Spring RTS Engine

Might any "techies" here have opinions on the components I've selected, and perhaps suggest alternatives if desired?

Motherboard: ABIT AW8d Socket T
Processor: Intel Pentium Extreme Edition 965 2x3.73GHz
Case: XCLIO A380 Silver SECC ATX Full Tower
CPU Cooler: Cooler Master RR-PCH-S9U1-GP CPU Cooler
Hard Drive: 2x Western Digital Caviar SE WD2500JS 250GB SATA
RAM: 2x Corsair XMS2 240-pin DDR2-800 1GB SDRAM
Video Card: XFX PVT80GTHF9 GeForce 8800GTS 640MB
Power Supply: Logisys Computer PS550ABK 550W
Monitor: Hanns.G HW-191DPB 19" Widescreen LCD (max resolution 1440x900)

This computer will hit my bank account for $2,333.91 in financial damage.

Any suggestions?

That looks solid to me. Roughly twice as powerful as my laptop in all except for the graphics card.

Felix the Cat wrote:... will hit my bank account for $2,333.91 in financial damage.

Any suggestions?

Waiting a few months until SupCom arrives, that same hardware of 2334$ should cost quite less.

get raptors! they are seriously amazing, i have 4 x 72 gb ones now :D

Yeah, the CPU! I don't trust intel nor ATI!

Get a G5

hmm I dont think that cpu uses a conroe core do you? Clockspeed isnt everything in a cpu' speed.

iamacup wrote:get raptors! they are seriously amazing, i have 4 x 72 gb ones now :D

Oh, I want to, but the mobo doesn't support them, I don't think... it supports ATA100, Raptors use ATA150 or something like that.

I suppose I could drop yet more $$$ and upgrade the mobo too.

If your going to spend 1000 dollars on a proccesser you may aswell buy an Intel core 2 duo extreme.

Edit: at the same time this powerful machine is only going to power a 19" moniter? Unless your worried about fps drops from bigget moniters. The 8800 series can power 1920 by XXXX o.O;

with everything on full oO

Bigger aint always better. Every time I've tried to use a monitor higher than 1440x900, it's given me migrain headaches. Maybe he has the same issue.

dont even bother with the Pentium. do yourself a favor and get an Intel Core 2 Duo instead. its the best CPU out now and youll have the least bottlenecking with it and that 8800GTS

Dual Athlons are better than dual Pentiums (Intel Core Duos are Dual Pentiums just like a Centrino is still a Pentium-M which is still a modified Pentium 3).

Athlons incorporate in them the north-bridge, which gives them the HyperTransport and also allows one core to comunicate to the other core without having to go through the motherboard like Dual Pentiums which have the northbrodge in the board.

Switch to AMD, or get a newer Core intel, otherwise you'll seriosly regret it in a years time (when theres no upgrade options...). If you go AMD you may as well get a cheper procesor for now and by a new one when teher quad cores come out (which aparently are seriosly fast... better than cores?!?! But we wont know till its out obviolsy)

aGorm

+1

Core 2 Duo or newest AMD, the rest doesn't cut it.

Edit: forgot to add: Core 2 pwns all.

The Core 2 duo architecture isnt absed on the pentium architecture, they're 2 different beasts altogetehr, altho you're right about the northbridge.

btw there are 1.8Ghz 32 bit laptop mono core cpus that outperform my 32 bit 2.6Ghz celeron desktop cpu. Clockspeed is not always relative to performance.

And the AMD quadcore was demo'd showing just task manager in windows XP, with minders stopping people running other programs. I'd be weary quoting statistics or even vaguely predicting them atm. But atm the conroe cpus Core 2 duo are king of the hill where cpus are concerned.

Have to agree with most people here, get a Core 2 Duo or a high end Athlon FX instead, both own pentium.

Thanks for the advice there... I'll make the change. I'll probably go with a Core 2 - I've been a solid Intel man my entire life; the one AMD computer I owned had some issues, but then again, that was back when AMD made cheap budget processors that undercut Intel's prices.

As far as hard drives - which would be faster, a Raptor or two ordinary drives set up in a striped RAID configuration? I may change out the mobo to something that supports ATA150 and get one of the smaller Raptors and one or two other hard drives... use the Raptor as essentially a dedicated page file drive, use the other(s) as the real storage drives...

Get a sexier moniter.

Muzic wrote:Get a sexier moniter.

Such as?