Need Guru approval first Build

[Spartan1-1]

Goal: excellent DCS/Sim platform at a moderate budget This will be my first attempt at building a PC

 

 

Case Corsair Obsidian 600T

MOBO EVGA P55 FTW

Video EVGA Geforce GTX 470

CPU Intel Core i5 680 3.6ghz

PSU Corsair TX650

RAM Corsair Dominator 8GB 1600

HDD WD3000GLFS Velociraptor 10000

OS. W7 HomePremium

 

What do you guys think here? Both CPU and Graphics Card are picked with DCS in mind. Sims will be the primary, and almost exclusive, purpose here. Thanks in advance.

[Cali]

8GB of RAM might be overkill I think, what's the price difference between 8GB, 6GB and 4GB

[Spartan1-1]

Well I have 4 gigs now. RAM is pretty cheap so I figured it'd up it a notch. A little over 100 bucks for 4 gigs corsair stock. 220 for 8 gigs.

[KillaALF]

Don't know if I would call myself a Guru, but that looks like a very nice setup indeed. About the RAM - if I were to build a new PC now, I'd probably drop 16GB in and then run my games off a ramdisk. That said, 4GB is still plenty for today's games.

 

An SSD plus a cheap 500GB-1TB HDD instead of the Velociraptor might also be an alternative worth checking out.

[flanker0ne]

Ramdisk?

Yes if you never shoot down your PC.

Intead you have to wait every time all the game is loaded from HDD to Ramdisk

I know there are some stuff with DDR2 and backup battery but limited to 4 or 8GB, death with SSD on the market.

[EtherealN]

Spartan, one thing to be careful about with the RAM amount:

 

Is it two sticks of 4GB each, or four sticks of 2GB each? If the latter you will likely end up running in single-channel mode (and might even run into BIOS incompatibilities - I have two 2GB sticks scrapping in my shelves due to that), in which case you are trading larger RAM storage for slower RAM speeds.

 

I am also not convinced about the merits of the velociraptor drives. For the same money you could get two 1TB WD Caviar Black drives and put them in a RAID-0, and possibly end up with better performance than the raptor while having almost 10 times the storage space. (Slower seek times but much higher throughput.)

 

I am torn about the processor. For dualcores it's an absolutely superb choice, but since we've gone over the 200 dollar level I kind of feel you could just as well get a similarly priced 4-core i5 or save a buck and run an i3. Basically - if you feel sure that you'll only run two-core applications for the lifetime of the machine, go for it, but otherwise the slight clock speed hit from the 4-cores is worth it. (You can always study overclocking later and crank the 4-core up to 4.4GHz, which is roughly where you can get the 4-core i5's... :P )

[TeeJay82]

Yuck intel :P

 

go for amd instead... hyperthreading mostly kills game performance anyways..

 

oh and its muuch cheaper

[EtherealN]

Do you really want me to bring forth the performance numbers? ;)

 

Hint: I'm an old AMD fanboy. But AMD just doesn't cut it nowdays for anything but budget, and even there they have fierce competition by the Intel I3's and two-core I5's due to how most games are coded.

[Feuerfalke]

Well I have 4 gigs now. RAM is pretty cheap so I figured it'd up it a notch. A little over 100 bucks for 4 gigs corsair stock. 220 for 8 gigs.

 

Just make sure you buy 2 sticks, not 3 or 4. The i5 has a dual-channel controller, so it will most benefit if you have 2 memory-sticks installed.

[KillaALF]

Of course you can use 4 sticks and still have dual-channel enabled.

 

http://www.evga.com/support/manuals/files/132-LF-E657.pdf

 

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