Hi folks, was looking for a bit of advice. I've run the beta on mooege and it does run, but barely and is pretty laggy/stuttery on 1680x1050 on low settings. SC2 runs smoothly on low settings, but I'd like to bump that up to ultra and I want to play D3 maxed.
Current rig:
AMD Athlon 64 X2 6400+ (3.21 GHz, dual core)
ASUS M2R32-MVP mobo (says it supports two PCI Express x16 ATI Crossfire gfx cards)
Sapphire ATI HD 2600 XT 512MB ($91 4 years ago... good investment)
4GB DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) dual channel memory
Edit: Thermaltake Toughpower 550w
One thing I've always shunned is the "gaming laptop" but since I've gotten married I'm actually tempted to save up and get a really, really nice gaming laptop so I can game in the living room while my wife watches TV or something instead of me always being holed up in the second bedroom. I already stream movies/shows to the xbox360 in the living room using Tversity, but if I get a laptop this PC would exclusively be a media hub.
So my current goal is to spend as little money as possible to temporarily let me play D3 until I end up getting a laptop. I still want to play it on as high of settings as possible. Would a graphics upgrade suffice? No idea if my mobo will even support recent nVidia cards or if I'm forced to get a high end ATI one.
Further Edit:
Was reading some ASUS boards for this mobo and people talk about running PCI-E 2.1 video cards without issues.
CPU: Core i7
Ram: 8GB DDR3-1066 RAM Two 500GB 7200RPM hard drives ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5870 1GB GDDR5 graphics card 17.3-inch 1080p (1920x1080) display with LED backlighting
Well, I know that there are processors out with higher ghz then that, but considering it's got eight cores, it should run better, right?
Getting a six core would save like $20 or $30, but I'd have to upgrade eventually.
Looking over reviews of the new Bulldozer chips from AMD, the i7 2600k (4 cores) is better then the AMD chip in most areas. Most games arn't going to take advantage of all the cores anyways. I would stick with an i7 2600k for now as it's a great chip with an amazing price. unless you want to kick up to the new ivy bridge, but like they said it's generally good to wait for the 2nd or 3rd revision.
Hi folks, was looking for a bit of advice. I've run the beta on mooege and it does run, but barely and is pretty laggy/stuttery on 1680x1050 on low settings. SC2 runs smoothly on low settings, but I'd like to bump that up to ultra and I want to play D3 maxed.
Current rig:
AMD Athlon 64 X2 6400+ (3.21 GHz, dual core)
ASUS M2R32-MVP mobo (says it supports two PCI Express x16 ATI Crossfire gfx cards)
Sapphire ATI HD 2600 XT 512MB ($91 4 years ago... good investment)
4GB DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) dual channel memory
Edit: Thermaltake Toughpower 550w
One thing I've always shunned is the "gaming laptop" but since I've gotten married I'm actually tempted to save up and get a really, really nice gaming laptop so I can game in the living room while my wife watches TV or something instead of me always being holed up in the second bedroom. I already stream movies/shows to the xbox360 in the living room using Tversity, but if I get a laptop this PC would exclusively be a media hub.
So my current goal is to spend as little money as possible to temporarily let me play D3 until I end up getting a laptop. I still want to play it on as high of settings as possible. Would a graphics upgrade suffice? No idea if my mobo will even support recent nVidia cards or if I'm forced to get a high end ATI one.
Further Edit:
Was reading some ASUS boards for this mobo and people talk about running PCI-E 2.1 video cards without issues.
I would look into maybe getting 8 GB memory (2 4gb sticks), but you'd have to make sure the memory you look at fits in your mobo, and upgrading the GPU to something like a 6870 (about $190). your CPU should be ok, if you want to upgrade that i'd look at upgrading the mobo at the same time.
You really only need an i5 2500k unless you're going to be doing CPU intensive tasks, Streaming while gaming, Lots of Physics processing, Running lots of background applications, Video rendering. If you're a photo editor get a 2011 board with 64 Gigs of Ram, It HELPS A LOT, same with video editing really, you need a lot of RAM for those. For gaming though 8Gig of DDR3 @ 1600MHz is enough to last till four years. a 6870-6950 is perfectly priced with amazing performance. and a i5 2500k or a Phenom II X4 965 are more than enough. The only other upgrade really is an SSd to load games much quicker. Anything else is really unecessary unless you're an audiophile in which case a good soundcard like the HT OMEGA eClaro or CLARO XT , and the ASUS Xonar STX are very good choice.
