Give me the power!

[Furious5k]

Hi!

I come here in search of advice and valuable oppinions from people more knowledgable then myself. I would like to thank you ahead of time for taking your time to help me out. Here goes:

I am currently sitting on a temporary computer, my old system, which at the time of purchase was a monster, died on me. Without enough money on my hands to get anything decent I purchased a temporary one. It includes a Radeon x550, enough said..

Anyway, I am looking for a system at around £1000 ($2000) that would last me for about 3 to 4 years. I would oppinions on the following things

a) Should I buy before or after christmass/vista/dx10. I wish to get my pc sooner, but I am also aiming for a high end card like 1950xtx or 7950gx2 so unless the new cards are going to be above $600, I could afford it.

b) Where should I buy my system? I live in United Kingdom and everything is **** expensive here . I was considering buying in US, and shipping it here through a close relative to avoid taxes . Even if I can't turn the pc back in for repairs, the prices are so cheaper that even if the video card came DOA and i replaced here in UK, it would still end up being cheaper.

c) What about IBUYPOWER, any oppinions? I had a look today and it seems like they are selling for pretty low prices and the systems look good. I don't know anything about their reputation though. http://www.ibuypower.com/ibp/store/configurator.aspx?mid=182

d) Not to start a war, but what advantage does which cpu have? Athalon x2 5000+ or E6600.

e) Radeon 1950xtx or Geforce 7950gx2?

f) Just how much of a performance boost do the Raptors with 10,000RPM have over normal hardrives with 7,200RPM.

g) I did give this a read, but I am still a bit confused. No raid, Raid 0 and Raid 1? Raid 0 makes the pc think I have 1 hardrive and splits the information, making it more likely my system can become a goner if a hardrive fails and gives no performance boost? Raid 1 gives a performance boost, more security, but makes me only have as much space as 1 of the hard drives?

Thanks for reading all that, I ramble way too much.

 

[tommyboy123x]

you forgot RAID 5

but going down the list......

a. if you can wait you definatelly should. the G80's coming out will definatelly have an advantage over the 79's. end of story. If you can wait, then do. But if you absolutally can't wait then i would say a 7900gt or if ur feeling crazy 7900gtx. But at this point with the next line of gpu's coming out, just wait for the g80's... i know how hard it is

b. if you could you should build your own and buy the parts off www.newegg.com or another store in the uk (www.newegg.uk ? lol). But if you do buy from ibuypower, you will incur more expenses because it is prebuilt and if you have a problem and you mess with it yourself then you void the warentee and blah blah blah...

just to give you a comparison here, if i were to buy my computer on ibuypower RIGHT this second today, it would go for about 2500. Thats how much i spent on it 1 year ago (and all misc. upgrades). Building my computer off newegg today costs about 1300 today :-\

d. i'll let someone else take this one...

e. neither, wait for g80 if you can. Otherwise whatever is cheaper lol

f. after i got my rapter i had some serius troubles, but it all worked out (the problems were my fault). Went from about a 2 minute startup to 20 seconds (once i login). Those are very loud though... some nights when it starts scanning for spyware i have to turn it off cause i can't sleep with it on lol. but with your budget i would say definatelly get a rapter

g. RAID: REDUNDANT ARRAY OF INDEPENDANT DRIVES: basically raid 0 puts two hard drives together to make them faster. A lot of ppl here will say they don't like raid 0 because if one drive fails, all your data is lost. Personally, i say screw it because i back-up all my data . RAID 1 is almost the oposite. It puts data on both drives so if one fails you still have all your data. RAID 5.... i forget... something along the lines of it does both (RAID 0 and RAID 1)... you need at least 4 drives i think for this array.

fewf... any more questions?

 

[Furious5k]

Thanks for taking your time to answer all of that, it was definately no short one. Lets see now.

Video Cards
Firstly, what is so great about 7900gtx? Wouldn't a superior card make more sense then a SLI set up, they don't give you double power and less upgradability unless you want to go quad further down the line.

Also, could you give me some information on this "g80's" gpu. I haven't seen any information on it.

As for waiting, it is not that much of a problem really. The reason I am asking if I should wait is because I have no idea how expensive the dx10 cards will be. Although, even if I don't get a dx10 card, others will surely fall quite a bit in their price.

Place of Purchase
The reason I meantioned IBUYPOWER is because when I searched for parts in newegg, I came up with similar price as for they charged for the whole system. I mean, all the little things put together, it looked like it was only $100-200 more expensive then building myself. Did I miscalculate?

Processors
I kinda figured out myself from what I found posted by another user http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2802&p=4
However, I would like someone to clarify how much this raw power transfers into gaming. As I understand it, Core 2 Due processors have larger cache while Athalon has much larger bus. I've no idea which is better for gaming. I am only leaning to the 5000+ because I've got 5k in my nick and it makes for a nice effect when I post my pc stats in my signature when I get it Yeah, it's silly, but I don't think I'll live to see another day when a good processors gets 5000 in it's name.

Harddrives
Well, I am not particulary bothered with how long it takes to boot up my system. Also, how long it takes to boot up depends a lot on how much stuff is on your hard drive. I bet if you had 4 raptors stuffed with ~570gb or so, it wouldn't load in 20 seconds anymore.

Anyway, I only really care for how much this transfers into gaming. I don't really do anything else that relies heavily on harddrive speed or I do so rarely that it doesn't matter.

Also, noise does have some impact on my choise.I don't want to hear roaring when I am doing anything aside of gaming and even then I don't want to hear it over the sound from my speakers and I am not a person who turns sound high either.

In other words, I would consider them if there was a considerable performance benefit in something other then system boot up and file search (I realise this is something that is done while playing games). So, does it have impact in game other then load times between levels?

Also, Wikipedia seems to tell me that Raid 0 actually slows down the speed of the harddrives by a margin. Or rather, the seek times, but not the send times. If only I knew what that meant..

 

[lancec2c30]

okay, now the e6600 is a lot faster then any of the athlon X2 series. So if you have a budget that high, then I would get a core 2 duo e6700 . I hate to say it, but anybody who knows computer hardware will laugh at you and call you dumb for spending that much money on a cpu that performs like the 5000 compared to a C2D

The G80 is basically the GeForce 8000 series ( the NVIDIA cards that support DX10)

 

[Furious5k]

I know about the performance difference and I realise it may seem ilogical to buy a more expensive cpu that performs worse, but there is something to be said about a certain, less tangible value. If they were to laugh simply because they did not understand why I did it, if they were to think I actually bought it because I thought it was better, they would be simply ignorant if not slightly retarded. If you are confused as to what I was talking about, then I was reffering to sentimental value.

As for the E6700, I don't see a good reason to pay an extra $200 for a marginal improvement of 0.26Mhz clock speed when compared to the E6600. Is there any other difference between the two that i've missed?

Thanks for clarifying that the G80 is DX10. Any idea what the specifications and price for it are? Also, is DX10 support hardware or software sided, as I read somewhere that the companies would release drivers for the older cards to be more compitable with Vista and DX10 features. Was this info wrong?

P.S. I wonder if I could get parts for my pc in a way that I could spell out my nick. I suppose I could highlight GeForce for the F, hmm.

 

[DarkS1d3]

Are you locked into the 5000+ decision? I know your reasoning, but meh.. If I had that cash I'd be all over the 6600. And no, the diff between the 66* and 67* shouldn't matter, they're both extremely overclockable (so I've heard..), so it should be easy to make that up.

Oh, and about Raid, personally I think that drives in Raid 0 are faster than a single. It makes sense, x amt of data to be written, divided by two drives, so 1/2 the data goes to each drive, which write simultaneously, accomplishing it in half the time.

 

[Furious5k]

No, I don't have my mind set on amd 5k. It is a possibility, but since I am not rich it's more of a "wouldn't it be cool" thought, rather an actual decision to do that. Besides,the novelty on that would wear off pretty fast and then I'd just be stuck with less horsepower under the hood, so to speak. I will most likely go for E6600 unless amd cut their prices.

As for Raid, that is EXACTLY what I thought. Well, you can't always believe everything that is written in the Wikipedia, anyone can write there. But maybe I understood it wrong. It said that only the seek times would be lower. So maybe the seek times are lower for each harddrive marginally, but because it is 2 harddrives looking for data, it is still much faster. Makes sense.