[nuandy]

just ordered a new Rig from Alienware had a good discount offer through work and no VAT
well place a order today
i7-980x (3.33GHz 12MB 6.4GT/sec
Windows® 7 Ultimate
Dual 1.5GB NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 480
12GB 1600MHz (3x4GB) Tri Channel Memory
512GB Solid State Drive Raid 0 "Stripe" Dual HDD
1.5TB (7200RPM) SATA Additional Hard Driv
Soundblaster XFi Titanium PCIe card
Killer™ Xeno™ Pro Network card
Ill stick in the BD R/W i already have
And i have a Samsung full hd 24 inch monitor

EQ2 raiding on extrema setting here i come

i also do a lot of training video's for work so it should no longer take a couple of hours to convert them to DVD

My old Rig was 5 years old apart from the PSU and the GTX 8800 graphics card i put in 3 years ago.

i just could not be bothered with building my own again and the liquid cooling is a must with all the windows in this place it get warm in the afternoon even with the air con on

Cost £3500 almost 2k off full price with VAT

[AsheMan]

You are going all out on that new computer! Quite the spendy machine but it looks like you get what you pay for! I think NASA will be contacting you to use that machine for their next shuttle launch.

[rabb1t]

Originally Posted by AsheMan

but it looks like you get what you pay for!

Yes and no. I don't mean to poo poo anything , and I've no idea what that converts to in American monies, but the CPU is really absurd levels of overkill, and the new-school Killer NIC card has still proven to be no better than current on-motherboard offerings.

If it was a good deal for the price then that's a good deal.

I'd have probably gone for ATi and Eyefinity, but that's me.

[AsheMan]

Originally Posted by rabb1t

If it was a good deal for the price then that's a good deal.

It comes out to about $5150.

[rabb1t]

Originally Posted by AsheMan

It comes out to about $5150.

Gah!

[Fozzik]

That's a lot of money. I hope it works well for you.

Does Alienware give a good warranty on the cooling system?

[nuandy]

Originally Posted by Fozzik

That's a lot of money. I hope it works well for you.

Does Alienware give a good warranty on the cooling system?

5 years extended warrenty cost me about $100

i just wanted something that will last 5 years without me having to look at upgrades every year maybe i went a little OTT but had the money sitting in the bank so thought why not.

[rabb1t]

Originally Posted by nuandy

i just wanted something that will last 5 years without me having to look at upgrades every year

Well... that really won't happen. Functionally, sure, you shouldn't need to upgrade. My AMD X2 4200+ socket 939 system is roughly 5 years old and still functioning, but it is not current on features. (Graphics are only still viable due to getthing the 8800 GTX roughly 3.5 years ago. If I still had my series 7 in there from 5 years ago it is very unlikely it could run current games at playable framerates.) I can tell it's choking pretty hard when trying to load newer games like Mass Effect 2. Yes, it works just fine, but load times are pretty long.

This is why I developed my "lifespan" stat. There is how long a part will function, which is a very long time compared to what I'd call it's "lifespan." I'd say, as example, graphic cards have about a 2 year lifespan. After that point something has come out that will outdate them, be that newer/better features, newer versions of DirectX, or whatever. Depending on your game and resolution settings they may still function and be playable, but you more than likely are 'missing out' on some things.

IMO if you want the newest/most current features you are really only looking at about 2.5 years for the entire system, which is really why I recommend getting something 'mainstream' every 2.5 years compared to 'overkill' and then waiting 5. The minute you buy something that lifespan clock is ticking away. You may still have enough power 5 years from now, but in terms of features you could be a few generations behind.

Again, I don't mean to poo poo anyone's choices , it's just not choices I'd make or recommend these days.

[Dragon-RD]

That CPU is an absolute beast, congratulations! Do you plan to overclock it? because it seems wasted sitting at stock :P

[Slide]

Originally Posted by nuandy

i just could not be bothered with building my own again and the liquid cooling is a must with all the windows in this place it get warm in the afternoon even with the air con on

Cost £3500 almost 2k off full price with VAT

You're mad You have aircon? In the UK?

What with the rise in VAT and the slump in the Great British Lira my rig I bought last year has held it's value, it was £1500 this time last year, and would still cost £1500 new right now (for equivalent performance at least)

[mmorpeegee]

Originally Posted by rabb1t

Gah!

Lol, well everything here is more expensive anyway. So even just buying a single CPU or something, if you compared the best price in £ and converted it to $USD, it would seem overpriced. So when you do that on an entire PC, it must seem insane compared to what it would cost you.

Although the bulk of that price is the premium you spend on all that top end gear which is probably what your guides help people avoid. If you scale back just a little and buy in the sweet spots, it's a lot cheaper. I've been thinking about a new PC with an i7 920/930, with a single HD 5870, 8gb ram, etc, and it will cost me less than a grand. That's including an 80gig Intel SSD. So that's not too bad. Although when you convert that to USD it's probably like $500 more than you could get it for. But that's rip-off Britain unfortunately.

Nuandy, grats, that thing is epic. It's nice having a top end PC and just being able to play any games you want, and crank them as far as they can go. I've only ever done it once before with a PC, but it was so enjoyable, I'll do it again next time. You should get Arma2 on that thing, if you are in to shooters?

[rabb1t]

Mass Effect 2 for teh winz.

[nuandy]

we arrived today just installing EQ2 to see how it runs

[AsheMan]

That thing should spit EQ2 back at you and ask why you would install such ancient software onto it.

[Dragon-RD]

I've never been able to get a decent frame rate in EQ2 - I don't mind it as I'm not a lover of the game. It just baffled me, specs:

i7 920 @ 4Ghz
6gb tri-chan DDR3 @ 1600Mhz (dominator)
x2 5850's
300gb V.raptor

Extreme settings will see me with 50fps but when in combat with more than a couple of units it'll drop down into the late 20's early 30's. Crossfire disabled I saw a loss of about 5 frames out of combat, and didn't lose any in combat. This leads me to believe something funky is goin' on.

Though this was with the streaming client so I'll give it the benefit of doubt. Do report back naudy I'd love to see how your beast performs !

[rabb1t]

As we said back in the Vanguard launch days... 'there are just some games that no amount of hardware can compensate for bad coding'. It could just be that EQ2 is one such game.

[Slide]

Originally Posted by Dragon-RD

I've never been able to get a decent frame rate in EQ2 - I don't mind it as I'm not a lover of the game. It just baffled me, specs:

i7 920 @ 4Ghz
6gb tri-chan DDR3 @ 1600Mhz (dominator)
x2 5850's
300gb V.raptor

That's wierd, it ran fine for me on i7 920 @ 3.7GHz + 4890.

Originally Posted by Rabb1t

As we said back in the Vanguard launch days... 'there are just some games that no amount of hardware can compensate for bad coding'. It could just be that EQ2 is one such game.

I seem to remember them being a post-mortem about EQ2 and the graphics engine, they designed it to be scalable - but made some incorrect assumptions about how computer performance would change over time. I think it's something like it won't utilize multi-threading / multi-cores properly and only scales against single CPU speed.