New PC components

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Kantham

Fool.
Sep 17, 2004
18,034
2
38
Tiny? Come on.

You must have at least 1900x**** to make every aspect of PC gaming count? I wouldn't describe it as tiny. Not even small. People need glasses or something. I get the part where I must upgrade monitor because it can handle much more, but seriously, I'd rather stick to what I have, this monitor is rather low on consumption and is working fine. Plus, I can't imagine myself going for higher than 1400x900 on my desktop or forums, or games.
 
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NRG

Master Console Hater
Dec 31, 2005
1,727
0
36
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I'm going to agree with Twisted Metal.
you should definitely upgrade your monitor as part of this process.

14x9 is for little girls.
real men don't settle for anything less than 1900x1080.
And anything bigger than roughly 1680x1050 or 1600x900 is for e-penises in my opinion. The only thing it's nice for after that point is for more desktop area for windows/photoshop/whatever. If you're going towards 30+ inch displays then yes, 1080p is nice. But, I have a 23" Samsung 2342BWX which is 2048x1152 and I didn't notice the high pixel density in games unless I sat less than a foot away from both. I hate playing games on it because it barely looks any sharper believe it or not and it certainly doesn't help FPS, especially when you're trying to push any AA on a resolution that high. It sits as my second monitor which I use for chat windows and such. I much prefer my 2233 because it's 120hz @ 1680x1050. The loss in pixel density is almost unnoticeable in games and it looks way better (even without AA) because I can much more easily pull 120fps at 120hz. Even if wasn't 120hz I'd still use it for games.
 

Bi()ha2arD

Toxic!
Jun 29, 2009
2,808
0
0
Germany
phobos.qml.net
What's with all the hate on high resolution? The higher the pixel density, the better. But no, let's settle with 1600x900 on our 24" screens because monitor manufactorers are can rip you off more if they use 16:9 and low res panels...
 

oldkawman

Master of Your Disaster
Excellent choices IMO. But now you need a bigger screen.

I have the i7-870, socket 1156, Biostar mobo, clocked at 3.4 Ghz. Using an HD4870 right now, but just ordered a HD6870. I get great FPS at medium settings, 1600x1200, it almost never drops below 90 online. That was the same card and quality settings I ran with my old Opteron 180 at 2.8 Ghz. That setup would drop pretty low sometimes, like into the 30's but usually stayed around 55-65 FPS online. So the max FPS changed about 25-30%, but the drops in FPS are reduced greatly now and not nearly as frequent. That's the big change I saw.
 
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TurdDrive

sam k
Oct 31, 2008
3,445
2
38
WALES
Depends on what Game i am Playing. UT3 is best played at 1024 * 1280 because of the way the weapons look, Same with every mod for ut3.
 

tomcat ha

Well-Known Member
Feb 2, 2002
2,819
56
48
35
Visit site
the newest generation of intel cpu's, the sandy bridge generation, is definitely the one i would be looking at if i were you.

3d card however its more a case of do you run linux? If yes then go with nvidia. If you dont use linux or dont use linux for anything gfx intensive but do a lot of gaming on windows then i would look at benchmarks for your favorite games and get the card which gives you the best performance for the money you have.
 

evilmrfrank

Banned
Apr 22, 2005
1,631
0
36
35
Florida, US
www.evilmrfrank.com
They have been out for a while. Only intel ****ed up their chipset and they stopped selling boards. New revision will be out early march.

Yea thats why I was saying a month or two lol...

I actually heard they are doing another one around march that will have a whole new set already, only changes will be ability to overclock the video chip in it as well as some SSD caching but it uses a whole different socket so might be worth looking into as well, not sure which would be used in more in the long run :B
 

Twisted Metal

Anfractuous Aluminum
Jul 28, 2001
7,122
3
38
39
Long Island, NY
I gave up on Asus a couple of motherboards back. After two in a row that gave me BIOS/Memory fits, and finally one that died for no reason, I went to EVGA and haven't looked back.

Any motherboard has its fair share of horror stories, doesn't matter what the brand. People once told me that Gigabyte was amazing, but the PS/2 ports on mine died within the first few months of owning it. Asus has never given me an issue, and I've had at least 4 now.
 

dragonfliet

I write stuffs
Apr 24, 2006
3,754
31
48
41
Any motherboard has its fair share of horror stories, doesn't matter what the brand. People once told me that Gigabyte was amazing, but the PS/2 ports on mine died within the first few months of owning it. Asus has never given me an issue, and I've had at least 4 now.

Yeah, a while back I had a particular Gigabyte board that died 2x in a row. I kept getting it RMA'd but eventually gave up and grabbed and Asus one. Sometimes it really comes down to a particular model not standing as a whole of the line or plain 'ol bad luck.

~Jason
 

Lizard Of Oz

Demented Avenger
Oct 25, 1998
10,593
16
38
In a cave & grooving with a Pict
www.nsa.gov
Any motherboard has its fair share of horror stories, doesn't matter what the brand. People once told me that Gigabyte was amazing, but the PS/2 ports on mine died within the first few months of owning it. Asus has never given me an issue, and I've had at least 4 now.

I had two different models ("ASUS A7N8X" and "ASUS A8N32-SLI Deluxe" ) in a row that had memory and/or BIOS configuration issues only to be followed by an "ASUS P5N32-E SLI" that just up and died for no reason 6 months after I bought it.

I'm on my third EVGA board, and have yet to have a single problem.

ASUS is dead to me.
 

Lruce Bee

Transcending to another level
May 3, 2001
1,644
3
38
Sherwood Forest
I gave up building PC's literally years ago for a couple of reasons but mainly because tower systems were getting so cheap, it was simpler to buy straight off the shelf.
The only stuff I buy separately nowadays are screens, extra hard drives and anything else USB related.
I find a decent ready made tower with decent specs (doesn't need to be ninja) and that usually handles most PC games for my needs for a couple of years and simply move on to a better tower system or just upgrade the card, if I can absolutely justify it.
I have so many base units and video cards boxed up in the garage, I should really car boot it all and get rid.
 

-Jes-

Tastefully Barking
Jan 17, 2005
2,710
19
38
DM-HyperBlast
3d card however its more a case of do you run linux? If yes then go with nvidia. If you dont use linux or dont use linux for anything gfx intensive but do a lot of gaming on windows then i would look at benchmarks for your favorite games and get the card which gives you the best performance for the money you have.

More precisely; Do you want to play any opengl games? If so, nvidia.

Goddamn ati sucks at it. :mad:

Depends on what Game i am Playing. UT3 is best played at 1024 * 1280 because of the way the weapons look, Same with every mod for ut3.
Correction: UT3's 1st-person weapon positioning is ****ed for any resolution not 4:3'ish, due to the relevant code sucking. Pure laziness on Epic's part, if you ask me.
 
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BillyBadAss

Strong Cock of The North
May 25, 1999
8,879
60
48
48
Tokyo, JP
flickr.com
I had two different models ("ASUS A7N8X" and "ASUS A8N32-SLI Deluxe" ) in a row that had memory and/or BIOS configuration issues only to be followed by an "ASUS P5N32-E SLI" that just up and died for no reason 6 months after I bought it.

I'm on my third EVGA board, and have yet to have a single problem.

ASUS is dead to me.

I had two A8N32-SLI Deluxe boards. The first one litterally up and died in the middle of use. I went out to shoot some photos and came back only to find my PC locked up. Went to reboot and that was it. Never even posted after that. RMAed it and they sent me back a refurbished board. It lasted about 2 years and then a PCIe slot died. Then a few months later the board died again. I bought a Gigabyte that's been word's better than that board ever was. Also, (though not Asus' fault) I was really pissed at how Nvidia stopped supporting the chipset for the board. ****ing stupid. One last thing; Was it just me or did the board run hot. The board idled around 54C. I have a huge Silverstone Coolmaster Case. How the **** was it running so hot. **** Asus. Oh yeah, one more thing; It wouldn't reconize more than 3GB of RAM. **** them!:mad:
 

shoptroll

Active Member
Jan 21, 2004
2,226
2
38
40
My average gaming needs are 1440x900 MAXED AA 4x, so I know some people might say the card isn't probably the best selection for me here, But at the same time I want to plan for future games like:

Bulletstorm
Crysis 2
Brink
Just Cause 2?
Dead Space 2?

.. and many other non-shooter game my current system can barely handle.
Don't ask the specs, the system is corrupt.

Aside from Crysis 2 you're basically going for overkill on this build.

Core i3/i5 is more than ample for modern games and the i7s (both the 1156 and 1366 chips) gobble up new games like candy. I'm rocking an i7-860+Radeon HD5850 and it handled everything I've thrown at it with little trouble, although I don't stay totally current with FPS games. Most recent FPS for me would be Borderlands I guess.

Fermi 470 is also overkill for your resolution. You should be able to get by at that resolution with full tilt everything else with a less powerful card but it's ultimately up to you as to how much money you want to spend.

Anyways, looks good to me. You might want to wait for Intel to sort out their recent chipset issues if you're considering the newer Sandy Bridge chips (but I don't think they've got any chips that are successors to the 1366 i7s yet), but that's also a non-issue unless you're using SATA 6gb/s hard drives.
 

Jacks:Revenge

╠╣E╚╚O
Jun 18, 2006
10,065
218
63
somewhere; sometime?
And anything bigger than roughly 1680x1050 or 1600x900 is for e-penises in my opinion.
e-penis?
what are you, 12 years old?

this has nothing to do with epeen and everything to do with common sense.
if you build a desktop computer with top of the line processing and graphics power, why on god's green Earth would you settle for a monitor that runs no bigger than a laptop? you're simply doing yourself a disservice. it's like building a car with 800 horsepower and twin turbos but stopping before you upgrade the suspension; you can't actually harness all that power, you're wasting it.

if I were suggesting that he buy 3 huge monitors to run Eyefinity or something, that might be about showing off the epeen. but I'm not. I just think he should do the basics and get himself a single, new, slightly larger monitor to accompany the rest of the upgrades.

I get the part where I must upgrade monitor because it can handle much more, but seriously, I'd rather stick to what I have, this monitor is rather low on consumption and is working fine.
if you're fine with it that's fine.
but you have to understand that unless you get a bigger monitor, you really are wasting money on the other components. the core i7 and the GPU you are considering would be total overkill if you're only running 14x9. wasted money, total overkill. there's no good reason NOT to at least get a 21.5 or 22 inch monitor that will put you at 1680x1050.

you know I love you Kantham.
I'm only looking out for your best interests. I care about your PC gaming experience as though it were my own :fluffle:
 
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SleepyHe4d

fap fap fap
Jan 20, 2008
4,152
0
0
And anything bigger than roughly 1680x1050 or 1600x900 is for e-penises in my opinion. The only thing it's nice for after that point is for more desktop area for windows/photoshop/whatever. If you're going towards 30+ inch displays then yes, 1080p is nice. But, I have a 23" Samsung 2342BWX which is 2048x1152 and I didn't notice the high pixel density in games unless I sat less than a foot away from both. I hate playing games on it because it barely looks any sharper believe it or not and it certainly doesn't help FPS, especially when you're trying to push any AA on a resolution that high. It sits as my second monitor which I use for chat windows and such. I much prefer my 2233 because it's 120hz @ 1680x1050. The loss in pixel density is almost unnoticeable in games and it looks way better (even without AA) because I can much more easily pull 120fps at 120hz. Even if wasn't 120hz I'd still use it for games.

Err, wait wut. This doesn't make sense coming from a self-proclaimed image quality buff. You told me before that you can't stand games without running true anti-aliasing. Well all anti-aliasing is is a crutch for low resolution. :con:

Edit:
[especially when you're trying to push any AA on a resolution that high

Ah, wth, see what I mean. D:
 
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Twisted Metal

Anfractuous Aluminum
Jul 28, 2001
7,122
3
38
39
Long Island, NY
I had two different models ("ASUS A7N8X" and "ASUS A8N32-SLI Deluxe" ) in a row that had memory and/or BIOS configuration issues only to be followed by an "ASUS P5N32-E SLI" that just up and died for no reason 6 months after I bought it.

I'm on my third EVGA board, and have yet to have a single problem.

ASUS is dead to me.

So your 3 [out of thousands] implies that Asus motherboards are unreliable? You had a run of bad luck, it happens. I too had an A8N32-SLI, and it's been rock solid since release day, along with every other Asus board I owned.

Neither of us can conclude that Asus boards are reliable or unreliable based on the few we owned. But the thousands of positive customer reviews out there certainly speak volumes.