I need help building a good computer

[ncimike3]

These are my Components for my desktop. Is this considered to be a good gaming desktop? Will a second video card make a huge difference? I’m looking to play flight simulators such as lock-on and DCS black shark, high graphics

Motherboard- EVGA 170-BL-E762-A1 LGA 1366 Intel X58 4-WAY SLI Classified XL ATX Intel Motherboard

Processor-Intel Core i7-930 Bloomfield 2.8GHz 4 x 256KB L2 Cache 8MB L3 Cache LGA 1366 130W Quad-Core Desktop Processor

Video card-EVGA 01G-P3-1373-AR GeForce GTX 460 (Fermi) Superclocked EE 1GB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready SLI Support Video Card

Hard drive-Western Digital Caviar Blue WD5000AAKS 500GB 7200 RPM 16MB cache

Ram-OCZ Reaper Edition 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333 (PC3 10666)

[Kuky]

your PC is fine as it is nad no need for second video card unless you have few monitors and need more ports for the monitors :)

[thereminqblank]

Just something I noticed. I think that's a triple channel (memory) motherboard? I see you have chosen a 2 stick memory kit - which means you'll miss out on using the tri-channel capability of the motherboard.

[Prophet4no1]

You should have no issues with any game out right now. Grab MSi Afterburner if you want to overclock the GPU. Works on all Fermi cards, not just MSI ones.

 

http://www.msi.com/index.php?func=downloadfile&dno=11433&type=utility

[Prophet4no1]

Just something I noticed. I think that's a triple channel (memory) motherboard? I see you have chosen a 2 stick memory kit - which means you'll miss out on using the tri-channel capability of the motherboard.

 

 

Good spot. Also, EVGA Classified likes Crucial and Corsair best for triple channel memory. You get far better performance and more overclocking ability.

[ncimike3]

I noticed in one of the replies that someone mentioned that having more than one video card really wouldn't help me. Is that true? Can anyone weigh in on the pros and cons of having multiple video cards for lockon or the especially the new dcs a-10c coming out soon.

 

Also, how would having a solid state drive improve performance of these games? Please give me your opinions

[ncimike3]

Thanks for the heads up on the ram. I'll make sure to go triple channel.

[Gadroc]

I noticed in one of the replies that someone mentioned that having more than one video card really wouldn't help me. Is that true? Can anyone weigh in on the pros and cons of having multiple video cards for lockon or the especially the new dcs a-10c coming out soon.

It really depends on what resolution your running at and the game. For Lockon unless you are running a high resolution eyefinity display setup I don't think you'll see much benefit. Since DCS A-10 is not out no one can comment yet. For other genre of games (non CPU bound ones) you may see great benefit. There have been some recent benchmarks comparing dual 460s against a single 480 at tomshardware. You're best bet is to look at various hardware sites and find benchmarks for SLI for the games you're interested in.

 

Also, how would having a solid state drive improve performance of these games? Please give me your opinions

Yes you will see performance gains, but you will pay for them and how much is dependent on the game. Most FPS / RPG games will see reduced load times for levels, while some sims that constantly stream large images from disk can benefit. This usually won't translate to higher frame rate, but potential reduced stutters. Keep in mind the cost here as most games are 10+ GB installed and an 80 GB SSD is $200 (Do research on good vs bad SSDs before you buy!!!)

[ncimike3]

I have a 30" lcd monitor from Samsung with a native resolution of 2560 x 1600. Does that change anything in regards to needing another video card?

[Kuky]

Hm... for the 30" monitor of that high resolution (unlike TVs being used as monitors ;) ) I think you will benefit from crossfire setup if you want to use Antialiasing and Anisotropic filtering (these are loads on GPU's only and at high number of pixels like this 30" you will need lot of GPU power and it will show the difference when you drop flares or in overcast weather).

 

For games like ArmA crossfire will benefit greatly also.

 

The SSD will not give any performance boost in actually running of the game.. it will only recude loading times of the game (and reduce stutters that happen when textures are being loaded from the HDD, which happens also as not all objects are loaded at the start of the game)

[Prophet4no1]

You can get much larger SSD's for $200. Get an OCZ Onyx or Vertex 1 SSD. Onyx is the cheapest. We sell them starting at around $80 at Microcenter where I work. But we sell a lot of things at low prices. Like the i7 930 at $200. It's all about knowing where to shop.

