifice video and processor performance for harddrive performance to improve swap file access is ludicrous. Go to tomsforums pluzurich and tell them you are thinking about pitching your core i7 build for a Core2 duo that way you can get a SSD and get "2x the performance". Sure lots of programs require use of the harddrive past the initial startup phase, and writing data back and forth to the HD while a game runs does happen, but the cost reward ratio of trimming 20% of your total systems horsepower just so it can improve HD access in insane. Thats like trading a porche for a honda civic so you can get the racing tires you want. Have fun with that. Go look up ANY pc benchmark for modern games/software, and you will see all efforts are directly squarely at the processor/video card, and if there happens to be budget money leftover for a SSD then so be it. And unless your pc is going to be used purely for massive database use, or some other program which utilizes practically zero resources other than large volumes of storage space, putting all your money into the harddrive is just stupid. 99% of world applications are going to run better with a nicer processor, not a nicer harddrive.

If you take a core i7 system with a GTS 295 video card and downgrade the video card to a 250 so you can get a SSD, you will get lower frames per second, nuff said. Your in game performance WILL SUFFER. If you instead choose to use a standard mechanical harddrive, your load times will be a bit longer, BUT YOUR FPS WILL INCREASE. Whatever access the game has upon your harddrive is negligible compared to the performance loss using poorer hardware. Pretty shitty trade off if you ask me. Btw I just loaded FC2 using my normal harddrive, and it took 14 seconds to bring up a new map from scratch without anything cached. And this game uses real-time map streaming so that future levels require no loading, and it never hitches or delays... all with a slow ass 7200rpm harddrive. With a SSD it might take 3 seconds to load... who cant wait 10 seconds that they would rather lose 10fps? Which is probably the tradeoff he's looking considering what he'll have to downgrade to.

I know he's not buying a system just to play farcry2, but FC2 is one of the most if not the most demanding pc games available right now, and is a great game to benchmark your total systems performance by. Trust me, he's gonna want to play FC2 and games like it on his shiny new $1500 system, probably a lot more so than having HEM start up instantly.

On December 31 2009 17:45 NewbSaibot wrote: Im not gonna argue this point anymore, but the idea that you should sacrifice video and processor performance for harddrive performance to improve swap file access is ludicrous. Go to tomsforums pluzurich and tell them you are thinking about pitching your core i7 build for a Core2 duo that way you can get a SSD and get "2x the performance". Sure lots of programs require use of the harddrive past the initial startup phase, and writing data back and forth to the HD while a game runs does happen, but the cost reward ratio of trimming 20% of your total systems horsepower just so it can improve HD access in insane. Thats like trading a porche for a honda civic so you can get the racing tires you want. Have fun with that. Go look up ANY pc benchmark for modern games/software, and you will see all efforts are directly squarely at the processor/video card, and if there happens to be budget money leftover for a SSD then so be it. And unless your pc is going to be used purely for massive database use, or some other program which utilizes practically zero resources other than large volumes of storage space, putting all your money into the harddrive is just stupid. 99% of world applications are going to run better with a nicer processor, not a nicer harddrive. If you take a core i7 system with a GTS 295 video card and downgrade the video card to a 250 so you can get a SSD, you will get lower frames per second, nuff said. Your in game performance WILL SUFFER. If you instead choose to use a standard mechanical harddrive, your load times will be a bit longer, BUT YOUR FPS WILL INCREASE. Whatever access the game has upon your harddrive is negligible compared to the performance loss using poorer hardware. Pretty shitty trade off if you ask me. Btw I just loaded FC2 using my normal harddrive, and it took 14 seconds to bring up a new map from scratch without anything cached. And this game uses real-time map streaming so that future levels require no loading, and it never hitches or delays... all with a slow ass 7200rpm harddrive. With a SSD it might take 3 seconds to load... who cant wait 10 seconds that they would rather lose 10fps? Which is probably the tradeoff he's looking considering what he'll have to downgrade to. I know he's not buying a system just to play farcry2, but FC2 is one of the most if not the most demanding pc games available right now, and is a great game to benchmark your total systems performance by. Trust me, he's gonna want to play FC2 and games like it on his shiny new $1500 system, probably a lot more so than having HEM start up instantly.

x2 this.