I feel like a lot of people go way overboard when buying their systems just because "they can" and they assume more price and more stuff equals better performance. In actuality, only proffesional programs such as Adobe's line of products, Sony Vegas will use all 4-8 cores, let alone the 12 threads on the Hexa core i7's or the 24 threads on the dual Xeon boards. They're basically useless to us as gamers. Same goes with RAM, I always choose 16 Gigs DDR3 @ 1600MHz because I sued Photoshop and illustrator sometimes and make some cool designs that have alot of brushstrokes and layers. If I didn't do that I'd cut it down to 8 maybe even 4 Gigs because it's just a waste of an extra 100 bucks for the 8 gigs. same way it's a waste to get a soundcard if you're not an audiophile or really care about audio at all. The GPU, HDD/SSD, and monitor are the only things a gamer needs to worry about. The GPU is needed to push the monitor, and the monitor has to look its best so our games don't have shit colors, and the hard drives need to be somewhat fast so it can load our games quick, a 7200 RPM will be fine but once you go SSD, there's no going back.
Most importantly if you're lookign to build a rig only for Diablo, get an AMD PHENOM II x2 get a board that can unlock the other cores, unlock them have 4 gigs of ram and a HD 6850 and you'll run the game max.
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Not even Death will save you from Diablo Bunny's Cuteness!
I know I don't need 16 gigs of ram. But it's a cheap upgrade so eventually I did it. I may not use many programs that will ever utilize that much ram, but it's not like it completely goes to waste either. I did notice a slight improvement in my overall machine's performance. Just with it being a little more brisk and minimizing, maximizing programs faster going in and out of fullscreen mode and even the boot time seemed noticeably faster. This was my impression anyway. I had been running on 8 gigs for a long time so all these changes after the 16 gigs wasn't just in my head. I seriously noticed lots of things on my computer going faster.
But you are mostly right. Some people, if they have the extra money, do like to get the most expensive hardware and there is a market just for those people. Part of that market is for people who are rich and will just buy anything as long as its pricey but they're seldom getting the best value for their money. Which is fine too. If you got the money and you wanna be impulsive and not research your hardware before buying, than more power to you.
When I was building a new rig for around 1100, everyone thought I was crazy and wouldn't be able to build a nice computer. But with that kind of budget you learn serious discipline and you get more into hardware actually than some people with a much bigger budget would. Simply because you need to learn what you can get for your money so you really want to educate yourself on the differences in hardware specs and cross examine those specs with what you need.
Then if you're willing to be patient, you can also take the time to compare prices everywhere. Newegg is great, but I actually find their monitors to be rather overpriced. This one in particular I wanted was on sale at Newegg for about 290 but I'd found the same one at Best Buy for 250. So it's not even prudent to buy all your stuff from the same site just because it's well known such as Newegg.
Compusa is good for some stuff. Newegg for other stuff. Even Superbiiz for some things. Plus you keep an eye out for deals as well. Ssd's are still hella expensive, but they are constantly going on sale and if you keep your eye on them you can get a nice SATA 3 ssd for just over a dollar a gig sometimes. Stuff like that.
Okay, I really, truely do not understand what the big difference between the i3, i5, and i7 is. The i5 2500k and i7 2600k look just about the same, aside from a 0.1 ghz increase from the i5 to i7 for a $150 increase. (Kinda expensive...) What am I missing?
Also, the i5 isn't much more expensive then the AMD FX-8120. (About $50, even if it is four cores less.)
The i7 has hyperthreading which is nice if you do a lot of processor intensive programs but for games it doesn't really make use of that very much. It is just a tad faster yes, but barely. Certainly not worth the extra 100 dollars. And the overclock speeds on the i5 and i7 are about the same as well.
The i3 isn't too different either but the i5 over the i3 is still a much better value.