[Prophet4no1]

Hm... for the 30" monitor of that high resolution (unlike TVs being used as monitors ;) ) I think you will benefit from crossfire setup if you want to use Antialiasing and Anisotropic filtering (these are loads on GPU's only and at high number of pixels like this 30" you will need lot of GPU power and it will show the difference when you drop flares or in overcast weather).

 

For games like ArmA crossfire will benefit greatly also.

 

The SSD will not give any performance boost in actually running of the game.. it will only recude loading times of the game (and reduce stutters that happen when textures are being loaded from the HDD, which happens also as not all objects are loaded at the start of the game)

 

 

 

He is running nVidia, so SLI, not Crossfire. But, at any rate, unless running super high res, SLI or Crossfire has little benefit in most games. The second GPU is never under full load. You get about a 20-30% boost most of the time. Depending on the starting FPS, that's only 5-10 fps. Many times you can get that from overclocking.

 

Like I said, get MSI afterburner and overclock the crap out of it. Just make sure not to cook the card. Use Furmark to test the stability and heat build. Furmark will push the card to much hotter levels than any game. If things stay stable, your overclock is good and it's time to benchmark.

[Kuky]

Fair enough, SLI not crossfire :)

 

But you know, I used to have HD3870X2 and I switched to 2x HD4870 and then I sold one HD4870 (and now I'm on HD4890) and compared to single card 2 GPU did make very noticeable difference in ArmA... in LockOn, not so much as we all know CPU is what counts the most in this case (only when dumping flares you can tell the difference because that uses lot of the GPU processing).

[Prophet4no1]

4800 series cards are a bit low end any way. No offence. I have a single manually overclocked GTX260 and it has no issues with and ED games or ARMA 2. ARMA 2 can bog down if I crank up the AA though. With the card the OP is using, he should have no issues with one card.

[Gadroc]

You can get much larger SSD's for $200. Get an OCZ Onyx or Vertex 1 SSD. Onyx is the cheapest. We sell them starting at around $80 at Microcenter where I work. But we sell a lot of things at low prices. Like the i7 930 at $200. It's all about knowing where to shop.

 

I'm not following your math as there are NO drives larger than 80GB for $200 at microcenter (I live 15 miles from you're corporate offices). You also have to be very careful on the cheap drives that you don't end up with a junk JMicron based drive. As I said before SSDs vary greatly on everyone's cost / benefit ratio. For my main development machine an 80GB X25-M is well worth it as I'm opening and closing apps all day. For gaming it no where near makes up it's cost relative to performance gains in game.

[Prophet4no1]

Slight miswording, I meant that SSD's start around $80 for the Onyx drives. I think actual price is around $84.

 

My current build in progress is using a Vertex2 drive for the OS and a Raid 10 with four WD 1TB Black series 6gb/s drives. Not much point putting games on the SSD. You are better off putting just the OS on it. Overal speed is not much faster than magnetic drives. But what is a lot faster is random access times. As long as you have defragged magnetic drives and they are in raid 0 or 10, you will get plenty fast load times in games.

[Prophet4no1]

If you want truelly blazing speed, check out the OCZ Revo. It's two SSDs built on a PCIe PCB with built in RAID 0. PCIe bus speeds are MUCH faster than SATA2/3.

[Kuky]

4800 series cards are a bit low end any way.

 

You can't be serious :doh: Sure, the 4830 is low end but 4890 is not, so to say 4800 series are low end is incorrect. BY the way 4870 is also not lower end :smilewink:

Edited September 1, 2010 by Kuky

[Prophet4no1]

You can't be serious :doh: Sure, the 4830 is low end but 4890 is not, so to say 4800 series are low end is incorrect. BY the way 4870 is also not lower end :smilewink:

 

They are one generation back, so, lower end. If it was a 5870, that would be a different story. Just like the 200 series from nVidia is lower end now. Replaced by the 400 (fermi).

[hassata]

One generation back is now lower end? Surely not. OP, you are in luck:

 

http://www.digitimes.com/news/a20100831PD202.html

[Kuky]

They are one generation back, so, lower end. If it was a 5870, that would be a different story. Just like the 200 series from nVidia is lower end now. Replaced by the 400 (fermi).

 

You don't know what you're talking about obviously :music_whistling: