So you suggest a 75 euro more expensive gfx card for a budget build and a 6-core CPU for a game (NS2) that that might not even have multithreading on release.
I don't recommend buying stuff for NS2 yet, better idea to wait until the game is out and polished with few patches, which is not going to anytime soon. Then you also get the idea which GFX card works the best.
Where does he say he is buying this PC for one game?
Since he is on a budget, he should spend the most on the graphics card, since that is what will decide his gaming performance.
99% of the games out do not care if you have a sandybridge, phenom II or core i5 - they will all be Graphics bound (unless ran on medium settings and low resolutions and/or no AA/AF). So spending 75 euors on the GPU and saving 75euro on the CPU (or anything else) would be VERY wise when on a budget, and at the same time up gaming performance alot.
If you could save 75 euros by getting an AMD 6-core you would do yourself a huge favor. Your PC would be faster right away (due to the GTX 560 Ti) and in the future, a 3+GHz 6-core will shine compared to quadcores.
Of course he's not going to use it for NS2 only, it might not even be worth playing. But I know he wants this computer for it if it turns out good. I suppose you didn't know that though, so you're excused on that.
If you're buying a computer to play competitive, the gfx card is less important than you suggest. Graphics settings will be set to minimum anyway to maximize FPS and minimize vision clutter.
Futureproofing is bullshit. When it gets slow, you upgrade.
Yea i can understand where youre coming from and it makes sense. But i dont think he plays more games on lowest than on highest. If he does then by all means go for weak gpu. But imo, people only play 2-3 games on lowest (competitive)and the rest they play for fun i guess. A 6-core with a GTX 560 Ti will have no problems running games on lowest ;)
Also worth noting, all sandy bridge chipsets are being pulled back, there is some huge bug in sata ports wich could eventually lead to them dying, while slowing them down would be more common.
Anyone already sitting on a sandy bridge platform should contact reseller to get a replacement board once the issue is fixed (jiriki.).
From tweakguides.com:
"Intel has announced that it has identified a chipset design error which affects its latest P67/H67 chipset motherboards. Any SATA drives connected to such motherboards can decrease in performance over time, eventually failing to be detected. This issue only occurs on the 3Gbps SATA ports, not the 6Gbps ports (Ports 0 & 1)."
Yea, (near)futureproofing is not bullshit. There will be a time where quadcores are crap but 6-cores fly. Just as now, dualcores in some cases just doesnt cut it (eg bad company 2, 32 player server) while quadcores fly through those games.
This way you could save yourself a year or two, and thus increase the longevity of your PC.
Potentially good suggestions but my budget said no :(
Btw, i'm running a 10m ethernet cable from the router to my pc so I don't have to rely on shit wireless but I was wondering if people had bad experiences with long cables? A quick search said that performance only degrades over 100m but wasn't sure if this was just by shitty standards.
Tweadle i got a 15 meter cable from my router to my PC and another 8 meter from router to modem (Yeah i know layout is a bit sucky ;D ) And my I net provider gives me 25.6 Mbit so my max download should be 3.2 Mbyte/s
And guess what i had constant 3.3Mbyte/s from time to time so i am pretty sure that ur 10 meter cable wont do any harm considering i have like 23 meters of cable!
What an irony. My computer crashed when I was writing about my computer crashes.
Yeah nothing wrong there Tweadle. Extra 10m adds around 50ns (0.045ms) to your delay with Cat5e which is meaningless. I recommend buying Cat6. Shielding is nice but costs extra.
Danny thanks for the tip. I'll move my SATA drives to the Marvell 6GB/s and Intel 6GB/s ports now.
I have random crashing though. I checked my RAM with Memtest86 and seems fine. I highly doubt that CPU would be broken either which leads me to believe either a software problem or motherboard problem. I also changed Power Supply and reassembled the rig twice. It also never happens under loads but when I'm websurfing etc. I have disabled both VRM and spread spectrum, litestep, turbo mode and lots of other bios related things and none of these things helped. I just removed my external soundcard and let's see if that helps.
Beware of this board Tweadle. I'm not the only one having problems. There's already 500 post topic on P67-problems especially the Asus on Finnish OC'ing forums.
I have updated my BIOS to the newest version (1253) from another site.
50% of the time I have an USB stick connected, it won't boot (or atleast hangs up there for a very long time possibly looking for boot records). I unplugged most my USB devices and removed my external sound card, let's see if that helps. Also removed front panel connections.
The socket is LGA1155. Not sure about voltages and timings, I haven't played with those things so not sure what I should change.
As Dux asked, what RAM did you buy? Knowing this, it would be easy to find the correct settings (ie timings) aswell as what voltage is needed for the RAM to operate.
Motherboards default are SPD values (wich manufacturers leave with super conservative timings) and usually very low voltages.
Eg. my motherboard default RAM votlage is 1.5V. My RAM specifically needs 1.65V It doesnt require a smartass to know i will have stability issues if i dont set things up correctly myself.
Yeah, I got 2 kits of M1333KLN-4GK, which is total of 8 GB of memory.
But I removed my PCI external soundcard (M-Audio Audiophile 192) and I haven't had a single crash. Weird shit. I doubt its broken either. Its probably not just compatible with the motherboard, or maybe the drivers. It worked completely fine with my last w7 build. Shame, its a very good sound card and has low-latency ASIO drivers.