Okay, I really, truely do not understand what the big difference between the i3, i5, and i7 is. The i5 2500k and i7 2600k look just about the same, aside from a 0.1 ghz increase from the i5 to i7 for a $150 increase. (Kinda expensive...) What am I missing?
Also, the i5 isn't much more expensive then the AMD FX-8120. (About $50, even if it is four cores less.)
The 3D rendering/video encoding/game performance starts at page 15 if you would just like to look at those. You'll see that the i7 outperforms the i5 in the rendering/video encoding tests, while the i5 is almost exactly as good (some games even better) as the i7, even though the i7 has the extra 0.1GHz and is a "better" sandybridge model than the i5.
BTW DO NOT BUY THE FX CPUs, yet. The Bulldozers are just not good. They fall short in almost every way compared to PHenom II x6 110T. Plus they're more expensive for absolutely NAUGHT!They might be decent when it comes to multi-tasking but honestly the jump from Thuban to bulldozer is shit, wait for their next-gens which should be out mid year to see if AMd still has a shot at competing with Intel. If not then I'd advise against AMD CPU's forever, but praise their GPU's over Nvidia.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Not even Death will save you from Diablo Bunny's Cuteness!
The thing about cpus is the highest performing ones are well above what you actually need for anything besides quite intensive, specific tasks such as video encoding (which is now in many cases offloaded to gpus anyway).
Intel is far more expensive than AMD, both in cpu and the motherboards to put them on. Whether the extra performance is worth that cost jump when you actually (in almost all cases) don't need it is debatable.
While the FX cpus are a disappointment they're not bad as such, just not the massive leap they were hoping for.
I would agree with Enty though that getting a Phenom II x6 is probably a better bang for buck purchase.
In the end though what you have is two cars that can go 300km/h and 350km/h, the thing is you really only need to go 120.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
"For the price of one bullet you can eat 4 hotcakes." - Vash the Stampede.
In the end though what you have is two cars that can go 300km/h and 350km/h, the thing is you really only need to go 120.
Well put. Simply you don't need it but you might as well for the future cause you've got the money to blow. I'd like to add that If you wait for the next gen CPU, you'll hear about their even more next-gen cpu and then want to wait for that. If you're set on buying something just do it. Don't wait around otherwise you'll have to rethink your build based on different prices and performances.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Not even Death will save you from Diablo Bunny's Cuteness!
Theres always the next guy out there reading reviews and builds people decide on and then taking a look in a random forum and seeing something negative, turning him off to his build he was so set on.
Research is important, you should look around for sure, primarily IMO when deciding on your processor id take a look at the combo of mobo and cpu and look for overclock capabilities. Worst case scenario you just juice up your system a little more and buy yourself another year.
Having said that Im in the mix for a new PC from the ground up.. not that D3 is going to be too intensive for my system but I want to move back to desktops, and lets face it building your rig is just plain fun. Ill post what Im considering (about midway through my decision process so please comment and critique)
It's terribly fun to build a new PC and I wish I hadn't gotten into this expensive hobby. LOL
My problem lately is deciding on my next upgrade. I want to finally purchase my two ssd's and raid them, yet at the same time I want to get a 27'' monitor just to finally have a dual monitor setup. Neither one of these upgrades I need at all right now but I still really want them.
Just ordered my EVGA GTX 560 yesterday! With Amazon Prime I should get it tomorrow... unfortunately I don't have the full beta, maybe I'll play around in mooege. For the most part it'll just be nice going from minimum settings (resolution notwithstanding) in SC2 to maxed out ultra.
It's terribly fun to build a new PC and I wish I hadn't gotten into this expensive hobby. LOL
My problem lately is deciding on my next upgrade. I want to finally purchase my two ssd's and raid them, yet at the same time I want to get a 27'' monitor just to finally have a dual monitor setup. Neither one of these upgrades I need at all right now but I still really want them.
When do you ever NEED any of that?
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"The Unchosen" Pain of Admirance Sigil (For those without -Feat of Strength-):
Long time lurker - I have been a Diablo/Diablo2 fanatic since they were released and probably spent months (literally) of my life playing them in high school/college. I guess since it's been so long, my 'gaming' life has changed quite a bit as I now only have an HTPC, netbook, PS3, ipad, etc. as my sources of entertainment. Suffice to say, I need to purchase a new machine solely for Diablo 3 (my wife thinks I'm nuts).
I'm geeked out for D3 so I'm going to get a dedicated desktop JUST for D3, but obviously want to keep the price of the desktop low, but have the best experience possible for gameplay. I appreciate a lot the great info that has been provided in this thread for system ideas. I'm sure I'm not alone when it comes to reliving those years.
I'm hopeful I can get a system for under $500 that can play D3 to it's fullest - not worried about future game technologies. I've been hunting craiglist and ebay for a system the past couple days - luckily I have some time.
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Current rig:
AMD Athlon 64 X2 6400+ (3.21 GHz, dual core)
ASUS M2R32-MVP mobo (says it supports two PCI Express x16 ATI Crossfire gfx cards)
Sapphire ATI HD 2600 XT 512MB ($91 4 years ago... good investment)
4GB DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) dual channel memory
Edit: Thermaltake Toughpower 550w
One thing I've always shunned is the "gaming laptop" but since I've gotten married I'm actually tempted to save up and get a really, really nice gaming laptop so I can game in the living room while my wife watches TV or something instead of me always being holed up in the second bedroom. I already stream movies/shows to the xbox360 in the living room using Tversity, but if I get a laptop this PC would exclusively be a media hub.
So my current goal is to spend as little money as possible to temporarily let me play D3 until I end up getting a laptop. I still want to play it on as high of settings as possible. Would a graphics upgrade suffice? No idea if my mobo will even support recent nVidia cards or if I'm forced to get a high end ATI one.
Further Edit:
Was reading some ASUS boards for this mobo and people talk about running PCI-E 2.1 video cards without issues.
CPU: Core i7
Ram: 8GB DDR3-1066 RAM
Two 500GB 7200RPM hard drives
ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5870 1GB GDDR5 graphics card
17.3-inch 1080p (1920x1080) display with LED backlighting
^^^ 17.3 inches of pain lol
Looking over reviews of the new Bulldozer chips from AMD, the i7 2600k (4 cores) is better then the AMD chip in most areas. Most games arn't going to take advantage of all the cores anyways. I would stick with an i7 2600k for now as it's a great chip with an amazing price. unless you want to kick up to the new ivy bridge, but like they said it's generally good to wait for the 2nd or 3rd revision.
I would look into maybe getting 8 GB memory (2 4gb sticks), but you'd have to make sure the memory you look at fits in your mobo, and upgrading the GPU to something like a 6870 (about $190). your CPU should be ok, if you want to upgrade that i'd look at upgrading the mobo at the same time.
I feel like a lot of people go way overboard when buying their systems just because "they can" and they assume more price and more stuff equals better performance. In actuality, only proffesional programs such as Adobe's line of products, Sony Vegas will use all 4-8 cores, let alone the 12 threads on the Hexa core i7's or the 24 threads on the dual Xeon boards. They're basically useless to us as gamers. Same goes with RAM, I always choose 16 Gigs DDR3 @ 1600MHz because I sued Photoshop and illustrator sometimes and make some cool designs that have alot of brushstrokes and layers. If I didn't do that I'd cut it down to 8 maybe even 4 Gigs because it's just a waste of an extra 100 bucks for the 8 gigs. same way it's a waste to get a soundcard if you're not an audiophile or really care about audio at all. The GPU, HDD/SSD, and monitor are the only things a gamer needs to worry about. The GPU is needed to push the monitor, and the monitor has to look its best so our games don't have shit colors, and the hard drives need to be somewhat fast so it can load our games quick, a 7200 RPM will be fine but once you go SSD, there's no going back.
Most importantly if you're lookign to build a rig only for Diablo, get an AMD PHENOM II x2 get a board that can unlock the other cores, unlock them have 4 gigs of ram and a HD 6850 and you'll run the game max.
But you are mostly right. Some people, if they have the extra money, do like to get the most expensive hardware and there is a market just for those people. Part of that market is for people who are rich and will just buy anything as long as its pricey but they're seldom getting the best value for their money. Which is fine too. If you got the money and you wanna be impulsive and not research your hardware before buying, than more power to you.
