PC gamers: my new system

nostatic · nostatic's Garage

After a week long workshop I am finally forced by work to start gaming (tough, i know). I'm having a system built up right now, going on the advice of a couple of friends...hammer away at whether it sucks or not. The first goal is to play Battlefield 2 networked:

ASUS NF4SLI-A8N-SLI DX Motherboard - Socket 939, PCI-E
GeForce 7800 GTX 256M PCIE HDTV/VIVO EVGA
AMD Athlon 64 3500+ S939

Evidently the motherboard and vid card are SLI capable so I could run two video cards and bridge them.

bryanthompson · bryanthompson's Garage

Should be a beastly machine, although I have to admit that I haven't bought hardware in a long, long time. It's all kindof foreign to me. Big numbers, though. Looks impressive.

What are you doing for harddrive? I saw a 320 gig SATA for $130. I could dig up the link if you're interested.

nostatic · nostatic's Garage

200gig SATA 7200 rpm 8MB buffer. Nothing special. If I end up doing some audio with this machine I'll get some fast drives, but I see no reason to do music on this when my macs are working fine and much better behaved for audio.

Evidently the SLI thing is pretty amazing...I could get a second 7800 vid board, bridge them, and get ridiculous numbers of polygons...

bryanthompson · bryanthompson's Garage

I ahven't heard about this SLI stuff... it sounds pretty cool.

Holy crap, just looked it up... that's a $800 vid card! Hot damn!

MikeCT · MikeCT's Garage

(drools)

nostatic · nostatic's Garage

The boys at EA told me to get as much HP as I could. So I did. Always listen so a senior VP

Yellowbird RS · 07-30-2005, 12:33 PM

the best audio/video system is Silicon Graphics "Prism Deskside" if you realy needs high performance.

syncroid · 07-30-2005, 01:45 PM

Thats going to be a sweet box when its done. I have a half baked back burner project going very similar to that one. All I need to finish it are the two vid cards and some memory and we're in business. See it here.

BlueSkyJaunte · 07-30-2005, 03:05 PM

Dude, you can play Enemy Territory on Mac or Linux.

No need for anything else.

HardDrive · 07-30-2005, 06:20 PM

Looks sweet.

I'm running an 9800pro, flashed with the XT bios.

I keep getting the urge to upgrade, but I have not run into any peformance issues.

AMD 3000 (@2300mhz)
2gb pc3200
Soyo Dragon Ultra Platinum

Its all in an Antec Super Lan Boy case. Love it. A pair of 120mm fans. Great air flow.

lm6y · 07-30-2005, 08:31 PM

Sounds like it ought to be a monster. I'm getting ready to upgrade, and have been really looking at SLI vidcards. All the research I have read says that in SLI mode, the cards actually run around PCIE 8X (or 4X, I can't remember). With a single card, it runs the full PCIE 16X. It seems that you only get a 10% better frame rate with SLI. That was the last time I really did serious research, about 4 months ago. They might have the pipeline opened up, and using the whole 16X on both cards now.

You didn't say how much memory you were putting in this beast. If you are running BF2, especially a BF2 server, load it up with memory.

The machine I run now is just BARELY better than the minimum requirements of BF2, except for the Radeon 9800 pro vidcard. I'm really waiting for the next patch to come out. With the V1.02 patch my pings went through the roof, and I almost can't play online.

If you ever kill Leadpuppy on there, it's me! I pretty much suck at 1st person shooters, but it's still fun!

Maybe we should start a BF2 Thread!

ChrisBennet · ChrisBennet's Garage

What kinda job makes you play vid games? Are you scoring music for games? That would be cool.
-Chris

krichard · krichard's Garage

Nice setup, thanks for buying AMD. I need the money

I have a similar setup with dual 7800 in SLI mode and I'm running a 4800+ X2 processor. I have been playing BF2 online for a couple weeks now and it rocks.

Steeve · 07-31-2005, 03:24 PM

So how much did that system set your company back? It sounds like it will absolutely rock!!

Tim Walsh · Tim Walsh's Garage

makes my 10 month old system look anemic (but I'll bet mine's quieter

)

Athlon 64 2800+ overclocked to 2300Mhz
1 gig of corsair ram
Nvidia 6800 normal (overclocked as well but can't remember the specs)

ALL running on water.

yellowline · 07-31-2005, 06:21 PM

Gaming is definitely something I miss...I bought an Apple Powerbook for college.

Used to have a Dell Dimension 8200 with 1gb of RDRAM, 1.7ghz P4, 80gb HDD, and a Radeon 9550.

MysticLlama · 08-01-2005, 10:47 AM

That system will run BF2 great.

It's about the only game I play right now, I usually just play one at a time. I get great framerates at 1600x1200.

My system:
P4 3.0 w/HT, due for an upgrade
2GB of DDR400 (2GB does make a diff in BF2 over 1GB)
XFX 7800GTX (slightly faster than the normal one, but slower than the BFG OC one)
3x Cheetah 15k drives, RAID5 on an Adaptec Card

It's a pretty good little machine.

Purrybonker · 08-02-2005, 07:13 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by nostatic

Evidently the motherboard and vid card are SLI capable so I could run two video cards and bridge them.

Can't stand it... Four people in my house, three desktop gamer PCs, one laptop. Chasing the carrot is endless. I just went AMD for the first time, as well. PCIe, but note that ATI takes the nod over nVidia on SL1. More flexibility on vid card types. eg nVidia needs identical cards.

But the "old" HT 3.0 pentium with 2 gig/Radeon 9800 still runs BF2 as well as 64 bit Athalon with PCIe and x800.

All smoke and mirrors. Like slapping those SSIs on the 3.2.

But why is it that ripping open PC component boxes and bolting a new system together is just soooo satisfying?

Yellowbird RS · 08-02-2005, 08:00 AM

Here it is my office system were we run 10 Radio stations

CamB · CamB's Garage

Haha, I just "upgraded" to a 6600GT video card (it was ~US$200, and the rest of my system will hold anything better back). That's a long way from the 7800... but at least I can now buy and play Battlefield 2.

I spent some (a lot) of time reading this site's reviews recently - they seem as good or better at reviewing than any of the other 10 million hardware reviewers out there:

http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/

This one looks particularly relevant.

They also have a really cool section of guides (more or less just written) about building a high end gaming, workstation, and hometheatre pc.

http://www.firingsquad.com/guides/

Their ultimate gaming pc.

I've been playing with linux instead (Ubuntu) - I must have burned 10 hours getting the friggin USB wireless adaptor to work on my WPA secured network at home (could do it again in 15 mins now though...).