When I was building a new rig for around 1100, everyone thought I was crazy and wouldn't be able to build a nice computer. But with that kind of budget you learn serious discipline and you get more into hardware actually than some people with a much bigger budget would. Simply because you need to learn what you can get for your money so you really want to educate yourself on the differences in hardware specs and cross examine those specs with what you need.
Then if you're willing to be patient, you can also take the time to compare prices everywhere. Newegg is great, but I actually find their monitors to be rather overpriced. This one in particular I wanted was on sale at Newegg for about 290 but I'd found the same one at Best Buy for 250. So it's not even prudent to buy all your stuff from the same site just because it's well known such as Newegg.
Compusa is good for some stuff. Newegg for other stuff. Even Superbiiz for some things. Plus you keep an eye out for deals as well. Ssd's are still hella expensive, but they are constantly going on sale and if you keep your eye on them you can get a nice SATA 3 ssd for just over a dollar a gig sometimes. Stuff like that.
Siaynoq's Playthroughs
Also, the i5 isn't much more expensive then the AMD FX-8120. (About $50, even if it is four cores less.)
The i3 isn't too different either but the i5 over the i3 is still a much better value.
Siaynoq's Playthroughs
I'm...pretty positive about that. Like the i5-2500k doesn't have hyperthreading but it's really good for overclocking.
Siaynoq's Playthroughs
Many people above has stated that the i5 has the best price/performance ratio. Gaming wise, the i5 2500K is basically the same as the i7:
http://www.anandtech.com/bench/CPU/50
http://www.anandtech.com/bench/CPU/342
http://www.anandtech.com/bench/CPU/47
Here's a very lengthy review (22 pages) for all the Intel Sandy Bridge processors (you can skip to certain parts at the dropdown at the bottom of the page):
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4083/the-sandy-bridge-review-intel-core-i7-2600k-i5-2500k-core-i3-2100-tested
The 3D rendering/video encoding/game performance starts at page 15 if you would just like to look at those. You'll see that the i7 outperforms the i5 in the rendering/video encoding tests, while the i5 is almost exactly as good (some games even better) as the i7, even though the i7 has the extra 0.1GHz and is a "better" sandybridge model than the i5.
Hope this helps!
Intel is far more expensive than AMD, both in cpu and the motherboards to put them on. Whether the extra performance is worth that cost jump when you actually (in almost all cases) don't need it is debatable.
While the FX cpus are a disappointment they're not bad as such, just not the massive leap they were hoping for.
I would agree with Enty though that getting a Phenom II x6 is probably a better bang for buck purchase.
In the end though what you have is two cars that can go 300km/h and 350km/h, the thing is you really only need to go 120.
Well put. Simply you don't need it but you might as well for the future cause you've got the money to blow. I'd like to add that If you wait for the next gen CPU, you'll hear about their even more next-gen cpu and then want to wait for that. If you're set on buying something just do it. Don't wait around otherwise you'll have to rethink your build based on different prices and performances.
Research is important, you should look around for sure, primarily IMO when deciding on your processor id take a look at the combo of mobo and cpu and look for overclock capabilities. Worst case scenario you just juice up your system a little more and buy yourself another year.
Having said that Im in the mix for a new PC from the ground up.. not that D3 is going to be too intensive for my system but I want to move back to desktops, and lets face it building your rig is just plain fun. Ill post what Im considering (about midway through my decision process so please comment and critique)
My problem lately is deciding on my next upgrade. I want to finally purchase my two ssd's and raid them, yet at the same time I want to get a 27'' monitor just to finally have a dual monitor setup. Neither one of these upgrades I need at all right now but I still really want them.
Siaynoq's Playthroughs
When do you ever NEED any of that?
http://i.imgur.com/O7Oeo.png
I received TWO beta keys. Eat it and like it.
its essential for my existence
I'm geeked out for D3 so I'm going to get a dedicated desktop JUST for D3, but obviously want to keep the price of the desktop low, but have the best experience possible for gameplay. I appreciate a lot the great info that has been provided in this thread for system ideas. I'm sure I'm not alone when it comes to reliving those years.
I'm hopeful I can get a system for under $500 that can play D3 to it's fullest - not worried about future game technologies. I've been hunting craiglist and ebay for a system the past couple days - luckily I have some time.